Category: Development and Training

Training, education and ongoing professional development is very important to your ongoing success at MSU. This category highlights professional development news, views and opportunities.

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Assistance for Professional or Educational Development

Published on by MSU Human ResourcesLeave a comment

As a benefits-eligible MSU employee, you have access to a variety of unique benefits and resources to help you and your family succeed, including Educational Assistance and Course Fee Courtesy. These benefits offer financial assistance toward your professional development or the educational development of your spouse and/or dependents after you’ve worked at MSU for a certain amount of time.

MSU HR receives a lot of questions about the differences between Educational Assistance and Course Fee Courtesy. We hope this article will help clarify the differences between the two benefits and encourage you to take advantage of them.

EDUCATIONAL ASSISTANCE

Who’s eligible to receive this benefit?
The Educational Assistance benefit is available to MSU support staff after working at MSU for an equivalent of 12 full-time service months. If you work less than full-time, the benefit is pro-rated based on your employment percentage.

Note: A similar program, The Professional Development Support Program, is available for Academic Specialists. 

What does the benefit include?
You may receive financial assistance for both credit and non-credit courses, which may include trainings, seminars, workshops, conferences or other educational opportunities. Use this benefit to enhance your professional skillset or help you reach Performance Excellence goals.

For non-credit courses, like professional development courses available through HR, support staff employees have up to $800 per year to use towards course registration fees. This money does not roll over to the next year, so be sure to take advantage of this benefit every academic year. The course must be considered job-related and from an approved institution/program to receive assistance.

For credit courses, you can receive up to 14 credits per academic year. Your financial assistance level is determined by your union group, the type of course you’re taking (graduate or undergraduate), and where you’re taking the course (MSU or another university). The course must be considered job-related, degree-related, or career/professional development-related.

MORE INFO: Find detailed information about Educational Assistance – including how to apply – on the HR website.

COURSE FEE COURTESY

Who’s eligible to receive this benefit?
The Course Fee Courtesy benefit is available to your dependents or spouse. Regular support staff become eligible for this benefit after the equivalent of 60 full-time service months, which is equal to working at MSU full-time for 5 years. Faculty and academic staff become eligible based on their appointment; fixed-term faculty/academic staff are eligible after 60 full-time service months; continuing/tenure employees are automatically eligible; full-time Health Programs (HP) faculty become eligible upon the commencement of the first additional HP appointment.

What does it include?
This includes a Michigan resident undergraduate tuition rate reduction of 50% for your dependent(s) and/or spouse who attend MSU. So, if you have children and/or a spouse who are planning on attending MSU, you could save 50% off their undergraduate tuition rate. This benefit is only valid for a student’s first bachelor’s degree and through the semester in which the 120th credit is attempted.

MORE INFO: Find detailed information about Course Fee Courtesy – including how to apply – on the HR website.

Have further questions about Educational Assistance or Course Fee Courtesy? Contact HR’s Organization and Professional Development department at prodev@hr.msu.edu, and we’ll be happy to assist.

Courses in February to Improve Workplace Communication

Published on by Megan MacGregorLeave a comment

Being able to communicate effectively with your co-workers is key to a successful and engaged workplace. When you can share your ideas openly and understand your co-workers’ views in return, you’re more likely to feel happier at work. Yet, oftentimes there are certain barriers that can make communication difficult, like personality or work style differences. If you have a better understanding of your own work and personality styles – and can identify different styles in others – you can start to bridge any gaps of misunderstanding and ultimately communicate more effectively.

We have a variety of courses available in February for MSU employees related to improving communication:

Everything DiSC: Behavior Styles at Work
Have you ever had a co-worker or boss who you could not even begin to understand? Even when you ask them questions, you’re still unsure what they need or want. Most of us have felt this way at one time or another. The course EverythingDiSC: Behavior Styles at Work is designed to help you understand yourself and other people better by giving you an understanding of different behavioral work styles.

Before the course, you will take a simple online assessment to learn your DiSC style, which is your unique work behavior style. During the class, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how your style relates to others and tools to help you connect better with co-workers whose priorities and preferences differ from yours.

Honing Your Emotional Intelligence
The essence of emotional intelligence (also known as EQ or EI) is our ability to identify and manage our own emotions and to identify emotions in others. In today’s high-stress, multi-tasking workplace, having a high EQ can lead to better stress management, stronger relationships with better communication and increased job satisfaction. The Honing Your Emotional Intelligence course will show you tools to master the principles found within EQ. Specifically, this course will focus on:

  • Why EQ is an essential competency in today’s work world.
  • How to fully engage the four fundamental areas of EQ: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.
  • How to increase your EQ.
  • Why EQ has a direct impact on job satisfaction and performance excellence.

Thriving Through Change
Change is inevitable and being able to communicate effectively through change will help ease the transition process. This course will define what change is and help you understand the stages and reactions to change. Learn techniques and strategies to help you cope with stress and manage the process successfully.

Ready to Register?
To register, login to the EBS Portal and click on the My Career and Training tab, then the Courses for Employees at MSU tile. Find a complete list of available OPD courses on the HR website.

Creating Professional or Personal Development Goals that Stick

Published on by Megan MacGregorLeave a comment

Did you make a New Year’s resolution? The start of a new year inspires people to make big changes to improve their lives. Unfortunately, that goal we set on January 1 can start to look pretty daunting a couple weeks later when the initial buzz of new year motivation wears off. It’s not uncommon for goals to be forgotten or abandoned. In fact, for those who make New Year’s resolutions, 80% fail to stick to their goal by February (Jantz, 2018). If you’re struggling to maintain your New Year’s resolution, don’t give up hope yet. This just means it’s time to recalibrate or redefine your goal, and we’ve got tips and tools to help.

Identify Why a Goal is Meaningful to You
At the start of a new year, people are inspired to commit to lofty goals they’ve previously never been able to achieve. Common goals include lose weight, save money, learn a new skill and find a new job (Economy, 2019). Unfortunately, that initial rush of inspiration is only temporary, which is why most end up losing interest after a couple weeks. Motivation alone cannot push you to achieve a goal, learn a new skill, or change a habit. And if your goal is too vague, you’re likely to forget about it come February.

When you’re curious about a goal, you must ask yourself why you want to achieve it – and then keep asking yourself why until you get to the root of why this goal is meaningful to you. Leadership and career coach Lisa Rogoff explains, “You’d be surprised at how many [goals] are grounded in values and purpose. And when you can surface that meaning and give it a voice, a simple goal shifts into a mission. With your why front and center, it’s almost impossible to turn your back and not go after it.” When you identify the personal value and meaning behind a goal you increase your likelihood of achieving it. Read Rogoff’s full article.

Get help identifying a meaningful professional development goal by visiting the Explore Your Learning Needs page or the Sample Goals for Different Roles page on the HR website.

Get SMART.
After you’ve identified your goal and why it’s meaningful to you, it’s time to make it SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. The SMART method helps you make a detailed plan with clear objectives to achieve your goal. Learn more about SMART goals.

Be Accountable.
If you have a professional development goal, try sharing it with your supervisor or incorporating it into your Performance Excellence plan (for support staff). Check in with your supervisor periodically to make sure you’re hitting your objectives and making progress. If you’re not sure how to broach the subject, visit the Requesting and Accepting Feedback page for tips to start the conversation.

Stay Inspired with Resources on Campus.
As an MSU employee, you have a variety of resources available to help you create lasting change and achieve your goals:

  • Take a professional development course on one of the many subjects offered through Organization and Professional Development. For support or academic staff with 12 full-time service months, don’t forget you can use your Educational Assistance benefit for any fees.
  • Use the FREE online elevateU resources – books, videos, courses and more!
  • The WorkLife Office offers tons of resources and programs to help MSU employees navigate the workplace, their careers and life transitions.
  • The Academic Advancement Network provides programs, opportunities, and events for faculty, academic staff and academic administrators.
  • The MSU Health4U program offers health-related articles, cooking classes, coaching, and health/wellness events.
  • The MSU Library provides events and classes on a variety of interesting subjects to staff and faculty.

Economy, P. (2019, January 01). 10 Top New Year’s Resolutions for Success and Happiness in 2019. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/10-top-new-years-resolutions-for-success-happiness-in-2019.html

Jantz, D. G. (2018, January 03). This Year’s Resolution. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-years-resolution_us_5a4cff60e4b0d86c803c7b1b

Rogoff, L. (n.d.). The Best Goals Start With ‘Why’. Retrieved from https://advice.shinetext.com/articles/the-best-goals-start-with-why/

Are you happy at work? Time to make career goals part of your New Year’s resolutions.

Published on by Megan MacGregorLeave a comment

With the new year on the horizon, now is the time to relax and recharge, spend time with your loved ones, and maybe start thinking about your career goals for 2019.

The average American spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime. That’s 1/3 of your life or 50% of your waking hours spent in the company of your co-workers (Pryce-Jones, 2010). When you think about your work life in these terms, it makes sense that you’d include career goals as part of your New Year’s resolutions.

What should your goals be? Research shows that people who feel more engaged and appreciated at work report feeling happier in general. These happy worker bees have a few things in common including a meaningful vision for their future, a sense of purpose, and great relationships (McKee, 2016).

Lucky for you, as a benefits-eligible MSU employee you have access to a variety of personal and professional development courses that can help you identify growth areas and build roadmaps for a more purposeful future. We recommend using some (or all!) of the following courses to help you reach your career goals and ultimately become happier at work.

Highlight of 2019 Professional Development Courses:

Chances are, you could use a little focus in your life. Between emails, text messages, phone calls, meetings, social media, family, and co-workers all demanding your attention, it can be hard to clear away the distractions and zero in on the work that needs to get done. We recommend taking the course From Distracted to Productive to learn “game plan” ideas for getting and keeping your distractors under control.

Once you’ve become more productive at work, how do you sustain those high results? You must have a significant amount of emotional resiliency as you navigate the challenges inherent in your day-to-day life. The course Sustainable High Performance teaches you how to increase your capacity for calm, creative responses to a wide variety of problems and operate from a high-quality state of mind.

And career goals would ultimately be meaningless if you didn’t create them with a bit of introspection. The Everything DiSC: Behavior Styles at Work course helps you understand yourself and how you relate to other people – including your co-workers. While the Identify and Maximize Your Strengths course shows you what makes you unique and helps identify your natural talents.

Ready to Sign-Up?

Find all the current professional development courses on the HR website. Register for the courses through the EBS Portal. After you log in, click the My Career and Training tab and then click the Courses for Employees at MSU tile.

McKee, Annie. “Being Happy at Work Matters.” Harvard Business Review, 26 Oct. 2016, hbr.org/2014/11/being-happy-at-work-matters.

Pryce-Jones, Jessica. Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital for Success. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

Learn to Become a More Effective Leader

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Are you a leader of your unit or department? As a leader, you are faced with three fundamental responsibilities: to craft a vision, build alignment, and champion execution of that vision. The course Everything DiSC: Work of Leaders focuses on understanding how your tendencies influence your effectiveness in specific leadership situations around the vision of your unit or department.

For this course, you will take an online assessment that will provide you with a personalized report. This report focuses on developing preferred behaviors to improve leadership skills around building and sustaining a vision. Using the report you will:

  • Receive tangible steps directed at leading a group or organization toward a desired outcome.
  • Understand how your tendencies influence your effectiveness by enabling others to capitalize on their talents to make the vision a reality.
  • Understand yourself better – the first step to becoming more effective when leading others to execute a vision.

Good leadership skills can be difficult to learn because they are behavioral in nature. The course instructor will help you understand your report and walk you through your leadership strengths and challenges. Please note, the Everything DiSC: Work of Leaders approach is for the one-to-many relationship of the leader, as opposed to the one-to-one relationship of the manager.

Ready to Sign Up?

Everything DiSC: Work of Leaders is Tuesday, April 24 from 8:30 a.m. to Noon. Sign up for the course by logging into the EBS Portal and selecting the Courses for Employees at MSU tile under My Career and Training.

Equal Pay Day: Raising Awareness

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This is a guest post written by Lydia Weiss at the WorkLife Office.

Slowly but surely, the wage gap is decreasing. Currently, women earn on average 80 cents for every dollar paid to men. However, the reality is that even if the wage gap is decreasing over time, this inching towards parity has not really budged in over a decade, according to the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Although the Equal Pay Act was enacted by Congress in 1963, the wage gap persists. The gap is also particularly glaring for women of color.

In an effort to raise awareness about the wage gap, Equal Pay Day is a symbolic recognition that, in order for women’s yearly salary to reach that of men, women would have to work until April 10 in order to catch up to men’s previous year’s salary. But let’s be clear – that’s for white women. According to the AAUW, Asian American Women’s Equal Pay Day is in March, African American Women’s Equal Pay Day isn’t until August, Native American Women’s Equal Pay Day is in September, and Latina Equal Pay Day is in November.

One contributing factor to the pay gap is that women are often offered lower starting salaries than their peers who are men – and then women often do not negotiate to increase those offers. As many folks in the business world know, your starting salary is the foundation for future raises, therefore if women’s starting salaries are lower than men’s to begin with, their opportunity for raises is stunted, especially when those raises are based off a percentage of your current salary. For instance, if a woman negotiates a 1% raise and her salary is $40,000, and her colleague who is a man also negotiates a 1% raise, but is making $50,000 – the wage gap persists based on their existing salaries.

In order to address this issue, the Michigan State University MI-ACE Women’s Network Institutional Representatives, in collaboration with the AAUW and several MSU units are bringing salary negotiation workshops to campus for faculty and staff on April 11. You can register for the workshop for support staff or the workshop for faculty and academic staff.

At MSU, in addition to the salary negotiation workshops on April 11, other organizations exist to support women-identified folks in building professional skills in negotiation, mentoring, networking and confidence building. The Women’s Networking Association, Academic Women’s Forum, and Women’s Advisory Committee for Support Staff are just a few ways to get involved.

Interested in Learning about Emotional Intelligence?

Published on by Megan MacGregorLeave a comment

The essence of emotional intelligence (also known as EQ or EI) is our ability to identify and manage our own emotions and to identify emotions in others and manage interpersonal relationships. In today’s high-stress, multi-tasking workplace, having a high EQ can lead to better stress management, stronger relationships and increased job satisfaction.

Organization and Professional Development  is offering two new courses about emotional intelligence, one for all employee types and one with a leadership focus:

Honing Your Emotional Intelligence

Isn’t it interesting how some people have the seemingly natural talent for handling themselves and/or others with ease? Most likely, these individuals have mastered the principles found within EQ. Specifically, this course will focus on:

  • Why EQ is an essential competency in today’s work world.
  • How to fully engage the four fundamental areas of EQ: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.
  • How to increase your EQ.
  • Why EQ has a direct impact on job satisfaction and performance excellence.

Emotional Intelligence in Leadership

A strong leader ignites motivation and unleashes productivity creating an environment in which individuals want to follow. Specifically, the course will focus on:

  • A case for EQ as a necessary leadership competency.
  • The link between EQ, retention, motivation and productivity.
  • The four competencies of EQ (self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, social skill).
  • Building skill as it relates to the four competencies of EQ.
  • How to design an emotional intelligent culture.

Ready to sign up?

Register for courses by logging into the EBS Portal and selecting My Career and Training, then Courses for Employees at MSU. Click Browse Current Courses, then Organization and Professional Development. You’ll find both of the above courses in the All Current Courses folder.

No time for class? Visit elevateU.

The online learning platform elevateU has tons of resources related to emotional intelligence that you can work through at your own pace. Access elevateU here and select the ‘Develop Your Professional Skill Set’ icon on the homepage to dive right into resources about EQ.

Financial Knowledge for All: Upcoming Workshops

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Setting a budget. Managing debt. Planning for a loved one’s future college education expenses. You may find yourself in the midst of one or all of these financial situations and looking for financial knowledge and tips to help you manage everything. Retirement vendor, TIAA, is hosting several upcoming workshops as a part of their Financial Essentials education to provide free workshops to staff and faculty. Click the workshop location to register.

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Start saving and financial planning for the future.

 

Lifetime Income: Help secure your retirement
Wednesday, November 8, 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.

Live Webinar

This webinar will discuss planning for retirement now, financial risks during working years and in retirement and the importance of creating an income stream for life.

College Savings Seminar
Wednesday, November 15, Noon – 1 p.m.
Chittenden Hall, Room 110

RSVP here by November 14.

This session will provide information on how you can start saving for your loved ones’ higher education expenses with Michigan’s 529 College Savings Plan.

Managing Difficult Customers

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Every day, we are faced with new situations, people and conflicts. Organization and Professional Development has created a class to help you prevent and de-escalate situations.

In this featured course, attendee’s will be provided with practical information and methods designed to enhance internal and external customer service, learn strategies to maximize individual and team performance, positive communication and cohesiveness to manage circumstances before, during and after the situation.

The objectives of this course include:

  • Learn self-management techniques to enhance one’s ability to effectively navigate a potentially difficult situation.
  • Learn to proactively identify precipitating factors, situations, and dispositions that could be warning signs.
  • Explore the Integrated Experience and Verbal Escalation Continuums.
  • Learn, discuss, and practice non-violent (hands off) crisis intervention techniques.

This course will be held on Thursday, December 7, 2017 from 9 a.m. to 11:30 am in Room 10, Nisbet. Come out and learn something new and share your experiences!

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Happy National Online Learning Day!

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A vital part to a successful career is constant development and training. MSU HR and MSU IT have teamed together to create a way for our employees to constantly learn and develop new skills from the comfort of their own computer.

elevateU resources include traditional online courses, job aids, skill briefs, business impacts, challenge series, simulations, books, videos, practice tests and mentoring. Another unique feature is inGenius too, a tool that can assist you in social networking and bringing together a community with similar interests to you.

Course content ranges from leadership, IT & Desktop, Finance and Human Resources, to Change Management, Project Management, Interpersonal Skills and more.

elevateU is available on all computers and now, mobile! Android and iOS users can download the Skillsoft Learning App to access elevateU courses on the go.

To login to your elevateU profile, use your MSU NetID and password.

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