The Case for Professional Development
The Higher Education Web Professionals Association has a mission, and it is
“To advance Web professionals, technologies and standards in higher education.”
As a group with its roots in New York, we’ve been holding conferences for 10 years. As we’ve grown, one item that has been added to the regular conference agenda is “Professional Development.” Under this title, such general topics as Giving Effective Presentations, Making the Case for Resources, Negotiation, Strategic Planning, Project Management and Student Employment have been presented in the past or will be presented this year.
Some might reasonably ask, “Why?”
It comes back to our mission. Part of that is to advance you, as a Web professional. Between an increase in responsibilities at work and ever-present challenges on the home front, going back to school for a formal degree isn’t always an option. But if you can, in one stop, meet new people that are facing the same challenges in similar jobs, bring back tips to help you at your current job, and learn new skills to help you at your next job, I think we all win.
We need more leaders in higher education who have come from Web backgrounds, who understand the medium and help colleges and universities meet the “perfect storm” of challenges that threaten their that existence. (This was recently discussed at Penn State’s Web Conference, and Mark Greenfield also addressed this at a past HighEdWeb conference.)
So I hope you, like me, aspire for that next step in your career, and that we’ll see you in some professional development sessions at HighEdWeb 2009.
Steve Lewis (@stebert) is the president of the Higher Education Web Professionals Association, sits on both the conference and program committees for the #heweb09 conference, and is Web manager/information security coordinator for The College at Brockport.
[...] MMP rocks, that’s why! Because graduate school is too expensive (see The Case for Professional Development ). Because you don’t want to grow pointy hair when you become the [...]
[...] MMP rocks, that’s why! Because graduate school is too expensive (see The Case for Professional Development ). Because you don’t want to grow pointy hair when you become the [...]