Recap of Hybrid IT Town Hall on March 7

At the Hybrid IT Town Hall Meeting on March 7, 2023, the following topics were discussed:

• Organizational Updates
• Resiliency
• Strategy and the Road Ahead
   

If you were unable to attend, a recording of the meeting is available to view until April 9, 2023. In addition, the following answers, provided by John Barden and his Senior Leadership Team, address questions we received during that meeting.

For answers to questions about the Job Family Redesign, visit the Job Family Redesign tab on IT’s Team’s site.

It seems like there is a conflict between hiring exclusively young external people for a lot of positions, and other University goals such as being a workplace of choice. I know several people who have been skilling up, and in some cases waiting for years for their opportunity to move from one area of IT to another, or to move to IT from a related area on campus, only to see lower-level positions they would have been qualified for go exclusively to younger external hires, or people groomed for a position. What would you say to these people as a reason to stay at Yale and not take their skills, experience, and institutional knowledge elsewhere?

We will not be hiring “exclusively” from early career programs, but rebalancing. Our goal is to have half of the annual hiring happen through early career programs. In short, this approach creates better opportunities for everyone. It does that by looking internally for opportunities for advancement first –less external hiring at a senior level encourages internal growth and stretch assignments for everyone. In other words, I expect this approach will result in more internal promotion.

In addition, a large part of the motivation for the Job Family work has been creating more clarity on career paths and looking at IT positions across the entire university through the same lens so that all of us can more easily assess the comparability of roles and navigate our career development with a more informed perspective.

To make this pivot successfully will require us to focus on training and mentoring programs, as well as revisiting our performance management practices, all of which are being refined in support of this approach.

I hear about how bad the wifi is on campus. Is this happening after buildings are updated?

We are in the midst of the largest infrastructure project in Yale’s history, and that project is being done because we recognize for the need for modernization and increased capacity for wifi.

Our legacy network operates with reasonable stability, but with nearly 10,000 network devices of varying age, inevitably there is always repair work underway. The technology needs of campus and reliance on the network continues to grow, and the capacity and performance of the new network is a necessary improvement. 

While we have had some learnings along the way, the areas deployed on the new network are implemented with updated standards and coverage expectations and the new network has been working very well overall.

As always, users who experience disruptions or areas without expected coverage should contact the help desk so that any service issues can be investigated and, if necessary, repaired.