What Cats can teach us about Excellent Customer Service

Presented by: Miranda Carney-Morris, Julio Appling, and Elizabeth Young (Lewis and Clark College)

An interactive workshop where various archetypes of cats were explained and how they related to typical support user types. A participant activity followed in which attendees creatively devised solutions to herd (and best support) these types of cats/customers.

Read the paper in the ACM Digital Library

Review the slides in Sched 

Takeaways:

Customer types are diverse as cat breeds. Providing flexible and effective support is an art! Meow, meow, meow!

A Career in Organized Anarchy: Building Interpersonal Relationships in Higher Education

Presented by: Matthew House (Washington University in St Louis)

Understanding the university as an organization can help you build relationships with others on your campus. Relationships can help foster trust and engagement, gain commitment and backing, and help you get timely and accurate information.

There are four different models of higher education institution; knowing the type of institution that you work at can help you build those relationships. The four models are: collegial, bureaucratic, political, and anarchical. Also, know your institution’s Carnegie classification. This can help you navigate the rough waters of relationship building.

Investing in your Training Portfolio: diversifying Training Methods

Presented by: Winnie Ling Luper, William Olsen (Rutgers University))

In this presentation, Winnie and William covered their entire student training program in depth and talked about how they used slido.com for the presentation. This session covered their student evaluation, feedback and improvement process.

Student training included some cool gamification ideas. Student leaders were tasked with coming up with gaming themes for training. Some examples include Consultant Ninja Warrior, Who wants to be a Consultant, and The ARC Amazing Race. Training also includes a number of hands-on activities, like building a computer and raspberry pi. They seem to have a great training program with a very small teacher to student ratio (no more than 7 students per class).

This session also covered their consultant review process. Each student supervisor has 7 consultants.

Read the paper on the ACM Digital Library

Review the slides on Sched

Takeaways:

Exciting perspective on training student employees with many examples that could be used by anyone even smaller schools. – Tim Foley

Navigating your Path to Leadership

Presented by: David Weil (Ithaca College), Beth Rugg (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), Terry Ruger (Ithaca College)

What a phenomenal group of presenters who shared with us how to prepare for advancing up the career ladder. They reminded us that advancing up that ladder is about people and vision and less about technology. Mid-level management is not about being better at technology.

Anatomy of a Career Coaching Session

Presented by: Diana Sadlouskos (Sadlouskos Consulting)

Diana Sadlouskos, a career coach, provided us an inside look at a career coaching session by showcasing her process with a SIGUCCS attendee. Some of her advice included:

• Identify the job(s) that you are interested in
• Update your application materials to apply specifically to that job
  • Cover letter
  • Resume
• Prepare for interviews
  • Create an interview prep document/matrix
  • Develop a career notebook
  • Create your 2-3 minute introduction
• Plan for your next steps

Review the slides on Sched

Takeaways:

Your resume should be built upon the themes of the job for which you are applying. Highlight the skills that are being requested in that new position. Be sure that your resume and cover letter tell your story and tell it well. – Lisa Brown

What a fantastic opportunity to see what happens in career coaching sessions. I learned that each time you apply for a job, your application materials must be recreated to apply toward the credentials sought. – Laurie Fox

The “I” in Team: How developing individual strength builds a great team

Presented by: Tom Wilk (Carnegie Mellon University)

Managers face three types of employees on their teams: struggler, “average Joe”, and rock star. Each type requires a different management strategy. Managers need to set SMART goals and document progress as part of performance management (don’t just tell them to do better). Tom uses 1-1 meetings with agendas, performance appraisals, coaching, shared documents, and other tools to assist him in building a team.

Best Practices for Small Groups Communication and Efficiency

Presented by: Ella Tschopik, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Ella gave us some great ways to run meetings and tied in a few workshop-like activities in this presentation. Her presentation immediately followed the opening keynote where we were reminded that the most important skills that a student can learn in college are the soft skills, like communication. Ella’s presentation was a great way to start the conference!

As part of this presentation we learned some best practices for successful meetings, including identifying individual behaviors during group communication. One of the group activities was about observing these in action. We were challenged with answering questions that were clearly opinion answers. It was great to see how we were able to apply some of the tools Ella spoke about during the presentation.