Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

I have only attended one student affairs related conference (NASPATech – Nov 2011) in my career and so my experience when it comes to regional and national conferences is very limited.   Blog posts by Joe Ginese and Eric Stoller and others about the need to improve the quality of student affairs conferences and the presentations themselves provide me some glimpse of what it would be like if I was to attend them.  If I read the blog posts correctly, one of the intent is to provide suggestions on how to improve the quality of the conferences/presentations leading to a more productive experience for the attendees who took their time out of their busy schedules and spent their institution’s money or their own.

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credit - monster.com

I initially hesitated to  comment on Ed Cabellon’s blog post “Listing Technology on Your Student Affairs Resume” because I wasn’t quite sure how resumes for IT positions differ from student affairs positions.    I do think there are general considerations applicable to both and so this post is to offer an additional perspective. Purely from my perspective as a hiring manager in a student affairs IT department and limiting the conversation to the technology portion of a resume, here are what I look for:

* Context of how an applicant used the technology. This means numbers and scope. Designing an application used by 2 people is different from designing a system used by 1000 people.  A list of technologies are good, putting some context behind the experience is even better. It helps to see specific versions of software and/or programming language(s) used.

* Experience with technologies relevant to the position. Listing technologies used 20 years ago is irrelevant. For example, if we are looking for a SQL Server database developer and I see FoxPro as the only database experience listed, that’s probably not a good fit. In addition, I think it’s probably acceptable to list other technologies like web development software, social media, desktop publishing as secondary information and they do not take focus away from required technologies to the position.

When interviewing an applicant, here is what I expect:

* I expect an applicant to be able to describe what the task/problem the technology solved, how technology was used. I also would expect them to describe their role(s) and their use of the technologies including from the context of business perspective.

* Instead of asking questions like “describe how you would use this tech?” I ask “how have you used this tech?” What I’ve found is that even applicants who list certifications like MCP, MCSD, etc, when asked practical questions, sometimes cannot answer questions that I would assume are fundamental knowledge. In other words, I obviously want to know that an applicant has some foundational understanding of how/when/why to apply technology but I also want to know that they’ve had some experience working with them.

* Do not misrepresent your level of experience. After having reviewed hundreds of resumes and interviewing applicants, I have found it easier to determine whether an applicant’s resume matches his/her actual experience during their interview.

The required level of experience and skill set vary based on the classification of the position we are trying to fill. My general advice is to represent your experience to match the job description and requirements for the position. In my career, I have been a developer, project manager, department manager and now a director. When the position I am applying for is a software developer, I would highlight my software development experience. As a matter of fact, if an applicant is applying for a software developer position and all I see is management experience, I would question whether the applicant is actually a good fit or if they’re even competent for the position.

When determining an applicant’s level of competence, motivation and fit with an organization, there are other evaluation processes that could/should be used including reference checks, questions about soft skills and coding exercises.

What’s your perspective on my thoughts above? Any other considerations to add?

On your current or last job, what kind of welcome did you receive from your supervisor? Did he/she take the time to spend hours with you on your first day to go over your department, projects? How about take you around your campus, take you to lunch and introduce you to your co-workers?

One of my co-workers welcomed a new member to his team this week. He is busier than most people I know, working on multiple projects and managing a team with several members.  Despite his busy schedule,  he took a big part of his day to welcome  his new colleague, patiently explaining how our organization works and current projects we are working on. He works right next to my office and so I could over hear everything he was sharing and I kept on telling myself how I could be more patient like him. I saw him sometime that afternoon and he told me that he had taken his new colleague around the campus, even going to the highest floor of our library, one of the tallest building on our campus so he can show him a view of the entire campus, including the lagoon and the Pacific Ocean nearby. He also walked with him around the small town adjacent to our campus where students live.  He then took him to lunch where he and I, along with some of our colleagues frequently eat.

I thanked him for all that he had done to welcome our new colleague that day as I know all the things he took time to do was a start of their working relationship, a positive one. Taking time to welcome new employees or just to chat with colleagues we’ve worked with for years seems such a simple thing to do yet I know I don’t do often enough. The actions of my co-worker in making sure his new staff feels welcomed reminds me of this. I had made a commitment when the year started to spend more time with all of my staff, even if just having lunch or coffee from time to time to connect with them, exchange stories beyond what they’re working on.

What have you experienced or seen in your career we could all do to make new colleagues feel welcomed?

Courtesy of Sybren A. Stüvel

A former colleague of mine called me a few days ago wanting some advice on how to deal with some frustrations she is experiencing at her work. She also wanted to know if there are any opportunities for her to work with me again. Unfortunately the technologies we use are different from what she has been using the last few years and so she would need to gain some experience and skill set for this to be possible. I think we have all been in situations when work really frustrates us and personally for me, I have tried many ways to cope with the situation. Below are some advice I shared with her, the same advice I try to follow for myself.

• Remain professional. Continue doing work  with a positive attitude to the extent that it is possible. It’s also the right thing to do. There may come a point when moving on is the only option and a positive reference from the current employer is needed. If there are issues that needs to be addressed, go through the organization’s formal process. It’s so easy to gossip and start sharing frustrations with co-workers who may not share the same sentiments and in fact may further worsen the situation by having words misconstrued and be shared with others, including management. If there is the need to vent and get feedback, talk with someone outside the organization who can provide a different perspective and who will not further complicate the situation.

• Communicate with your supervisor. He/she may not even know the frustrations. Instead of internalizing frustrations hoping for change,  communicate with them to make sure the issues are addressed. If the supervisor is part of the frustration, address the situation as quick as possible in a diplomatic and assertive fashion. In addition, there are probably other individuals/departments that can assist with situation, including HR or in universities, the ombuds office. I’ve seen some folks who go in to work just looking miserable every single day and I think to myself, life is too short to be spending 8 hours every day at a place I do not enjoy.

• Prepare for next opportunities. If the situation is so bad that moving on is the best option, prepare for the next opportunities. This requires planning, identifying potential positions, and investing some time and resources to gain the experience and skill set. This may mean taking some classes after work, learning the skill sets at nights, or volunteering to gain some experience. We all have choices including the option to move on. Some choices are harder to achieve than others, but nevertheless, there are choices.

• Leave frustrations at work. If the source of the frustration are other individuals at work, those individuals are probably not feeling the frustrations brought back home and we just end up further victimizing ourselves by spending emotional energy. We also don’t want to take out our problems with our family who have nothing to do with the situation at work.
  

• Focus on helping other people. For me personally, when I’ve had frustrations in the past, diverting some of my focus towards assisting other people really helped me put some perspective on my issues and at the same time, I’m able to help others. Even in my current position, there are bureaucratic road blocks that frustrate me and I have no control over or takes some time for the process to  and in those cases, I focus on what I can do to help my staff in the meantime as I wait for the roadblocks to clear.

• Focus on the positives. While this may sound cliche, the fact that we still have a job is probably a blessing. Considering the fact that there are millions of  unemployed individuals who have lost their homes or are not able to feed their families and have no health insurance, having a job, even those that prove to be frustrating at times, is a good thing.

I realize the advice I provided above are very general and not all of them will work in every situation. Nevertheless, these have worked for me as well as with those I have shared with in the past. What other advice can you offer?

I was talking with someone working in higher education IT a few days ago about social media and why I have embraced it. He told me  “No way will I be interested in social media. If you watched the movie Social Network,  you’ll know that Zuckerberg created facebook so his buddies could get laid.” He also told me “I don’t want to know what some mom cooked for breakfast.” So I asked him if he has a daughter and he tells me he does. I asked him “Who’s going to teach your daughter about how to properly use social media?” and his response was “Not me.” With the realization that I could not convince him about at least understanding social media and that they won’t go away soon, I changed the topic.  The negative attitude towards social media by some IT professionals is understandable given the security and policy implications. In some sense, social media also represents some loss of control when it comes to what and how technology should be used in the workplace.

Based on my short experience using social media, I would urge other colleagues who work in higher education IT to give social media a chance for the following reasons:

• Keep up with trends. I have observed the following the last couple of years:

• Increasing use of mobile devices on our campus by students and staff.
• Increasing requests from departments we serve to use external software services for their business needs.
• Increasing social media presence by campus departments, student organizations.

Before I started using twitter last year, I didn’t realize there was actually a term for this phenomenon and it is not unique to our campus.  This trend is called “consumerization of IT” and is defined on Wikipedia as “trend for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business organizations, resulting in the convergence of the IT and consumer electronics industries, and a shift in IT innovation from large businesses to the home.”

• Understand our customers.  How can we serve our customers if we don’t know their mindset and tools they use? By just observing the communication between students and our staff on facebook and the general conversations on twitter, IT staff can learn a lot about issues/trends that cannot be found anywhere else.

• Professional Development. Every day I log onto facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, slideshare and other social media websites, I consider them as free learning opportunities. I have only attended 2 conferences the last 4 years due to lack of training budgets but I have used social media as my personal learning network (PLN) and have learned a lot about mobile web development, social media and leadership.  When I read blogs by experts in technologies and higher ed, I find insights than typical articles and websites would often reveal.

• Be Relevant and credible. As more of our customers demand to use consumer technologies, inevitably, appropriateness and policy issues will come up for discussion.  Would I  really be credible as an IT professional if I don’t even know how these technologies work? Part of the reason why I spend so much time on social media is to research how they work and how they relate to our business, including what issues to consider. If I have to take the position of rejecting a customer’s proposal to use an external service, I want to be able to credibly tell them the reasons for my position. On the other hand, if I do approve their proposal, I need to be able to assist them in using the service that is consistent with university policies and in ways they may not have thought of.

• Keep up or get left behind. I was told a year ago that social media is a fad and so is Skype so I shouldn’t bother investing any time/resources investigating it for business use. I was also told students do not use mobile devices. Ironically, part of what motivated me to be on social media is to find out for myself on whether what I am being told are actually true. Given the pace at which consumer technology changes, it is a challenge to keep up. I generally spend up to 4 hours most nights just learning new technologies including mobile web and social media and I still feel as if I am behind. In some ways, I consider the time I spend on social media as career investment. I don’t know what IT will look like five years from now but all I know is that the convergence of social media and the enterprise will be even greater than what it is today and I want to be in a position where my knowledge lie in both areas to be employable, competing against our current students who will have entered the work place and who have far greater knowledge about consumer technologies than I do.

• Learn about hobbies, personal interests; connect with folks with same interests. While I hear stereotypes about IT folks as not being too sociable and have no lives, all the IT folks I work with have some outside interests/hobbies. I spend my weekends watching sports and it’s fun being able to watch the games with others that are in different cities, states and in some cases, other countries.

Social media definitely have some pitfalls but I think the benefits outweigh the risks. For anyone working in higher education, not just IT, the days of questioning the values of social media in higher education is long gone. If we are to stay relevant and provide quality customer service, we need to do our part to understand the current needs of our customers and future trends so that we are prepared to adopt them rather than reacting.

What other reasons should higher education IT staff be on social media?