As vice president of human resources, Security Technologies, for Ingersoll Rand, Dan Hawkins gathers his global HR leadership team for quarterly meetings. For three days in September, Hawkins and his leaders from the Indianapolis headquarters traveled to West Lafayette to discuss company business and to meet with Krannert faculty, staff, and students, particularly those in the Master of Science with a concentration in Human Resource Management (MSHRM) program.
Why hold a quarterly meeting at Purdue? “I believe the Krannert School has an outstanding program in human resource management,” Hawkins says. “We wanted to interact with the great talent that is available here and learn from these students about what they are looking for from an employer of choice. We also wanted to meet with faculty to talk about emerging trends in human resources and learn how we can advance the function in the future.
“Finally, in these dynamic economic times we want to make sure that we look at our HR function and understand how it needs to evolve. As a large, diversified industrial company, we have to ask ourselves what our key priorities are, and how we must change to accelerate our progress in innovation and globalization.”
Hawkins is familiar with the Krannert School, serving on its MSHRM Advisory Council and on the advisory board of Purdue’s Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER). He believes the on-campus exchange between his team and the Krannert community was mutually beneficial.
“I feel like we have benefitted just as much out of this as the students and faculty,” he said. “We’ve had a tremendous interchange of ideas and have jointly identified innovative ways to ensure HR is strategically relevant in business.”