An update from the Finance Training team

    October 31, 2022

    The Finance Training team officially launched just over six months ago, with the hire of our first director of financial training & development, Karina Julius. In July, Maggie Reilly joined the team as the instructional design and innovation manager. Since then, we have been working on some key pre-determined deliverables and determining priorities and strategies over the upcoming months and years. While we are still in the “storming” stage and figuring out team structure and resource needs, we wanted to provide you with some updates on work to date, work in progress, and plans for the future.

    Since the official launch of OneFinance, we have begun partnering with co-leads Brian Rebeschi and Lisa Varni to establish a financial training priority list and find ways to engage with the broader community on the needs and resources required to support the program and the training deliverables. We are at the beginning stages of this partnership, and a lot of work is happening to establish project plans, processes, and coordinate effectively across the University. At the same time, we have made progress on several initiatives that are worth noting. The team continued and/or created several key learning courses that are available (or will be shortly) to all staff at Yale. These are all eLearnings and, therefore, can be taken on demand and as often as needed. Links to these courses can be found in TMS: 

    In addition, we are just a few weeks from launching a new pilot training called Finance Foundations, an onboarding program developed for new hires into Finance. We created the first iteration of this training as a “launch and learn,” with the expectation of starting locally to gather feedback from new hires in central finance to help us build on and expand the curriculum. We will also begin work with OneFinance and stakeholders outside of central finance to incorporate or build additional training into the curriculum. We expect to launch the first cohort in November. A group of recent hires in central finance, with support from their managers and the training team, will go through a self-paced program of courses and key policy review, and be provided with access to professional development opportunities, with deadlines to complete over 90 days. This initiative was created based on feedback we collected in our online focus group in July, where we heard a desire for a more structured training experience at the time new staff join Finance, in addition to what they receive from their manager and team. It is also widely acknowledged that an effective onboarding process contributes to increased employee engagement and retention. We are excited to launch this program and gather feedback from our first cohort of learners and their managers, which we will share with all of you. More info to come shortly!

    In addition to supporting the OneFinance initiative, the team is actively involved in the Learning initiative (see memo from Jack Callahan for more information on these initiatives), which is responsible for establishing strategy, capability, and tools for learning and development across Yale. We also play a crucial role representing Finance as part of the Workday LMX project, which will replace TMS as the university’s learning management system. We are participating in user acceptance testing, strategy sessions, and working to determine what finance courses exist, are in good shape, and should be transferred into Workday LMX, which is no small task! The current list of finance related training in TMS (both active and inactive) is over 200 courses to review, and that doesn’t include courses created outside of TMS or Workday learning.

    We will need support from the Finance community to ensure our content is appropriate and up to date; the Finance community will play a key role as we continue to build out the team and the curriculum. If you have any interest in participating, please let us know. We will provide more details at the November 7, 2022 All Hands meeting. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please reach out to Karina Julius, Maggie Reilly, or the Finance Support Center (FSC) at askfinance@yale.edu.