What was once old is new again?

I received my email from the Wharton School today and in it was an article about the nature of the HR profession as conducted in a study for PricewaterHouseCoopers. The finding of the research showed that
if you "step into the office of the head of corporate human resources today and the odds are you will find a 53-year-old man with a bachelor's degree who has been with his current employer for 15 years. He has spent about half his work life in HR roles, most often in workforce development. And he would not be that much different from the man holding the job a generation earlier. While the face of corporate human resources departments is changing as more women and more executives with international expertise ascend to the top HR positions, predictions that HR leaders would increasingly come to their jobs with broad and diverse front-line management experience have failed to come true. Indeed, HR leaders are even more likely to rise up from their own ranks than a decade earlier, according to a new Wharton research paper titled, "Who Gets the Top Job? Changes in the Attributes of Human Resource Heads and Implications for the Future." Click the link to see the full report.