The most important asset in any company isn’t their facility, their product or service, or their even their financial resources. A companies biggest asset is their human capital–the people who make the company work! Therefore, it is essential that companies provide their people with the necessary training and development to accomplish their work
I have worked in the BYU-Idaho Career and Academic Advising office for over two years now and have grown a great appreciation for the work of our peer and full-time advisors. Of the various roles I have held within the organization, my most recent role was as the Student Employment Specialist where I would help to hire, onboard, and train employees. Following one of our team lead retreats, several of the team leads expressed a desire for more training. At the time, there was not any training for team leads other than the occasional team lead retreat once a semester. This inspired me to create a training program to help our team leads be better prepared to lead the peer advisors.
Project Overview
For my project, I designed a team lead training program for the BYU-Idaho Career and Academic Advising center. This program has 6 lessons, each consisting of a 10-12 minute video and a coordinating worksheet. To complete this project, I assessed outcomes, developed curriculum, designed presentations, and filmed training videos.
Project Process
Assessing Outcomes
I first began the project by assessing outcomes. I have gone through three different supervisors during my time in Academic Advising. My first supervisor initially started on this project about a year and a half ago before he moved to another job. He developed six outcomes for these lessons and I had the opportunity to help. These outcomes had previously been approved by the Advising Director, Sam Brubaker, so after talking with my current manager, we decided to maintain them. The outcomes are the following:
- TLs will understand their stewardship and show confidence in their role.
- TLs will understand and lead with a growth mindset.
- TLs will effectively communicate information from their Coordinator to their team members.
- TLs will demonstrate they can provide constructive and corrective feedback.
- TLs will build and sustain a strong culture of positivity in their center.
- TLs will advocate professionally for those within their stewardship.
Developing Curriculum and Designing Presentations
This is where the bulk of my project was focused. Developing the curriculum consisted of making a lesson plan, a corresponding worksheet, and a slide presentation.
To make the lesson plan, I researched many additional resources that could help me to expound my knowledge. Since I am not an expert in all communication fields, I used scholarly resources such as Harvard Business Review, Stanford University, Michigan State University, The Center for Creative Leadership, University of Utah, The Society of Human Resource Management, and more, to establish credibility.
In the process of developing the lesson plan, I relied on information that I had previously learned in my communication courses. Some of this information included:
- The communication pattern of sender, receiver, and noise.
- The importance of establishing psychological safety in an organization.
- The “Situation, Behavior, Impact, and Intent” model for giving feedback.
- The importance of establishing workflow communication patterns for more effective communication.
- Building and sustaining team culture.
Following each lesson plan, I made a corresponding worksheet. These worksheets give the team leads an opportunity to apply what they learned in the video they watched. Below you can see all seven worksheets that were included in the curriculum.
Once I completed the lesson plan, I transferred that information to a slide presentation. You may notice that every lesson has a slightly different design than the one before. This was because after talking with my mentor, Brother Brent Bean, we decided that a distinct difference between the slide designs could be helpful to the audience in distinguishing one lesson from another.
Below you can see the slides from each lesson.
Training Videos
After talking with my manager, we knew that we wanted this project to be something that outlasted my time in the organization. Because I will be graduating soon, we needed to find a way that these lessons could be taught after I was gone. With the help of my mentor, we decided that creating training videos would be the most effective way to communicate the information long term. Using Zoom, I recorded videos of me teaching the content from the slides and uploaded them to the “Career and Academic Advising New Hire Training” Canvas course.
Project Outcome
The outcome of this project is a module in the “Career and Academic Advising New Hire Training” Canvas course. This course is made available to all Career and Academic Advising employees, therefore this is the best place to store the information and refer the team leads to. This project has given me the opportunity to both exhibit and expound my skills in research, curriculum development, visual design, and presentation. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to make a contribution to the Career and Academic Advising organization.
Below you can see images of the Canvas course module and one of the lessons:
