Make the right career choice

“Decisive thinker” is the next HR and business behaviour that we are investigating as part of our series on the eight professional behaviours that make up the CIPD’s HR profession map. These behaviours set out how leading HR practice is demonstrated when professionals carry out their activities and use their specific HR knowledge to affect business outcomes.To be credible and effective practitioners, HR professionals will demonstrate decisive thinking, defined as “the ability to analyse and understand data and information quickly. Is able to use information, insights and knowledge in a structured way using judgment wisely to identify options and make robust and defendable decisions.”As a professional you should start thinking about the way in which you approach a problem, whether you are data driven, how you distil information, and how you connect information in order to develop unique insights into your organisation and environment which are robust and well grounded. Using your intuition is essential here, so become interested and learn to probe and ask questions. Now let’s look at each level of decisive thinking more closely. Decisive thinker can be demonstrated at four professional bands of competence, each of which highlights key indicators that can help you identify where you are and how good you are at demonstrating this behaviour.For example, at band one you will be someone entering into the profession. As a result, your focus here will be as guardian of information, ensuring that what information you have is reliable, correct, complete and consistent. Your role is to ensure that any conclusions drawn from the information that you have will be based on solid foundations.But as you move into band two and gain more experience in HR, your focus will be more on the comparison of this information and contrasting situations. You are identifying patterns and trends that would inform any subsequent decisions and starting to distil information clearly in order to provide recommendations.