March 1, 2007
Making opportunity knock: Career development manager to help staffers get ahead
Susan Templeton would like UW staffers to know that she’s here to help them manage their careers. Notice that she says “career,” not job, and she says the word “manage” applies whether the person in question is a manager or not.
Career management, Templeton says, means being aware of the opportunities out there — in the whole University, not just your department — and being able to advocate for yourself to take advantage of them. As the UW’s new career development manager, Templeton hopes to raise that awareness and give staff the tools they need to be good self advocates.
Her position is a new one, created after staffers who participated in the Leadership, Community and Values survey said they wanted career development pathways at the University to be clear. In other words, they wanted to know how they could grow and develop in their jobs and move into better jobs when they were ready. A career development task force that was subsequently formed recommended that a career development manager be hired. The position is funded by LCVI.
Templeton, who spent 12 years in the UW’s Center for Career Services — first as a counselor and then as a senior counselor — is enthused about the daunting task before her. “It’s really an exciting position to be able to take at this point in my career,” she says. “In my old job I had many clients who were both UW alumni and staff, so I’m aware of the issues that have been identified as needing attention.”
Just what does a career development manager do? Templeton is starting with the basics — providing UW staff with the tools they need to get ahead. On the Professional and Organizational Development Web site (http://www.washington.edu/admin/hr/pod/) is a section on career development that contains a lot of information — on exploring new careers, searching for a specific job and finding a mentor, for example. Templeton plans to build on that and also to create workshops on some of the same subjects. By spring or early summer, she hopes to have a standard series available: applying to the UW, navigating UWHIRES, resume basics, cover letter basics and interviewing basics.
Beyond these nuts and bolts topics, however, Templeton would like to help staffers see the ways they can help themselves on a day-to-day basis. In a session on career management that she’ll teach for the first time at the support staff retreat on April 24, she’s going to be talking about some of those techniques.
“It’s a fact of work life that managers are often spending more of their time addressing things that aren’t going well and solving problems,” she says. “So sometimes the things that are going well get overlooked because they’re going well. And that includes people who are good performers, top performers, their work isn’t recognized, it’s not on the radar. So career management is taking some initiative, being active in documenting the work you do, seeing performance reviews as an opportunity not just to be reviewed, but also to share with your manager how you have done well throughout the year.”
Templeton recommends that staffers document what they are doing through a portfolio or some other presentation of their accomplishments that they can share during a performance review. She also says that when employees are praised by others in the course of doing their jobs, they should pass along those words of praise to their supervisors.
Besides working with employees who want to move up, Templeton will also be working with supervisors on their side of career development. Supervisors, she says, may not always see that career development is a good thing. “If career development is promoted and career paths are defined, then managers may think they’ll lose employees,” she explains. “The manager thinks, ‘Who’s going to move? It will be my top performers and then where will I be?’ So we really need to communicate that there’s a lot of talent here and movement can mean you lose one good performer and get another. It’s always a good thing to help someone grow.”
In addition to workshops, Templeton will be planning some special events. For example, between commencement and the first summer session in June, there will be a professional development day for staff — both professional and classified. At the center of that will be a resource fair, but there will also be breakout sessions, workshops and a number of other activities to make staff aware that there are career development resources on campus for them.
One of those resources is Templeton herself. She will be available for limited one-on-one career counseling — limited because there are 19,000 staff and only one of her. “We’re going to use those sessions to see what the issues are,” Templeton says. “So far, we’ve had a lot of requests for resume reviews, and that could be handled through workshops. But what people ask for will tell us what staff as a whole are likely to need.”
A Seattle native who went off to graduate school at Harvard thinking she wanted to be a professor and a researcher, Templeton fell into career counseling when she realized she liked interacting with her research subjects more than doing the research itself. She worked for nine years in the Career Services Office at Virginia Tech before returning to her hometown and the job at UW’s Center for Career Services.
“I loved that job,” Templeton says. “As a career counselor, I knew that every week, I made a difference in at least one person’s life.”
Now she hopes to broaden that influence by putting together a University-wide program. “Right now there’s me and we’ve hired a 50 percent administrative specialist for 19,000 staff, but it’s not overwhelming to think of that ratio because I know there are so many resources here at the University,” she says. “I find it exciting to see how I can pull things together, leverage some existing programs and create some new services to fill a gap. I feel confident that in the end we’re going to have a first-rate service.”
