Expanding access to Yale IT staff training

May 11, 2023

The Learning, Training, and Development team is growing to meet the evolving needs of IT staff. Taber Lightfoot, User Experience & IT Training and Staff Development and Michelle Morgan, in her new role as Informational Services Consultant, are working with Hadar Call, Advancement & Web Technologies, and IT leadership to design an expanded program for staff training under the IT Academy umbrella.

The implementation of IT’s Job Family Redesign, alongside the move from TMS to Workday Learning LMX in the coming months, presents an opportunity to build a staff learning and training program that is straightforward, flexible, and aligned with IT goals and initiatives.

Partnering with Human Resources and the Business Office to understand the career pathways currently available to IT staff, as well as gathering feedback from managers and individual contributors about the foundational trainings and skills needed to achieve professional and organizational goals, will inform the creation of a program that will provide all IT staff a clearer route to career advancement. Ideally, this framework will allow IT staff across the university to engage more deeply with their current work while simultaneously pursuing new skills and interests across a broader swath of job responsibilities and goals.

As part of this effort, Taber, Michelle, and Hadar have created a roadmap to guide work for the next two+ fiscal years. The team has started peer analysis to look at what learning and development models our peer institutions use and presented this roadmap to the IT Senior Leadership Team this month to capture feedback on priorities and to begin thinking about the outline and scope of the project. They will also meet with the Information Technologies Leadership Council (ITLC) to solicit feedback and deepen existing relationships and shared commitments to staff learning across university IT.

Since this program is focused on you, the IT practitioners, we are looking for your engagement and support to ensure what is developed is of value to all of you. In the coming months, you will have many opportunities to engage. The team will conduct focus groups in June and send all IT staff a survey to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of current opportunities and programming. In addition, managers and other team leaders will be hearing from Michelle as she seeks to understand the current processes and how to incorporate the incredible work already happening in some areas of IT. Efforts to provide clearer career development paths for all staff, including those participating in early career programs and creating a more robust mentorship program, are also planned.