How to ensure faculty professional development with Faculty Career Pathways
Faculty professional development is vital to institutional success. From training courses and workshops to advanced degrees, ongoing development empowers faculty to excel today while evolving to thrive in tomorrow’s higher education landscape. Some faculty members may hesitate to seize development opportunities, and this lack of engagement can limit their growth and institutional progress.
Guided faculty success career pathways can help overcome this resistance by showing faculty members a clear roadmap to achieving their potential. Read on to discover how faculty success career pathways can ignite a culture of professional development at your institution.
Understanding the benefits of faculty professional development
Promoting engagement in professional development starts with distilling the “why” and communicating it to your faculty members. Faculty professional development unlocks several benefits:
Equipping faculty to support improved student outcomes
Cultivating a growth mindset for lasting faculty success
Improving faculty skills, performance, and earning potential
Discovering and developing faculty talents
Increasing professional fulfillment in faculty members
Meeting continuous improvement standards for accreditation
Enhancing the institution’s reputation
Barriers to faculty development
Despite the benefits of professional development, some faculty members may be reluctant to pursue it. Understanding common barriers to participation in professional development can help you overcome them and improve engagement to maximize your return on investment (ROI) for providing development opportunities. Obstacles to professional development include:
Information overload: Faculty members may feel overwhelmed by the range of professional development opportunities and unsure where to start.
Lack of awareness: Faculty members may not know about the professional development opportunities they could be pursuing.
Relevance concerns: Faculty members may doubt whether a professional development opportunity will help them with their daily duties and professional goals.
Time constraints: Faculty members may find it difficult to fit professional development within their busy schedules, especially if they lack a strong incentive.
Self-confidence: Faculty members may feel insecure about their abilities to succeed in professional development opportunities.
Disinterest: Faculty members may not feel intrinsic motivation and interest in taking on a professional development journey.
How career pathways increase faculty development engagement
One of the most effective strategies for overcoming these barriers and increasing faculty engagement in professional development is providing guided career pathways. These pathways are structured frameworks for professional development throughout an academic career.
A career pathway includes advancing stages, each defined by SMART goals and milestones to achieve before reaching the next stage. These goals and milestones could relate to work performance metrics like research output and student evaluation scores, but should also incorporate professional development opportunities like completing pedagogical courses and attending seminars. A more detailed pathway could also tie these milestones to expected timeframes and incentives for completion.
Establishing clear expectations: Faculty members receive a clear message about what professional development goals their department expects them to achieve and when.
Visualizing career trajectory: By organizing a career success pathway into defined stages, faculty members can visualize their future professional status at any point in the future. This forward-facing perspective can help motivate them to pursue the next step toward realizing their career aspirations.
Offering incentives for development: An organized career pathway allows departments to anchor incentives to milestones, motivating progress and ensuring fairness to all. These incentives could include bonuses, benefits, promotions, gifts, or other forms of recognition.
Tracking faculty development progress: User-friendly success pathway software that displays progress data on a centralized dashboard allows administrators and faculty members to track professional development at a glance. This transparency can improve faculty member engagement and accountability while helping administrators recognize achievements and intervene with support where necessary.
Facilitating reviews: Faculty success pathway progress data can inform performance reviews, enhancing objectivity and minimizing bias. Administrators can use this data to identify areas where progress lags and discuss strategies to realize the faculty member’s career potential.
Other strategies to increase faculty development engagement
While introducing faculty success career pathways alone can inspire increased engagement, guided pathways are compatible with other strategies. Consider combining several or all of these best practices with guided career pathways for optimal results:
Conducting a needs assessment: Before compiling your faculty career pathway goals and milestones, conduct a needs assessment survey to understand what faculty members want and expect from their own professional development journeys. This could be an open-ended question, or you could provide a checklist for them to select from.
Catering to various learning styles: Recognize that your faculty members have different learning styles. The most common styles are visual learners, who learn by seeing. Auditory learners learn by listening, and kinesthetic learners learn by handling or acting out the subject matter. For professional development learning components like workshops and courses, cater to diverse learning styles through a multimedia approach that serves all three styles. Alternatively, provide a choice menu allowing faculty to select their preferred learning experience.
Encouraging hands-on learning: Ensure your professional development learning components include hands-on practice. For example, if you want them to implement a new software tool in their teaching, let them practice using it during a professional development workshop.
Gathering faculty feedback: To improve your faculty development pathways over time, give faculty members regular anonymous surveys to elicit feedback about their professional development experience. This feedback can cover learning resource content and delivery, as well as the pathway’s structure.
Evaluating effectiveness: Conduct regular impact evaluations to understand the effectiveness of your professional development strategies. Along with analyzing faculty survey data, these evaluations can incorporate pathway progress data and student success data. Aim to establish whether your faculty members are progressing in line with your expectations and whether this is helping them and their students succeed as intended. If faculty members are falling behind, evaluate whether you should adjust your pathways or provide additional support.
Facilitate professional development with Watermark Faculty Success Career Pathways
Watermark’s new module for Faculty Success, Faculty Career Pathways, helps you monitor your faculty’s progress and encourage their success. After creating pathways with our straightforward interface, you and your faculty members track their professional advancement on a centralized dashboard. This helps each faculty member visualize their career trajectory, motivating them to pursue the next milestone. Meanwhile, administrators have a clear reference point for performance reviews that support growth.
