With the guidance of a faculty member instructor and teaching associate, students in the HCM capstone courses form teams to design projects that develop targeted solutions for Human Capital Management problems. At the beginning of the semester, students identify organizations and business challenges as contexts for their projects. Students analyze the identified organizations and apply the core concepts gained through their coursework over their entire Columbia HCM career to design innovative solutions.
At the end of the semester, after having crafted and documented a multi-layered and integrated approach, accompanied by analytics to measure success, students present their capstone projects to the instructor, peers and outside experts. The presentations address the companies' business challenges and include HCM strategy, stakeholder mapping, change management, people analytics, and financial impact.
After this past summer’s HCM capstone seminar ended, HCM lecturers and executive guests highlighted some student reflections and assessor comments from the capstone presentations. Here is a selection of the student responses.
- “Capstone is a delightful example of ‘expectation matching reality.’ ”
- “The Capstone really brought the value of evidenced-based HR to life: how to be purposeful in how you use evidence to help people work better and create better lives.”
- “While at a high-level DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is deemed to consider gender and racial equity, this course helped me to uncover in-depth the other factors that DEI covers. This includes financial implications, organizational attrition, performance, and talent attraction to name a few.”
The comments provided by the lecturers and the outside experts also reflected the quality and success of the capstone projects.
- “Thank you for collectively developing a solution focused on stakeholder management, identifying risk factors, and applying the scholarly voice. You each contributed to a PHENOMENAL final project.”
- “Compelling presentation and storytelling of a major issue that affects one of the world’s largest firms. Excellent demonstration of the qualitative and quantitative benefits of the solution, as well as the potential risks, to make a compelling case for change.”
- “Your success metrics really demonstrated the thoughtful approach this team took to instill confidence in the C-Suite of how the team would capture value with clear milestones and early wins. Refreshing, practical and spot-on!”
In summary, the Columbia University Master of Science in Human Capital Management program capstone course provides an opportunity for graduate students to draw upon the knowledge and skills gained in the program and demonstrate their expertise. As such, they graduate from the program confident that they have acquired leading-edge expertise in order to contribute to their organizations and to grow their careers.
Learn more about the Human Capital Management Master’s program.