Charting a new course

The IT Learning and Development team was born out of the need to formalize IT staff learning. In the fall of 2022, Taber Lightfoot, associate director of user experience and IT training, took the lead in spearheading this program, with Michelle Morgan, information services consultant, joining the team shortly after. Taber has a background in executing user experience training for YaleSites for the community. Working collaboratively with subject matter experts in project management and Human Resources, to name a few, the team has successfully begun the process of refreshing and creating an extensive curriculum for IT. With goals such as ensuring that staff are adequately equipped with the tools and training to perform their jobs, setting up a new framework to structure the way we approach learning and development, and refreshing IT courses for Workday Learning, they demonstrate IT’s commitment to being a Workplace of Choice.

Tell us about you and your background. Who drives this team's new programming?

Morgan: I started this position in late March 2023 to find new creative ways to define what counts as learning. As someone who has benefitted enormously from formal and informal educational opportunities but doesn't fit any neat packages of what a career, a meaningful life, or "success" might look like, I am deeply invested in how other people find their way from one interest to the next.

I am the first person in my family to attend college. I have a B.A., M.A., and a Ph.D. (at Yale) in American Studies. My interests in art (studying and making), literature, and politics led me into interdisciplinary studies, and I came to Yale expressly to study the history of visual and material culture and the ways the history of race, gender, and sexuality in the United States were understood and even theorized using visual and material artifacts.

While completing my degree and teaching, I took on-campus jobs everywhere in administration! I worked at the Office of Gender and Campus Culture and Ezra Stiles and created bystander intervention training in partnership with the Title IX office. I also took a contract position on Pilar Abuin's Ed Tech team, helping faculty and staff transition to Canvas. Roughly at that time, the university started to focus more on accessibility, and I joined the Digital Accessibility team at IT. In that role, I worked jointly with the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning and developed workshops and trainings about accessibility for staff and faculty. Accessibility fits perfectly at the nexus of my interests in how people use technological objects to make sense of the world and generate knowledge. The wonderful thing about having different university jobs is you're exposed to various areas of Yale and meet so many people. I think this gives me a great place from which to approach this new position and work.

What is the strategy behind the L&D program?

Morgan: In the early stages of building this program, our focus is on delivering standard training courses that meet the needs of IT staff to give some baseline foundations on IT methods and technological processes. But it also means finding ways to share knowledge and build relationships that make the work we do not just sufficient but satisfying. That will look different for each individual, so we aim to build some flexibility into learning and development. With the training curricula in development, we will focus on other opportunities for learning - mentorship programming, communities of practice, and more. Additionally, we are developing curricula for each job family role to clarify the required skills, job knowledge, or responsibilities for each, and we are actively working with Internal Communications to implement a communications strategy to build staff awareness of our program. Ultimately, I can only succeed in this role if staff have personal development goals that they are committed to and find ways to fit them into their busy work schedules. I am here to help them achieve that goal of learning and professional development at Yale IT.

What other projects are you working on? What can we expect to see on Workday for IT in the future? 

Morgan: Pathways and frameworks are critical for almost any project. We generally have a plan to follow in school to get us from one grade to the next. Work is not college or a certificate program, but we still need plans to execute projects with several moving parts. In Workday, more organization and clarity will enable staff to understand what is available and how those pieces fit together. Yale desperately needed an improved learning management system to manage staff learning, and I applaud the OESD team for making this a reality. We will build a mentorship program for IT staff in FY25 and plan to seek feedback from the community on this effort in multiple ways, including a focus group of IT staff. 

To learn more about the Learning and Development team or share your thoughts on the new curriculum, please email itlearning@yale.edu. Watch for updated content on the Learning and Development  homepage  in early spring!