Assessment, Evaluation, and Research

Skill: Needs Assessment - a systematic process for determining and addressing needs, or desired gaps between current conditions and desired results.

As someone who is interested in retention, persistence, and student success, being able to perform needs assessment is critical in understanding where we are at, where we want to be, and how we get there. Needs assessments are used to find out what is needed to improve or move forward towards organizational or departmental goals. I want to learn how to conduct needs assessments to find out what barriers there are for students at the institution that I work at, and strategically plan for ways to offer support in these areas. This addresses the competency area of Assessment, Evaluation, and Research, as refining this skill will help me to not only assess my own practice, but how I myself and my colleagues work with students to improve student success.

Advising & Supporting

Skill: Relationship Building - a combination of soft skills that a person applies to connect with others and form positive relationships.

When advising students, it is important to foster meaningful and genuine relationships. Relationship building is a skill that I value as the relationships that my mentors built with me have shaped me and impacted not only my academic success but my future goals as well. As an advisor I hope to create these types of relationships with my students to help them to define and achieve success for themselves. This skill directly relates to the Advising & Supporting competency area.

Leadership

Skill: Strategic Planning - an organizations process of defining it's strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating resources to peruse this strategy.

As a young professional in higher education, I plan to expand my competence in leadership through strategic planning. I hope to use strategic planning to articulate the logic and impact of decisions on groups of people, institutional structures, and implications for practice. I see this being an important skill to have in the functional area of academic advising. By strengthening my strategic planning skills, I will be able to develop and assess programming and intervention needs of students.

Social Justice & Inclusion

Skill: Emotional Support - the ability to show empathy, compassion, and genuine concern for another person.

Although I have learned a lot about social justice and inclusion over the past year, I know that this is something that I will continuously need to stay informed about and dedicate time to educating myself on. Developing my emotional intelligence and being able to emotionally support others will allow me to develop more competence in social justice and inclusion. Moving forward, the outcome related to this competency that I wish to achieve is to "foster and promote an institutional culture that supports the free and open expression of ideas, identities, and beliefs, and where individuals have the capacity to negotiate different standpoints.

Information on this page has been obtained through Burning Glass Technologies and Indeed.