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Lesson 14: Current Skills and Plan for Professional Development AssessmentPatrice M. LombardThe Pennsylvania State UniversityLesson 14: Current Skills and Plan for Professional Development AssessmentAs I look back at the semester I can see many ways in which my knowledge base has grown from participating in this course, especially in the area of organizational intelligences, which were introduced by Pat Terenzini in 1993 (Eimers, Gardner, & Ko, 2012). In my follow-up self-assessment (see Table 1), it is clear to see that my development from the beginning of the course to today has improved. I consider myself to be in the above average range, but I do not feel as if I am at the advanced development level quite yet. To increase my level of organizational intelligences I will need to continue on my path of lifelong learning, which includes professional development, completing my master’s degree, and basically stepping outside of my higher education comfort zone in order to maximize my intellectual growth. Table 1. Institutional Research (IR) Intelligences: Self-AssessmentIn Need of DevelopmentAverage Development Advanced DevelopmentInstitutional Research IntelligencesInitial Follow-up Technical/Analytical Intelligence: Factual knowledge46.5Methodology skills36.5Understanding computing and computing software38Issues Intelligence: Understanding key issues in higher education especially internal issues most germane to your institution (faculty workload, time to degree)36.5Knowledge level of formal and informal decision-making processes36.5Ability to work with and through others to accomplish goals38Contextual Intelligence: Understanding the culture of higher education, including your own institution’s culture and history (such as institutional memory)36.5How business is done at your institution (who the key players are and the key processes are)57.5Respecting the perspectives of all constituencies99Knowledge of the environment in which your college operates36.512345678910Note. Adapted from Lesson 02: Career Paths in Higher Education, (2016) and populated with the information from “Practicing Institutional Research,” by Eimers, M. T., Gardner, D., & Ko, Jang W., 2012, The Handbook of Institutional Research, p. 43, Exhibit 3.1.As I mentioned earlier, this course has broadened my knowledge base. Each individual lessons in this course provided a new understanding into the importance and depth of IR. I especially enjoyed creating the benchmark and prediction reports. The benchmark report was useful in expanding my knowledge of how to find then manipulate raw data to tell your story or convey your point of view. I think Alex Yin said it best in the first “Voices from the Field” in Lesson 2 of this course, “. . . I’m basically a storyteller with data” (2016). With the benchmark report I was effectively able to convey my belief, using data from College Results Online, that students, regardless of their socio-economic background can (financially) afford to attend any institution they choose, if they qualify academically. Similarly, the prediction project gave me the opportunity to effectively portrait my assumptions and intuition as to what the enrollment at Penn State Hazleton would be for fall 2016. This project encompassed data mining, research, data manipulation, prediction modeling, and presentation methods, all of which I was not well-versed in at the start of this course. From these two projects I came away with the following edicts: What you think you know, you really don’t know – sometimes assumptions are just that.Assumption/Intuition is a necessary evil – you have to start somewhere.Data prevails – once you block out the noise and focus on the signal (Lesson 9, 2016) and present it in a clear and concise manner.The cause and correlation lesson was by far the most challenging, but I belief the most fruitful for me. This lesson pushed me well beyond my comfort zone and intrigued me to do additional research to determine how it works and what its benefits are. Knowing whether or not something is simply correlated with or caused by something else is pivotal in higher education particularly when strategic decision-making is involved. For example, does the incentive of free application fee with a campus visit cause more prospective student to apply or is it just a correlation because of the omitted variable of students’ satisfaction with the campus after their visitations.All in all this course was very enlightening, however I still have no intentions to switch the option of my master’s degree from Administration to IR. I remain confident however, that another IR course taken as an elective would be more than helpful as I move forward in my professional career. The course that appears to have the most real-world application for my career goal of Regional Registrar is HI ED 850: Analyzing Faculty Workload, Performance, and Compensation. Although this course is somewhat geared towards those in the position as Director of Academic Affairs, gaining the knowledge from it would be advantageous when building semester schedules and determining what instructors can or cannot teach based on their workload.ReferencesEimers, M. T., Gardner, D., & Ko, J. W., (2012). Practicing Institutional Research. In Howard, R. D., Knight, W. E., McLaughlin, G. W., & Associates (Eds.), The Handbook of Institutional Research (pp. 40-56). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.Lesson 02: Career Paths in Higher Education, (2016). Penn State World Campus, HI ED 490: Exploration of Careers in Higher Education. Retrieved from Lesson 02: Introduction to Institutional Research, (2016). Penn State World Campus, HI ED 801: Foundations of Institutional Research. Retrieved from Lesson 9: Introduction to Prediction, (2016). Penn State World Campus, HI ED 801: Foundations of Institutional Research. Retrieved from ................
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