In 2015, AACRAO released Professional Competencies and Proficiencies to help members gauge professional development and provide guidance to help advance in their professions. The competencies consist of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are necessary for all AACRAO professionals irrespective of their role at their institutions, while the proficiencies describe the specific knowledge and skills required to excel in the professions of Admissions, Enrollment Management, and Records & Academic Services.
University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is pilot testing how these competencies and proficiencies can be used as a tool to increase morale, build pathways for staff professional development, and support succession planning in the Office of the Registrar. Two UMUC staff members, Joellen Shendy, Associate Vice Provost and University Registrar, and Patrick Elliott, Senior Associate Registrar, outline how they’ve used the AACRAO competency report to achieve personal and professional development goals.
1. Use as opportunity to benchmark the talents of staff and leaders in the office. A benchmark allows you to create a starting point on which you can evaluate the professional growth and proficiencies within your team.
2. Allocate resources wisely and put your time, money, and staff where your competency exists. Look for areas of strength and weaknesses. It may make sense to give priority to the competencies that represent significant gaps in your office skills or those that may support your institutional strategic plan.
3. Form a foundation to build a leadership succession plan for the office. It’s important to understand your team’s talents and areas of growth required to propel them to the next stage in their career.
4. Tie learning to the workplace in a meaningful way for staff which helps staff understand learning-workplace connections on a personal level. Staff who are familiar with their competency skill set and how it can be leveraged for career growth and opportunity are ahead of the game when it comes to hiring and ensuring they have what it takes to move to the next level in their career progressions.
5. Influence your profession by innovating new models of professional growth and development using the competency framework and sharing. Identifying and mapping staff to competencies creates an understanding of competency-based education (CBE) which is part of the fabric of the university versus merely a pedagogical model isolated to the classroom.
6. Plan conference attendees across the office using the competencies to identify opportunity and growth for staff. The AACRAO Professional Competencies provide a framework that we can use to match up gaps in skill with the meeting agendas.
7. Use as an engagement tool for staff who want to grow in the profession. The Core Professional Competencies are the foundational skills required in any AACRAO-related position. The Admissions Core Competencies, Enrollment Management Core Competencies, and Registrar Core Competencies focus on the proficiencies needed for the respective areas.
8. Help make the performance assessment process easier - tying staff KSA's to professional competencies. The AACRAO professional competencies can take the guesswork out of the process by providing ten core competencies and up to eight profession-specific competencies and assessment metrics.
9. Discover hidden competencies and talents in your office and leverage them for training and development. Admissions and Registrar offices vary in responsibility, which means, depending on your office, you will likely have competencies that are less used than others. Look for those core competencies that your team rarely gets to exercise.
10. Brush up on skills for a new role or when entering the profession. Review the list of core competencies and position-specific competencies and assess yourself. You should play to your strengths, prioritizing tasks and initiatives that complement your skill set.
Joellen Shendy, Insiya Bream, and Patrick Elliot will present a free webinar titled “Creating Pathways for Success & Succession through Staff Development: A competency-based model” on February 22 at 2 PM ET. For more information and to register, visit the webinar page on AACRAO’s website.
For an in-depth exploration of these 10 tips, see Shendy and Elliots' articles below: