Provide Input Into Enriching Professional Development for Faculty, Staff, and Post-doctoral Fellows

Do you provide learning and professional development programs and/or services for faculty, staff and postdoctoral fellows? Human Resource Services is seeking your input on how the University can enrich learning and professional development for these groups.

As part of Objective 15 in “For the Public Good,” a Steering Committee, a Working Group and an Advisory Group with broad stakeholder representation have been established to develop recommendations for senior administration.

The Working Group is currently undertaking an internal environmental scan to determine what learning and professional development is currently taking place for faculty, staff and postdoctoral fellows. As part of this task, we are asking units who provide learning and professional development services to respond to a short survey. This will enable us to:

• develop an up-to-date ‘inventory’ of providers of staff learning and development services at the university, 
• determine what professional development opportunities are currently available to faculty, staff and postdoctoral fellows, and
• ensure all units that are tasked to provide learning and professional development services are included in our consultation process.

What do we mean by “tasked”? A unit tasked to provide learning and professional development services to University employees (Faculty, Support Staff, APOs, Librarians, FSOs, TAPS, CAST, Postdoctoral Fellows, TRAS, etc.) will typically have this work identified as an ongoing priority in their strategic plans and be provided with financial, human, and infrastructure resources to achieve that mandate.

We ask that each unit designate a contact person to complete the survey by describing the kinds of learning and development opportunities they offer, to whom, and at what cost. Depending on your organizational structure, it may be appropriate to ask several people to complete the survey for their own area’s contributions. Please forward the survey to the appropriate designates to answer the questions to the best of their ability. We can follow up to obtain clarity on responses as necessary. The survey can be accessed at https://goo.gl/forms/irpWobYcrv5yK9rH2

The survey will take approximately 15-20 minutes to complete, and we will close the survey at the end of the day on February 16, 2018. If you have any questions or difficulty accessing the survey, please contact Danielle Stewart at 780-492-5204 or stewart@ualberta.ca.