we are traveling new organizational highways where economic globalization, permanent change, profuse, available technology and the enormous importance given to knowledge are affecting the way things are done in business. personnel administration is not foreign to these tendencies, which result from a series of stages and contributions made by diverse authors and scholars, from owen, babage, taylor, fayol and mayo, through bertanffy, deming and ishikawa, until reaching contemporaries such as hammer, champy, jensen, meckling and wernerfelt, to quote the most relevant. nevertheless, analyses show that together with the mega-tendencies of today a series of challenges have been forming that should be approached from both an investigative as well as a pragmatic perspective. this documentary study analyzes some of the aforementioned challenges, highlighting: paradigmatic changes in people management, a strategic vision of human resources, changes in the labor force, globalization in the function of human resources, new competences for areas in charge of human resources, repositioning the role that organizational culture fulfils in companies, appropriate exploitation of opportunities offered by the internet and structuring a modern theory belonging to human resource administration. conclusions are that understanding and taking on these progressively increasing challenges will be key in determining the failure or viability of a certain organization.