The most common way into human resources is not a degree in human resources. It is an adjacent job you can already reach – recruiting coordinator, office manager, payroll clerk, benefits administrator – followed by one certification and a resume rewritten in HR vocabulary. That path takes six to eighteen months and it is how a large share of working HR professionals actually got in.
The field has room for them. LiftmyCV tracked 128,635 active HR openings in July 2026, and 22,070 of those were entry level.
Below is the practical version of how to get into human resources: which lane to pick, which credential is worth paying for, what the work pays, and how to reach enough openings for any of it to matter.
Is HR Worth Getting Into Right Now?
Pay says yes. Across the 24,799 tracked HR postings that publish a salary, the median sits at $86,250, with the 25th percentile at $63,860 and the 75th at $125,000. Entry-level postings cluster around a $64,000 median.
Volume says yes too, and more usefully, the volume is spread out. Every company above roughly fifty people needs someone doing HR work, which means openings exist in hospitals, manufacturing plants, school districts, retail chains, agencies, and software firms at the same time. Very few careers give a beginner that many employer types to aim at.
The catch is that HR is an easy field to enter badly. Job seekers who apply as a generic “people person” get filtered out fast, because the screening is done against a specific lane and specific systems. The people who get hired named their lane before they applied.
Pick Your HR Lane Before You Apply
“HR” is an umbrella over four jobs that share a department and share very little else. They hire on different evidence, so a resume aimed at all four reads as aimed at none.
- ›HR generalist and HR business partner: employee relations, policy interpretation, performance cycles, leave administration, manager coaching. The broadest lane and the usual route to HR manager.
- ›Talent acquisition and recruiting: requisition ownership, sourcing, interview coordination, offers. The easiest lane to enter without HR history, because results are measurable from day one.
- ›People operations and HRIS: employee data, workflows, audits, reporting, system administration in Workday, BambooHR, UKG, or SAP SuccessFactors. Rewards anyone who is good with systems and documentation.
- ›Compensation, benefits, and compliance: enrollments, pay structures, I-9 and records administration, policy work, investigations. Fewer openings, less competition, and the least likely lane to be automated.
Choose one as your headline and keep a second as supporting range. A profile that reads “HR coordinator with benefits administration experience” gets screened in. A profile that reads “HR professional open to all people functions” gets screened out, even when the underlying experience is identical.
Four Routes In, and What Each One Costs
1. HR or business degree
Three to four years and the highest cost, though a degree in business, psychology, or communications counts nearly as much as one labeled human resources. Worth it if you are choosing a first education. Not worth going back for if you already hold any bachelor’s degree, because employers treat the field of study as secondary to demonstrated HR exposure.
2. Certification first
The cheapest credible signal available. aPHR from HRCI is built for people with no HR experience at all. SHRM-CP and PHR expect some exposure or a related degree and carry more weight with hiring managers. Study time runs two to four months at a few hours a week, and the letters do a specific job on a resume: they tell a screener you understand employment law basics, so your application survives the pile even without an HR title behind you.
3. Sideways from a job that already touches HR
The fastest route for anyone currently employed, and the one that produces the strongest applications. Office managers, executive assistants, payroll clerks, recruiting coordinators, and shift supervisors all handle work that HR owns: onboarding paperwork, scheduling interviews, benefits questions, employee records, first-line conflicts. Volunteer for more of it, get named on the process, and after twelve months your resume shows HR responsibility rather than HR interest. Managers who have run performance conversations and handled a complaint have done the hardest part of the job already, which is why supervisors from retail, hospitality, and healthcare convert into employee relations roles so reliably.
4. Straight into an HR coordinator or assistant seat
The classic entry point and the reason 22,070 tracked openings sit at entry level. The work is scheduling, records, onboarding logistics, and inbox triage, and it pays around $64,000 at the median. It is also the seat with the clearest ladder: coordinator to generalist in about two years, generalist to manager in another three.
Pro Tip
If you are already employed anywhere, ask to be the person who runs onboarding for new hires on your team. It is unglamorous, nobody competes for it, and it puts onboarding, I-9 handling, and HRIS data entry on your resume within a quarter.
How to Get Into Human Resources Without a Degree
Nothing in HR screening checks for a diploma before it checks for exposure, so the real question is what you put in place of one.
Three things carry that weight:
- ›A certification, ideally aPHR if you are starting cold.
- ›Named HRIS or ATS experience, even light: Workday, ADP, BambooHR, Greenhouse, Lever.
- ›One documented process you owned end to end, described with the same words the posting uses.
Where a degree still blocks you: public sector requisitions, some hospital systems, and large corporate HR departments hardcode it. Skip those postings early instead of spending applications on them. Startups, agencies, mid-market employers, and staffing firms rarely apply the filter.
What You Need to Become a Human Resources Manager
The manager title is not an entry point, it is the third step. Employers hiring an HR manager expect somebody who has already handled the situations that go wrong: a termination with thin documentation, a harassment complaint, a leave request that collides with a deadline, a manager who wants to skip a policy.
The steps to become a human resources manager, starting from nothing:
| Step | Typical title | Time in seat | What you collect |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HR coordinator or assistant | 1-2 years | Onboarding, records, HRIS fluency, scheduling |
| 2 | HR generalist or specialist | 2-3 years | Employee relations, policy, performance cycles, leave |
| 3 | Senior generalist or HR business partner | 1-2 years | Manager coaching, investigations, workforce planning |
| 4 | HR manager | – | Team ownership, budget, escalations |
Five to seven years is the honest average for that climb. It compresses at smaller companies, where a generalist can become the whole HR function at year three, and it stretches at large employers with defined bands. People who arrive from recruiting leadership or operations management often skip a step, because they bring team ownership with them.
The credential that matters at this level is SHRM-SCP or SPHR rather than the entry-level letters.
How Long It Takes to Get Into HR
From zero, plan on six to twelve months before a first HR title. Certification takes two to four months alongside a current job. Rewriting your experience into HR language and getting through enough applications takes another two to four.
Coming from recruiting, payroll, or office administration, three to six months is realistic, because the resume rewrite does most of the work.
Coming from an unrelated field with no adjacent duties at all, budget a year and use the first half to manufacture exposure: run onboarding, volunteer for a scheduling process, take the aPHR, help a small nonprofit with its employee handbook.
What HR Jobs Pay
Figures below come from the 24,799 HR postings on the LiftmyCV feed that publish salary information, July 2026.
| Level | Tracked openings | 25th percentile | Median | 75th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All HR roles | 128,635 | $63,860 | $86,250 | $125,000 |
| Entry level | 22,070 | $51,250 | $64,000 | $76,000 |
| Mid level | 63,687 | $60,354 | $82,500 | $115,000 |
| Senior level | 42,878 | $86,875 | $118,310 | $161,875 |
Note the shape of that distribution: mid level is the largest band by a wide margin, holding roughly half of all tracked openings. HR is not a field where you wait years for the ladder to open. It is a field where the first rung is the tight one and the second is crowded with hiring managers looking for people.
Lane affects pay as much as seniority. Compensation, benefits, and HRIS roles sit at the top of each band because the work is technical and the talent pool is thinner. Coordinator and generalist roles sit lower for the opposite reason.
Did You Know?
Nearly one in six tracked HR openings is entry level, a better ratio than most office professions offer people changing careers.
Where the Entry-Level Openings Are, and How to Reach Enough of Them
Search by title, not by department. “HR coordinator,” “recruiting coordinator,” “people operations associate,” “benefits administrator,” and “HR assistant” surface postings that a search for “human resources” buries, and they attract fewer applicants because fewer beginners think to type them. Add employer types most job seekers ignore: staffing agencies, healthcare systems, school districts, and manufacturers hire HR support constantly and advertise less loudly than tech companies do.
Then widen the net. HR postings pull heavy application volume, screening is done against posting language rather than potential, and a well-qualified candidate who sends eight applications a month loses to an equal candidate who sends forty. The daily feed of live HR job openings tracked by LiftmyCV shows seniority, work type, and salary band on each posting, which makes the filtering part fast.
One more thing worth doing before you send anything: rewrite the top third of your resume for the lane. Not the whole document, just the summary and the first role. Screening decisions get made there, and a summary that opens with “HR coordinator” beats one that opens with “detail-oriented professional seeking opportunities” every single time.
Spend your time on the interviews, not the forms.
HR postings ask for the same fields over and over. An AI agent fills them, tailors the resume to each posting, and applies while you prepare for the calls that come back.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get into human resources with no experience?
Take the aPHR certification, then apply to HR coordinator, HR assistant, and recruiting coordinator roles while reframing any adjacent work you have already done: onboarding paperwork, scheduling, records, payroll support, first-line employee questions. Name the systems you touched, even briefly. Most people who break into human resources do it through a coordinator seat rather than through a degree.
Can you become a human resources manager without a degree?
Yes at small and mid-sized employers, where experience plus SHRM-SCP or SPHR carries the decision. Large corporate HR departments and public sector employers often hardcode a bachelor’s requirement into the requisition, so the practical answer is to build the manager track at employers that do not filter on it.
How long does it take to become a human resources manager?
Five to seven years from a first HR job, moving coordinator to generalist to senior generalist or HRBP to manager. It runs faster at companies under a few hundred employees, where a generalist often absorbs the whole function, and slower at large employers with fixed bands.
Which HR certification should I get first?
aPHR if you have no HR experience, since it has no eligibility requirements. SHRM-CP or PHR once you have a year in the field or a related degree. Both signal employment law and policy literacy, which is what a screener is checking for when your resume has no HR title on it yet.
Are remote HR jobs common?
Recruiting, HRIS, benefits, and HR analytics roles post remote regularly because the work lives in systems. Generalist, employee relations, and site HR roles skew on-site or hybrid, since investigations, onboarding, and manager support tend to happen in person. Targeting a remote human resources job means targeting the systems-heavy lanes first.
How do I switch careers into HR from an unrelated job?
Find the HR-shaped work inside your current role and take more of it: onboarding, scheduling, training new staff, handling a complaint, maintaining records. Six months of that plus a certification turns a career change into a lateral move on paper, which is a far easier thing to sell than potential.
Written by
Ruslan Nazarov is an SEO specialist focused on the careers and job search space. He writes about AI job search, resume optimization, and getting more interviews, drawing on hands-on work growing career and recruitment websites.
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