Accelerating IT's professional development

Over the past seven months, IT Learning & Development has been teasing apart the range of current efforts and offerings to restructure and reorganize staff training into a cohesive program. Those efforts have occurred mainly behind the scenes, as the team collected feedback from the members of the community, worked with senior leadership to get clarity on organizational priorities, and collaborated with Central HR’s Organizational Effectiveness and Staff Development (OESD) team to help ITS prepare for the transition to the new Learning Management System for delivering staff training, Workday Learning.

Last August, during their Café IT “Back to School” with IT Learning & Development, a high-level overview of the roadmap outlining these changes as well as some specifics about the future framework were shared. During that presentation, Michelle Morgan discussed the roadmap for IT L&D that she, Taber Lightfoot, and Hadar Call developed with input from Frank Mathew and John Barden. The roadmap illustrated the major efforts for FY23-24, which included hiring Michelle in her new role supporting staff L&D, developing the roadmap, capturing feedback from staff, and preparing IT course content for migration from TMS into Workday Learning.

Learning & Development Framework

This year the team has developed a framework for what is currently being referred to as IT Academy 2.0 and is continuing work on the launch of Workday Learning, including the creation of new training content and programs. The vision guiding IT Academy 2.0 is to create a comprehensive professional development program of courses and activities that provides Yale IT staff with the organization vision and technical skills necessary to succeed in the schools and units they support. There are four objectives anchoring the work:

1. IT L&D will establish programs for what will be called IT Common Language and IT Essentials. IT Common Language will include learning content that is foundational knowledge for any IT staff member at Yale. IT Essentials, in contrast, will provide training and curricula specific to each job family role, based on level. These job family programs aim to give staff clarity on the skills—both technical and “soft”—that each level of any given job requires.
2. Offer a course catalog that staff are motivated to participate in. For example, IT Essentials training should be more than links to videos; staff should be given the time and opportunities to complete training but also apply it to projects and work they’re completing in their positions.
3. Integrate IT Common Language and IT Essentials training into Workday Learning, to support course registration and transcripts.
4. Formal training needs to be reinforced with mentoring and deep professional development opportunities.

Community is likewise central to the framework the team has devised. Communities of practice for different job families will be incorporated into job family training; a more strategic deployment of Café ITs and Tech Talks is also currently underway.

Transition to Workday Learning

In January 2024, staff will no longer use TMS to complete training requirements. All required trainings and attestations will appear in Workday Learning. This will be fully integrated into your existing Workday dashboard, and you’ll see the Learning app alongside others you’re already used to using. Managers will also be able to recommend programs and courses to staff based on a much deeper catalog of content generated from across the campus. Staff will be able to browse topics and choose topic areas that are of especial interest to them. Central HR will be communicating more about these changes in the coming months.

Critically, the results from several focus groups, workshops, and an extensive survey are informing the creation of these opportunities and programming. The IT L&D team are currently synthesizing and analyzing the data they’ve collected over this period to produce a report on the needs and desires of IT staff as it pertains to their professional development. By requesting demographic data, such as race, age, gender, and years of employment at Yale, we have been able to identify specific needs and patterns within our community.

More information about the data we’ve collected is forthcoming; in the interim, the community should know that we are developing programming in direct response to the answers you’ve provided to our questions. For instance, in January Sheena Marcus, an expert in managing early career staff, will facilitate three sessions for all IT Managers. We’re also looking for ways to improve the feedback staff receive from their managers and to develop training in this area. Be on the lookout for information about these opportunities in future IT Updates!