My Co-Workers
We have three full-time employees: my director, Tim Black; my coworker that oversees the instructor-led trainings and workshops, Collette Blackwelder (who actually just came to HRD in March as part of the great musical jobs shake up that moved Greg Danklef out); and then I oversee the online training. We also have one part-time non-student employee: Marie Harris who acts as our Administrative Assistant and also as the Wellness Program Coordinator. Then we have ten part-time student employees: three wellness coordinators, two web-masters, three graphic designers, and one editor. I supervise the graphic designers and the editor.
My Responsibilities
As the Online Training Consultant . . . I do a bunch of random stuff. There are a few things that I do that are routine, but mostly it's kind of random. I'm the functional system administrator for our learning management system that houses the online trainings and handles all the registrations for our training workshops. I troubleshoot all the online trainings that have technical difficulties. I create opportunities for the online training developers around campus to collaborate. I develop a few online trainings myself - currently I'm working on what I call the Student Professional Series that will have courses on customer service, professionalism, working with the generations, communication, etc. Then I have fun random projects that I get from my vice president, Brian Evans. I have to add here that it is interesting working in a job that is so particularly interesting to my vice president. He has me send him monthly reports of all the online trainings we have available - by name - not just the statistics . . . he wants to know the detail. Anyway, back to the project: I have the opportunity to develop the university's first training certification. It is based on one of our values: Innovation. The certification process will consist of three online trainings (basically covering how to innovate) and a capstone application project where the employee will have to actually implement an innovative idea. We're going to pilot the certification idea with Innovation and see how it goes. If it is well-received, then we'll develop certifications for each of our other values: competency, respect for sacred resources, integrity, teamwork, accountability, respect for all persons, etc. Student Auxiliary Services and Physical Facilities are my biggest training developers with most of their trainings focusing on safety topics. Financial Services, Risk Management & Safety, and the College of Life Sciences are also big users. We have over 400 trainings in use with 4,000 users taking trainings during our peak months and about 1,500 users taking trainings during our low months. What else . . . I think that covers the big things.
How I Came into this Job
Previously, I was one of the Area HR Consultants (I so loved that job). But during the hiring freeze, in November 2009, the previous Online Training Consultant left for another job and of course, because of the hiring freeze, we couldn't replace her. But we couldn't let the position remain vacant since online training seemed to be one of our vice president's pet projects. So my assistant vice president, Forrest Flake, talked with his directors to figure out who they could move into the position. Apparently, I was the one deemed tech-savvy enough and design-savvy enough to be able to transition the best. Holy moly. It took me a year to get up to speed. I was calling the people that I was supposed to be consulting to learn how to do my job because my predecessor did not give me any helpful training. It was a rough adjustment - not only to learn all the technical aspects of this job, but to also go from a very social and central position to one of complete, utterly complete, autonomy and individual contributor. At the time I moved over, HRD did not have a director since the previous one left during the hiring freeze. So Greg, Marie, and I were on our own - although we did have Forrest's oversight, albeit very removed oversight. The hiring freeze didn't lift until January 2011, and by that time we were six months away from an even more previous director, Matt Smith, returning from being a mission president so Forrest decided to keep the job open for him to return to in August of 2011. Matt passed away this summer - just one year after being released from being a mission president.
My Pride and Joy
Just in the last two weeks I received my pride and joy at work: my MacBook Pro. It's been like Christmas at work because just a few days before getting my MacBook Pro, I also got an iPad. Online training development is tough on a computer - the authoring tool we use to develop our trainings (Adobe Captivate) is very memory-hungry and my old PC laptop was not cutting it. It would take 5 minutes just to open the program and then sometimes it would take several minutes just to move about my training as I worked on it. And don't make me talk about how it wouldn't publish my training. Ugh. That was super annoying. But with my new and beautiful MacBook Pro . . . sigh . . . it is so blissfully fast . . . and beautiful. I didn't realize how bad my PC was until I got my baby. I'm truly the fair-haired child to have this set up since everyone else in HRS have PCs even though some have requested Macs but didn't have the business case for it like I do. The iPad has been indispensable as well since I'm in the midst of testing HTML5 published trainings to see if they'll work from our learning management system on an iPad. Currently, they do not and it is quite frustrating.
 |
| Here is my office in the Jesse Knight Building |
 |
| And here is my baby - my MacBook Pro |
No comments:
Post a Comment