Graduate / "Relevant Knowledge/Training Skills" MSc in HR Management admissions essay [3]

Hello! I'm new to this forum and I really need your help with the admissions essay for postgraduate studies.

Relevant Knowledge/Training Skills

- this may inclue details of required laboratory, computer programming, specialised software packages skills or voluntary work that you have undertaken pertinent to the prgramme. If you have not yet finished your first degree, please tell us about the programm of study you're taking.

I have been working within human resources for seven years now. HR is an ever-evolving profession and one has to constantly learn new practices to stay relevant in that field.

My first experience was in Compensation & Benefits department of an Oil & Gas company in my country. As a specialist, I was responsible for designing compensation packages for various purposes such as hiring and retaining highly skilled personnel, promotions, demotions, international assignments, etc., as well as collected and analyzed data for salary surveys and budgeting, conducted employee performance assessments. My management was especially interested in helping our team grow as professionals, so during my time there I had undergone several trainings. Among the most interesting ones was "Compensation Management" that was directly related to my daily tasks. I have learned how to construct salary pay ranges, studied the types of monetary and non-monetary benefits, learned the effective ways for employee motivation. Other interesting courses I can recall were "Labor Rationing: Tools for Analyzing and Optimizing the Number of Personnel" and "Optimization of Business Processes". I later had a chance to use the techniques I learned there when company management were cutting personnel-related costs during the financial crisis. My team and I worked on a new effective organizational structure and pay reductions, while trying to keep our workforce motivated. Additionally, during my stay at that organization, I participated in a special SAP HR module development and undertook a course to learn to use that software.

My current job has to do with the Employee Relations which is another function of HR. As I was first unfamiliar with it and didn't have a prior relevant experience, I had to complete an "Industrial Relations and Culture Awareness" training which later helped me investigate disciplinary offenses such as sexual harassment, bullying at a workplace, fraud, and bribery, etc. It was especially useful to learn about the cultural differences of other countries as the project I work for has around 30 thousand employees with 20% being expatriates from other nations.

I believe that taking "MSc in Human Resource Management" course in the University of Edinburgh will help me learn new effective tools and techniques that I can later utilise to help build the effective HR function at a company I will work for.