A colleague recently lamented on Twitter:
“Finished prelim FY14 budget…another year of no pro devo conferences for this guy. 🙁 Oh well, it’s more $ directly benefiting students!”
That’s 140 characters of sadness right there!
For divisions of student affairs to make ends meet, professional development, particularly conference attendance and travel, may need to be an area to cut. However, there’s two big problems with this line of thinking: first, cutting staff professional development means they may not have access to education on some of the issues they most need to learn about. For example, if your state uses a graduation formula for funding, then you better know how to retain students. But what happens when your entire work has been focused on planning events, advising students about policies/procedures, offering services and programs, and organizational management practices and you haven’t considered retention conversations as part of your work. While these things may influence student retention, it doesn’t mean that you know how to use retention of students as your FRAMEWORK. How do you go about developing the competence and confidence to have the conversations and focus on the right topics to influence retention without some training?
While I would encourage divisions of student affairs to think twice about cutting conference and travel funds, the second issue is that when we think of professional development as ONLY going somewhere else and having to travel to get there then you miss the mark and professional development becomes something done once a year versus something that is integrated into your approach to work. While it stinks that you won’t head to your favorite association’s annual meeting, you can rethink professional development in a way that uses the human and fiscal resources you do have. Here’s a few ideas:
1. Form a reading group: discuss an article from a book or journal a few times a month. Put those association magazines and journals to use. You can use wikis to form discussion groups.
2. Determine an area of improvement, possibly one of the ACPA/NASPA core competencies, and meet with a colleague on campus who you believe is already strong in this area. Interview them about how they developed their skills. Develop an ongoing mentoring relationship.
3. If you’re in a location with multiple institutions around you, coordinate some in-service trainings using each other as resources. For example, here in Memphis we could have staff from student life at Rhodes, LeMoyne-Owen, Southwest Community College and many others meet to discuss best approaches to leadership development. And treat the day as if you were at a conference. You don’t have to go to your office before or after. Use the full day!
4. There are lots of free or low cost webinars offered by associations. If you’re a Campus Labs or Map-Works client, there are numerous assessment webinars that come with your package – and know that there are likely other services being used by other places in the university/college at which you work that may provide similar “free” services.
5. Coordinate a monthly call with colleagues across the country who do similar work to you. Pick a topic and have everyone bring two to three questions they have about the topic. Have people provide thoughts. For questions you can’t answer, have people commit to finding resources and sharing with the group.
6. Is it time to begin classes toward that next degree?
What matters is that you’re thinking intentionally about your professional development. Try creating an individualized plan using the ACPA/NASPA Core Competencies, possibly using this model that we’re beginning to apply here at U of M.
There’s value to coming together to learn. Ideally, divisions of student affairs can fund your participation at national or regional conferences, but when that doesn’t happen, it doesn’t mean to stop focusing on your development. Look around you and you’ll be able to find creative ways to keep learning without breaking the bank.