SHRM is turning its annual conference into a credentialing academy

We’re bidding a fond farewell to HR’s biggest industry conference. (We mean that literally: Its largest gathering in Chicago in 2024 brought together more than 26,000 HR pros, and we were there.) The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) announced last month it was retiring its annual conference, replacing it with a new event that “moves professional development beyond gaining knowledge to building capabilities,” according to the man behind the “voice of all things work.”

SHRM’s CEO, Johnny C. Taylor, told HR Brew it’s not an IHOP-IHOb marketing move. He hopes attendees (and the companies paying to send them to the event) get more out of the new SHRM HR-X Live! than just conference badges, networking opportunities, tote bags and other corporate swag.

“When you get 20,000 people registered for a conference, sometimes it feels like you’re just grazing. That was a word that showed up a lot in our conversations: you’re just grazing,” Taylor said. “People wanted depth.”

Instead, HR-X Live! will be a four-day “credentialing academy” set for next summer, June 27–30, 2027, in Chicago, with a goal of reimagining what is possible when a bunch of HR pros gather to grow in one place.

This isn’t the first notable reboot of a popular SHRM conference event of late. SHRM in 2025 rebranded its annual DEI conference, once dubbed the Workplace Diversity Conference, to Blueprint, slightly renaming it again this year to Blueprint for I&D. Some HR practitioners sounded the alarm in the wake of that change. That rebrand followed another hotly-debated decision to drop the “E” from DEI in SHRM’s content and materials related to diversity and inclusion.

“SHRM Blueprint is more than a rebrand. It dilutes the historical foundation of the learnings and labor that defined the DEI movement and distances the work from its purpose,” Glenwood Avery, who works in talent acquisition, told HR Brew last year.

But this new event looks to refocus its attendee outcomes rather than conference themes. (So far, HR pros haven’t flocked to SHRM’s LinkedIn page to decry the move.)

HR-X Live! promises to be more structured than previous conferences and expos, according to SHRM. Taylor said agendas for attendees will be organized into four distinct “learning dimensions” focused on different pillars of HR—talent optimization, organizational impact, functional acceleration, and market discernment. Cohorts are further divided into three different skill levels for each dimension.

The shift centers professional development and credentialing, so “purchasers” (you know, the person or people to whom you write those conference memos each year so they’ll pry open the L&D coffers) can see more value when you return.

Attendees, after registering and completing a brief survey, are organized into cohorts of peers in the same dimensions and at the same skill level. The track placements are done with the help of AI, but Taylor stressed attendees won’t be boxed in; if a different dimension better fits their career development, “you still get to choose.” There’s also room in schedules for sessions more akin to “electives.”

“It’s earned, not just attended, and that’s the deal. You can attend any conference in the world, but earning a credential really does stand out,” Taylor said.

By focusing on one of the four dimensions attendees can expect much deeper sessions with HR experts, according to Taylor, ,and they’ll be with a group of peers with similar interests in HR and skill levels. Taylor suggested the cohort model could also help solo attendees or those overwhelmed by the size of the gathering better navigate the professional networking opportunities at events like these.

To foster a better “student-to-faculty” ratio and focus on the credentialing, Taylor told HR Brew SHRM plans to cap registration at 18,000, sizably smaller than the 2024 attendance peak in Chicago.

“This is more than ‘I attended a conference,’ but ‘I became better because of the conference,’” Taylor said.