t was by chance that I became interested in the real value of human resource management when I went on a work placement as part of my business studies GCSE course in secondary school. I was placed with a large pharmaceutical company for two weeks, and at first was horrified to find out I would be spending that time not with the chief executive as I had hoped, but in the human resources department. It would be accurate to say at that point in my life I had absolutely no idea what human resources was. Over the course of a fortnight, however, I quickly realised the sheer scale of the task the human resources team had on its hands when it came to managing a workforce of more than 3,000 people on just one site.