Education and Career Development Committee 2018-2019 Report
Active committee members: Emma Beckham, Karlina Matthews, Hoi Ning Ngai, Alan Moran, Laura Pratt (Chair)
This year’s committee members were all brand new to the Employee Forum and the ECD committee. As such, there was a lot of learning and some process improvement that occurred throughout the year. There two areas in which a significant amount of process improvement occurred were the Professional Development Grants and the Carolina Family Scholarship.
- Professional Development Grants – In prior years, PDG’s were issued three time per year on a first come, first served basis. The committee decided to implement a new process in which applicants were asked to respond to a series of questions and reviewers would score applications with a standardized rubric. The committee also decided to reduce the applications periods to two to better fit within the university’s fiscal year. The committee went through two rounds of applications using this new system and it seems to be an effective change.
- Carolina Family Scholarship – In general, the overall process for the CFS application remained the same. The committee wrote three new questions and developed a simpler rubric for scoring applications. At the time of writing this report, we are still in the scoring portion of the process so there is no feedback to share on if the rubric was effective.
The committee explored two undertakings that will be a multi-year process involving many stakeholders but deserve to have attention:
- The committee is interested in a comprehensive database that shows all of the professional development trainings offered on campus as well as full list of trainings the employee has completed. Laura met with Mark Haapala from HR in the fall to explore this possibility. Mark confirmed that such a database does not currently exist, but it is something that HR is interested in pursuing.
- EF Delegate Alan Moran has been a huge proponent of creating a Facilities Services apprenticeship program to help replace the workforce that is set to retire over the next 10 years. Michele Bowen, Training Specialist at Facilities Services, met with the committee in October. She shared with us the work she has done to try to start the apprenticeship program. This will be a slow process to get up and running, but it was important to the committee to show our support of instituting an apprenticeship program.
Looking forward to next year, the committee members would like to take on hosting the Careers in Higher Education one-day conference. The conference has been hosted previously, but was not hosted in the 2018-2019 academic year.