Jennifer Bertoldo

Meet Jennifer Bertoldo: Direct to Students from the Real World

Jennifer Bertoldo was happy working as the Human Resources Director for AIU Online's parent company, but then she moved a few hours away. She would have loved to have kept her position, but, not surprisingly, HR Director isn't a position that works with cyber-commuting. Mrs. Bertoldo had to give her HR position up...but then she heard there was an opening in AIU Online's Human Resources faculty. "I was able to go right from actually doing HR to immediately teaching HR."

Bertoldo had long interacted with AIU Online faculty—she was, after all, responsible for hiring and training many of them—and was excited to remain a part of the university while challenging herself in a new way.

In the years since switching from practicing HR to preaching, ah, teaching it, Bertoldo has helped familiarize hundreds of students with the subject. "Most students come into my classes with very little idea of what human resources is all about. Any exposure they have had to it has probably been negative—"My HR doesn't do this" or "My HR doesn't do that"—and I like taking those experiences and giving them another angle."

During this process of re-examination, Bertoldo has turned more than a few students onto careers in HR. "Most of the students come in with the idea of getting a general management degree, but, after they learn more about what HR is about, they start to think of careers they hadn't been thinking about before. I think HR offers a lot more opportunities than most students know about. I'm happy to be the one to open their eyes up."

Bertoldo teaches Concepts in Organizational Behavior and HR Management. She particularly enjoys HR Management because she can offer students something she wasn't able to get in school herself. "When I started in HR, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I hadn't been exposed to any of the sub-disciplines and I had to use an internship to discover what was available and what I liked. In this one class though, students learn about compensation, benefits, recruiting, employee relations, staffing; they get a lot."

While Bertoldo has nearly seen it all over the course of her 15 years actively working in HR, two years ago she found yet another sub-discipline of HR: she and husband Eric opened their own small business, a personal training studio. "Now I'm doing everything I did for major companies on a much, much smaller scale and I've learned about differences that come with scale. Small businesses have different HR needs and issues."

This new, small business experience gives Bertoldo even more to share with students. "Many of them seem to want to run their own businesses one day. Some already are. I gladly share the HR and business problems I've run into with my own small business. I like knowing HR firsthand from the perspective of both large and small companies. It not only makes me a better HR person, but a better HR teacher."

Back to Faculty Profiles