Tribal Human Resources Professional (THRP) Certification

The National Native American Human Resources Association (NNAHRA) and Drummond Woodsum have joined forces to provide tribal human resources professionals with the practical knowledge and skills they need to handle the unique employment challenges facing tribal governments and their enterprises.  Our suite of virtual and in-person training events include:

THRP I

NNAHRA and Drummond Woodsum have joined forces to provide Tribal Human Resource Professional (THRP) training to HR Professionals in Indian Country. This course is offered as an in-person (3-1/2 day) event, as well as virtual (2 days per week for 3 weeks). It provides HR Professionals with the practical knowledge and skills they need to handle the unique employment challenges facing tribal governments and their enterprises.

Participants will learn and apply employment laws, with a specific emphasis on protecting sovereignty. Topics will focus on issues HR Professionals grapple with every day, including discrimination, wage and hour issues, employee discipline, investigations, evaluations, leaves of absence, union activity, Indian Preference, and more. Participants who successfully complete the final exam receive the NNAHRA Tribal Human Resources Professional Certification.

THRP II

THRP II is here! This 3.5 day course builds on the concepts covered in THRP I and provides HR Professionals with in-depth legal and practical knowledge and skills to help them handle the unique employment challenges facing tribal governments and their enterprises. The topics covered in THRP II include the legal and practical issues related to hiring, onboarding, employee privacy, employee benefits, employment contracts/agreements, and HR ethics, as well as the way in which these issues are affected by sovereignty and sovereign immunity. This workshop will provide lectures and group exercises to reinforce learning. Its goal is to provide an understanding of many of the underlying laws and practical and concrete solutions to the challenges that HR professionals face daily.

Tribal Leadership in Employment

There are many roads to effective Tribal leadership in employment, and while each Tribe defines for itself what is effective, over the last 30 years, we have listened and learned from the Tribes we work with, and we want to share what we have learned from them and our experience about the common factors that tend to define effective Tribal Leadership in employment and the role Human Resource Departments play in that exercise of leadership. In essence, we hope to share a system for assessing or building an effective employment leadership model and how to successfully utilize Human Resource Departments in that model.

This one-day workshop will review the authority Tribal leadership has over employment, the role of Tribal leadership and HR in assessing/establishing goals for employment, reviewing/creating effective HR rules that carry out leadership’s goals, and the challenge of leadership to follow its own rules that may limit its own authority. While there are no absolute answers to these issues, we hope to share what we have found to be effective tools to be a highly functional employer and how to assess effectiveness in employment systems.