Slate Career Trajectories

This next hour.

It's going to be good though. We've got, I think it's going to be really good and we have some good. Yeah, those couple of questions that came in. And I know there was something in the Facebook group too, so we should start seeing people. Yes, welcome people are coming and joining us. This is exciting.

We are going to.

Hold up and wait for just a couple minutes to give everybody a chance to arrive.

That was a big load all at once.

That was that was 200 people just like that.

Yep.

It's like magic. I love it.

On Slate, and I remember doing like some referral calls with her to learn how to load stuff into banner, I just have to say hi to Jan.

You can absolutely.

Love it.

I think that's one of the fun things about being in the system. It's three o'clock.

Christmas.

But it it's it's brilliant part of the community is come across names.

The community is one of my favorite things about Slate. All right, we've got a lot of people joining us. Still, I think a few more trickling in. But, well, maybe we'll give it just another minute.

That number keeps climbing.

Hello everyone, lots of greetings coming through in the chat. I love it if you're not. If you're not already in the chat or if you don't have it open, feel free to go ahead and open that and keep an eye on what people are saying because it's very fun.

Alright, well let's get started. Welcome everyone to Slate Stage Slate career trajectories which I personally am really excited to hear what these guys have to tell us. I'm Christine Peterson. I work here at technicians and I am a program manager and on the student success team.

Sorry about that, just trying to.

Get our there. We go housekeeping slides.

As you can see on the screen, UM, this webinar is currently being recorded. It'll be recorded the whole way through and it will be made available for viewing as long as you're a festival pass holder. It will be up there in your home slate when you go into your slate instance. If you need closed captioning, you can enable that with the button in the top right that says CC and the oh and the webinar recording also will be available in about a week. Just the heads up on that. It's not going to be immediately available.

Would be about a week and a few full screen viewing can be enabled by clicking the expand button at the top right corner of your window. A little arrows pointing out if you need to resync something, go ahead and refresh your window and if you have questions throughout this presentation, go ahead and post them in the chat. We will be monitoring that we're probably going to be collecting most of those for our presenters to address in the Q&A section at the end.

So just a heads up on that, put them in the chat and we will be taking them for the end and with that.

It is my pleasure to introduce your presenters for today's slate stage session. We've got Dom from RHB, just from Wellesley College and Joanna from RHB. RHB is one of our preferred partners and Jess has been working in slate for a long time. As a slate user so I'm excited to turn it over to you guys.

Thank you.

I'll start us off with introductions. I'm just going to tell you a little bit about myself and how I got to where I am now. So my name is Joanna Poole as she just mentioned and I actually started out using Slate as an end user as an admissions counselor way back in the day. Feels like a long time ago now and then I moved on and ended up building an instance of slate for Shady Grove Fertility, which I'll talk more about a little bit.

Later and after that I moved on to work with Hopkins, grad and undergrad, and then I ended up at RHB with Dom and have had a great time on this team for about six months now. So it's been very exciting to see where Slate has gone and where Slate has brought me and I'm looking forward to chatting more about that.

Thanks Joanna. I so as you can see my name is Dom. It's Dominic but but most everybody kind of knows me is Dom.

My career as you can see, I'm much much older than my colleague Joanna and has taken a bit of a bit more of a wisty winding Rd.

But I started in it and so I worked for a full service IT company right out of school and learned some really interesting skill sets there. Customer service being one of them.

But also took on a lot of.

Of of exposure to important concepts regarding databases and technology. Sort of in general.

I then transitioned into coaching Football League football throughout my college career and wanted to coach and found that ironically, just about every skill that I had in my IT space, I was able to leverage in my football career.

Football coaching career and then.

That gave me sort of an introduction, a loose introduction to higher Ed. Obviously doing the recruiting aspects and those sort of things were much more specific to the football environment, but but the ideas are the same, right? And so that brought me to a crossroads where I was really interested in sort of exploring.

A deeper engagement in higher Ed and it wasn't quite sure exactly where that.

Would land me, but as it turns out, the admission office is a perfect space, in particular an admission office that was implementing slate really brought all of my former skill sets to the table.

So within about a year or so of starting in my role as an admission counselor, I quickly turned into the primary slate person, which to date myself was priestly captain terminology.

But it was running the system and making it do all the things and and then that sort of brought me into a space of wanting to be able to explore helping others, and so the community forums were a great forum into that.

For me and, and that's what sort of brought me into this idea of broad scale consultancy. So that was a little bit of my background.

And I will let Jess share her experiences.

Great so hi everyone again. Jess Ricker I use she her pronouns and I'm at Wellesley College and I started my admission career as an admission counselor at Connecticut College, and I grew tremendously because I always said yes when asked to take on something new. So I ended up doing a bit of everything in my first five to eight years student workers, pubs and communications transfers international recruitment.

That's how I got the gigantic fan behind me. I'll tell you some other time how I shoehorned that into my suitcase travel strategy. I volunteered to help the operations team with App data entry. So imagine mail bins with paper applications that we would key into the banner system and became more familiar with the work that folks were doing. So you know, I was asked to help test out our common app configuration just because people knew I was willing to lend a hand.

So in the summer of 2008, when our director of admission and Information Systems left, I was asked to fill in during the interim and I hadn't imagined myself in a role like that previously, but that summer proved that I had the skills and interest to do that kind of role.

And I realized I'm not a systems person, but I'm a systems thinker. I think about policy, process, people and possibility, and I try to creatively align them to meet goals and make the work more efficient.

So let me be clear, unlike my colleagues here today, I don't know any sequel, but I liked logical thinking back at the the time in 2008. I could use Excel pretty well and I got the gist of this Microsoft Access training that human resources offered that had a sample database called Girl Scout Cookie sales, right? That was my intro to relational databases Girl Scout cookie sales. But what I really had going for me was that I understood how our students experienced our systems, which wasn't much at the time.

And how our staff use systems.

And I learned how to translate that into system setups and processes, and I had an option at the end of the summer to keep the role, but I didn't want it. I wasn't ready to give up travel and to do this full time so Fast forward four years and the role opens up again and I moved into the role at that time and I realized I was maybe worried in 2008 I'd be pigeonholed, but really the person who left the role in 2008 who was a mentor of mine, Whitney Seoul when she left an 08, she became director of admission at Bowden, and then she.

Became Dean of admission at Bowden and now she's the VP at Penn and so I really started to see how much my slate my slate skills could lead in a lot of different directions. So when I moved into the role we had pretty limited systems at the time.

And I felt like I had to use duct tape to make them work. I really had to be a no person. It was. Yes, that's a great idea, but no, the system can't do it. And in 2014, when we implemented Slate, I could become a yes person. Yes, slate can do that, but did you know it could also do these other things as well? And it brought me so much joy to make the work easier, more manageable, and more strategic to listen for pain points and solve them to allow our team to focus on the truly relational.

Human aspects of what we were trying to do. So while my title was director of admission Information and Systems, I felt like it was really director of admission, Innovation, Right? Getting a chance to get involved and reinvent every aspect of of what we did. So I just know that I wouldn't have gotten into the Dean director role if it hadn't been for Slate. You know, I used to joke and sometimes still joke people only love me for my slate skills, but the skillful leadership of Slate is so much more than technology. It's not the tool.

Itself, it's how you use it and adapt it and leverage it. And I think the session today is to help all of you figure out how do you convey that in a meaningful way. If you want to move into a role that looks a little different than the one you have now, that's higher out of Jason. Or if you're working with a search firm that isn't familiar with how you use these soft skills and other skills to do really great, innovative work. So we're excited to have this conversation with you.

So we want to explore some questions and I'll ask my colleagues to come back on the screen and things that are in our heads about careers and flate and and how you can approach skill attainment and and all of that. And so I'm going to start with Dom.

If you can come on Dom back on the screen and ask you to get us started with what experiences as a slate captain moved your interests out of higher Ed into this higher adjacent world that we'll call it.

Yes.

So I'm am I on screen I believe I am, but I may not. OK, I am. My screen looks different mobile roll with it so.

Experiences well, it's interesting because there's certainly quite a few.

I say that that it's a mixed bag, All in all, but.

I'll lean on a lean on some actually, that that I would say are very similarly aligned to just your your introduction and your thoughts.

Around.

Creating innovative ways to allow a system.

To support human process.

There were lots of well defined human processes established at my institution when I joined.

Right?

The systems prior to Slate did not necessarily support those, but rather the human process had to adapt to the systems.

I didn't know those systems. I hadn't worked in those systems. I wasn't confined to those restrictions.

When I when I first stepped into the role.

But but instead just understood slate and understood what we were, what we had the capacity to do in its infancy, and I should. I should preface this that this is 2012, so slate was.

Really, a shell of what it is today in terms of features and functionality.

But but nonetheless it was leaps and bounds above beyond.

Systems that were that were formally being used, and.

It was there was a really interesting conversation, so things like talking to our operations team who are responsible for processing documents, and 80% of it was coming in by mail, 10 percent. 20% of it was coming in through email, right in the next year it was 40% coming in by email. Electronic documentation.

And and and helping that group navigate through what was effectively significant changes to their world.

Querying on information instead of rifling through files.

Helping them understand that their work.

Wasn't there there? Their best work wasn't typing on a keyboard.

Their best work was done where they could check automated things that we were building out.

And so starting to make efficiencies create efficiencies in our human processes.

And having a system that could support that.

That was one of the really big things.

That I found I also.

Really got into the forums.

And so in the beginning there were there were slate conversations that were being had with the half a dozen, two dozen, five dozen schools that were in Slate. But really a confined group of people around how to do things, how to create different structures, and how to how to set up different pieces and parts of the system.

And then the question started flowing. So how do you do this? How do you do that in those very early days there were only a handful of people that could actually answer those questions outside of the Technovision staff.

And and so I just kind of locked into that, and as I was able to answer questions, more questions came and I was able to answer more questions and that that was a linchpin for me. I realized very quickly that if I could help another person attain their goals.

I was being filled. My cup was being filled.

And so whereas a lot of times there's a.

There's an energy drain that happens in the day to day.

I was finding a refill in helping other schools.

That was primarily my interest going forward and in my later days at my former institution.

I would find my spell self spending my lunch hours my off hours in the forums.

Trying to answer people's questions trying to get at.

A better way?

And, and that's what ultimately sort of led me toward this idea of I wanted to either do more with my institution.

Taking slate into other departments, taking Slate into other areas.

Or I wanted to work with more schools.

And so my natural inclination was to start to work through.

Extending slates usage into other parts of our campus.

That was in 2017. It wasn't really well established as a system that was broadly used outside of admission.

And frankly, there there was a. There was a, I would say a resistance, but a hesitancy to use this admission tool for other offices.

So that uphill climb was one that this school just wasn't ready yet and and. And that's everybody. Kind of works in their own space in time, right? So we just went to.

Started to get into sort of like an enrollment process. Toes, right? We're dipping toes in the water.

And and I was just ready like I just got to a point and was like it's time.

And and an opportunity came right. And so when those opportunities come, you explore them, and that's what sort of led me into.

What I'll call higher adjacent, which is our sole focus, is locked into higher Ed.

But it don't work at an institution. I work with institutions to help them all raise their.

Raised their boats. I'm a big big proponent of rising waters raises all ships.

So for wherever I can, I'm gonna jump in and I'm going to help move help the school advance in whatever direction they're they're attempting to go.

So now that I've kind of bored you all with my story about some experiences, I'd really be interested Joanna to learn a little bit about your experiences and how you sort of navigated in and around.

Getting into some, perhaps outside of higher Ed experiences.

Yeah, as I mentioned, I built an instance for Shady Grove Fertility, which you'll all note is not an institution, so I had started out working at Washington College on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. A tiny little school, and while they were implementing slate, I was learning about it as a counselor and understanding how to build trips and learning about how to build my own queries and.

Different things like that and and how the system worked with students and what I noticed about it at that time was that it really helped students connect with the right people at the right time. And I really believe in right fit for the right student and slate really helped us do that work through various avenues in the system. There's a lot of opportunity to really hone in on the right students for your institution and the right fit.

And I had the opportunity to be a part of Shady Grove fertility egg donor program, and when they were looking for someone to step in and work on their recruitment efforts, I jumped at the opportunity to do it because I thought it would be new and exciting and different, which you know higher Ed can be very fun, but I wanted to try something new. So joined that team and quickly realized that the CRM

they were using was old and outdated and it had some challenges and I was. I felt like I couldn't do anything for those egg donors that I wanted to do. I couldn't track my interactions with them. I couldn't see different information about them while I was on the phone with them. I it was so hard to get to that information that I suggested at the time that maybe we would use slate which sounded absolutely wild.

Of the folks I was working with and what I learned about suggesting something completely out of the realm of possibility for the people you're working with is that they definitely think you're crazy at first, but I actually had the the fortune to talk to Alexander on the phone myself and the way I pitch it to him was I said applicants or applicants and egg donors can do the same things that high school seniors can do. So why don't we give this a shot and the rest is kind of history so?

I spent a lot of time in the system and working directly with techno olutions, building it from the ground up and ultimately learned being the captain there that I love implementations. I love to see a school or an instant or another institution think.

Through their processes in a creative way so that I usually say that slate is not the Plato, but slate can sometimes be the container, so learning how to shape your processes within the new system, learning how to, you know, give, give some thought to you know what can we now do differently? And so when I was finishing at Shady Grove, I realized that higher Ed really is the place I want to be because.

To be able to help institutions implement and do their best work. What I really needed to do was go back to higher Ed so I will tell you. I'll admit I'll admit to this group of people that I was a little burnt out. Slate had been a lot of work for a lot of time and so I ended up taking a job with career development at the Business School for Hopkins completely not working with Slate at all. So I learned to use some other systems and then there was an opportunity to do some.

Part time work for the the grad instance there and then the opportunity arose at the undergraduate institution and I was doing full-time slate work, and through that realized that implementations are what I really love and that I wanted to help institutions do good work through slate and do their best work. And I realize that starts a lot of the time with an implementation or a modified implementation, or even sometimes just stepping into a project where you can help.

Kind of what Dom was saying in the forums. Help give advice and things like that. So I happened to know a few folks at RHB and was very lucky to be a part of their coop. And while I was doing some part time work for RHB I realized this is what I really wanted because I knew that implementing systems could be really special. If you can do it across the community. This community is very special. You all know that so it's really.

Really wonderful to work with different institutions and see what they're doing and how they're doing it, and what we can do to be creative in the system. So I think that that's that's really what I realized was that when you're being creative in the system, it's really so exciting to be able to do it in higher Ed. As fun as it was to be outside of higher Ed. It's so much more fun to help institutions really do their best work for students. So yeah, now that I've talked a little bit about my non traditional experience, I would love to know.

From Jess, what experiences as a slate captain affirmed your interest in being a Dean or director and what prepared you for that?

Yeah so.

You know, I really think that.

Slate gave me a lot of soft skills, right? So as I think about my experience right and I can kind of futz with sequel a little bit now. But you know, you and Dom having a bit more of a technical background than I do right? I really think about the these soft skills. So here. Here's some examples. I mean innovation, right? I learned never be afraid to blow it up and start over, especially if something isn't working. And that sometimes it's really a mistake to just do something the way that you've always done it.

And so, learning how to reverse engineer to start with the end goal right the desired outcome and to work backwards from there right to do an environmental scan, see where the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities are and really build out. So it means Slate was made for innovation and reinvention, and as a tool it really separates those from innovate from those who just replicate right? So that skill and being able to innovate and do that is really important in the work that I do.

Change management and managing expectations so it requires a lot of psychological trust, right for others to go along for the ride. When you change who, what, when, where, why, and how, and sometimes change all of those at once when you make a change and so you have to learn how to influence up down, left, right and sideways. I mean Slate getting involved in everything I was involved in all aspects of the work. It gave me a seat at the table with senior leadership.

But change can be hard because what it seems like you're asking at first. Maybe a process change. What it really is. Oftentimes is adaptive change. You're asking people to think about and engage in the work in an entirely different way, and that's not a comfortable feeling for folks right to really veer outside of what they're used to, and so it can take time to earn more trust and to create a culture that adapts to change. And you know people would say, oh, Jess has another crazy idea, but eventually they got excited.

When that happened and not like so worried.

The other thing I think I want to say is that I learned to be strategic and discerning about what I what I would build out.

And I'm famous for saying, just because you can doesn't mean you should. I really and truly believe that simple can be strategic, and sometimes it's more sustainable. And here here are things I think about now as a dinner director when someone says, Oh my gosh, they can do this and this and this and they want to do all the things I'm like, great, yes you can build that, but can you maintain it right? Do we have the support? The structure, the staff and the time to maintain everything that we build?

And people oftentimes forget that when they're asking for more and more, what if we have to pivot and change without notice? You know, like March of 2020, during the pandemic, we had to reinvent how we did everything, or what if next summer. The Supreme Court ruling upends the use of race and ethnicity and application review. Are we ready? Our processes nimble enough to adapt right quickly and and in a way that can help us still meet our goals? And then the other thing I'm famous for saying is, what if I win the Lotto and I buy a house in a warm.

There be an island and leave you all behind, right? How easy would it be for someone else to come in and to maintain that you know people are always poaching other great slate captains nowadays, and there's a lot of reshuffling is what you've built sustainable, so I think those are all really important things for for folks to think about as you think. OK, I'm not just learning how to use the rules editor, I'm like developing all these other skills that can be used in higher Ed.

You know, in high rated Jason right, in leadership roles and and right when you're involved in sleep, you're a leader in some way, shape or form. Even if it's not like by title, right? So it's really reflecting on how you're going about that work.

So I think I'm on deck for answering, asking the next question.

Or is it? Yes is it me?

OK, good.

Oh, I think I'm going to ask this question. Yeah, so my question and I'll start with Dom is what advice would you give yourself 5 to 10 years ago when you started working in sleep?

OK, we're going to need to back that up a little bit farther than 10 here.

You know, I this question is is an ever evolving question answer for me because.

Five years ago I would have said do it all, say yes try everything. Go go, go, go go, go.

OK.

And today I'm very, very much more in line with Jesse's comment about. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And and and I saw in the comments, should right now is actually a very well put sort of addendum to that statement.

It's and it's for those exact reasons I could build you a portal that does everything under the sun and the 2nd that a bad piece of data goes into that query and it blows the query up. You're going to have to find it.

Will you be able to? And that and I mean those are the kind of questions now that I'm pressed with. OI think some advice that I would give now is.

Take time.

And and time is.

Isn't always something that's afforded to us. It's something we need to take, but take time to learn.

Take time to do.

And take time to help.

Those things will will advance your skill set.

Whether you want them to or not, but it's not just going to be about learning slate.

It's going to be about having helping, like helping others is going to help you understand better when somebody says, I, this is my problem.

Really what they're saying?

Because oftentimes it's this isn't working well. Is it because there's no power?

Or is it because there was a configuration miss, you know misconfiguration or a very different sort of approaches to a resolution?

And so, as you're able to have a little bit of a better set of questions.

To ask, you're going to be able to provide better solutions.

And that.

Understanding what how the system works and you know so doing the things and trying the different thing I can. It just is a really short story and I'm full of them, but just a really short story. Most of my stories are not short. This one is.

When when I first got into Slate, the first thing I did was was made sure I could get a laptop that I could take home.

Because for about two years.

My every weekend Saturday morning.

Was getting in and learning how to build queries in slate.

And then it was how to build queries in query beta.

And then it was how to build queries and configurable joins.

And that was in two years, right? But it's two years each time those things come around, right?

The the the the taking time to do something that's important to you.

Right is where it actually sets in.

And those are the kind of things that that I think of today.

I've always a big person about asking questions. I ask questions. Everybody should ask questions. Alexander should ask questions.

I think he does to. To be fair, I think he does. His questions are a little bit more evolved than mine, but.

The idea is, if we're not asking questions, we're not growing.

And if we're not growing.

We're not moving toward our next goal.

And so I think asking questions are a really big one and the last one really quickly that I'll offer is.

To be observant and patient.

We can't all become slate captains on day one.

Unless you were previously and you have some experiences but.

You can grow into it, you just have to get there.

And you need to be a little bit patient to get there.

But being observant and being patient.

Allows you to express those options like express the.

The skill unstated skill.

That will help someone else understand that you're ready to move into that role.

So it's one thing to see a problem.

Right to find it I call them opportunities for growth.

It's one thing to observe that.

It's another thing to be observant of that.

Because in the critical thinking process that happens through the observation.

You start to develop a solution.

And sometimes those solutions can be.

Pretty complex, you know. A solution in Slate can take in lots of different modules and you can do lots of different fun things.

Sometimes they could be quite easy.

And sometimes it's just a matter of getting the right person in the right room in the right environment.

Where you can actually kind of.

Not just here the issue or see that sort of problem at its face.

But to dig into it and to try to unpack it and to sort of work through what it means to Jess. I love the comment about about it being adaptive change.

Right?

Because typically that's where our you know. That's where there's opportunities sort of present themselves.

So, but I'll pass the question along so. So what do you think about just about the advice that you might sort of want to convey to yourself from a time gone past?

Yeah.

You know, I I love slate so much in my my time at Conn College in fact I was pregnant with my second child and there were lots of jokes that I should name the baby Slater and and just all kinds. You know all kinds of other, you know things like that. I really did love it but I I can now love slate from Slate. A slightly different you know, position right that I hold in the office and and have a slightly different relationship with the tool so you know, I think I love slate.

So much at my previous institution, I probably missed out on really helping a lot of other folks get as much slate, knowledge and expertise as as they could. And so, right, you want to be careful about having all of your slate eggs in one basket, right between the great reshuffle and lots of turnover? And I think in my role now, I think a lot about succession planning right? There are lots of different reasons why folks will move on and move up.

Especially if they're really great, someone else is going to poach them, right? So what I think about now is really trying to build out slate skills while still having like the bumper bowling lanes so that people can't accidentally do something they shouldn't, right? So there is a balance there, but thinking about how slate knowledge and growth because it's so essential for higher Ed, really with how pervasive slate is as a tool, but you know these skills can be used in other realms.

As well, and so as we reorganized a little bit last summer, I found myself in a position where I had a a more entry level salary for a slate role and I kind of had to work it and really convey to folks right? Because great Slate folks command a really great and appropriate salary. But you know, a more assistant director level person that this could be a seat at the table for how strategy and innovation work.

How to think critically and differently about the work. How you could use Slate as a platform for launching a career in leadership and lots of other things right? And so you know, it's it's. It's been a journey of trying to.

You know build up right and we maybe we're a farm team right now, but we're we're doing pretty well with that farm team, right? That we're building up. So I mean Slate is worth investing in and investing time for other people to get to know the tool right? And to build documentation as you go, right? I think that's another thing that, like Dom said about investing and learning new tools. Having some documentation that you can leave behind or leave for others. And so I just really think that it's important for everyone to develop slate skills at this point and

that would be a big piece of advice, right? That I would have offered myself when we first implemented slate was to not be selfish with the slate, but to share it.

So Joanna hindsight for you from 5-10 years ago.

Yeah, I think what Dom said about asking questions is probably the big one for me. Asking questions of everyone and everything. So getting clear ideas about processes, understanding where people are coming from because the change management with slate is just as important as the system doing what it's supposed to do. That's actually the big one for me is be focused on the change.

Management as well as how much fun the system can be. I got really wrapped up in how cool slate is. I too love it a lot. T shirt bag water bottle, you name it. I'm a I'm a big slate fan, but I got really wrapped up in how cool it is and what it can do and I think I forgot. In some spaces where you really do have to sell it a little bit, you have to talk about what slate can do for the users who might not know what Slate is doing.

At the time, so I think that that focusing on the change management as well as the exciting things that slate does would definitely be my. My main piece of advice to myself for sure, and I think that now that I'm on the adjacent side, I would say that listening is so important listening for those problems, listening for you know what might be the struggle of an institution just listening and and really understanding what's going on on different campuses is definitely important.

So yeah, that I think you guys you guys said a lot of really great ones so I didn't have to. Didn't have to share too much there you you you hit you hit some good points.

So I I'm curious, I and I'm sort of. I'm trying to observe the the chat a little bit and we're starting to get some questions that are related to to my question, which is really about how do we.

I'll, I'll take it as sort of let's go round Robin with this a little bit because I know that we're we're gonna run up short on time. I imagine getting into this a little bit, but what are some of the? What are some of the ways that we can convey that we're ready or that we're?

Express ability to express to leadership.

Of set opportunity or unset opportunity that we might be interested in, I'll leave it open, but I just this is a sort of curious space and it's obviously one of the big topics for today's conversation.

A little bit U.

You know, so I would start with saying yes, express interest right? You know, let folks know that you're available to lend a hand or that you're interested in learning more about us.

A colleague who went off to grad school last year but.

She said, you know, I kind of like reports. I'd like to learn a little bit about more, more about reporting and at that point I was doing the bulk of the reporting work and it was just exciting to sit down and to say, OK. Claire was her name. Claire like? OK, go try to build a report that does this or what question she. She worked on a team that managed events. What questions do you have about the events right? What do you want to know? What would be useful, right and and just try to teach her how to use the tool to get someplace.

With the program that she worked on and to let her go out and.

You know, give it a try. See if she could build, you know and use the right filters to isolate the right population to make the report and reports you have to really think about what you want before you start building, because otherwise, yes, see. There's the head nodding, you know, so you know, I think just saying yes and showing an interest in a curiosity is sometimes enough. Sometimes you have to be a little bit more assertive right? In showing in showing your interest so you could be proactive with data. I mean data is a huge thing that people.

How you nowadays but not just can I build a rapport but.

You know that you see the connection of the dots. What do I know? How do I know it? Can I really trust it? Is their data integrity in it? And if I can trust it, what do I do with it? And they think you know you could you can dabble on that. Probably all on your own. And if you hit like you know a gold nugget of great insight, right? Bring that to a team and offer it up. I just know when I have staff who want to do more, it's hard to carve out time, but at the same time when they show some interest.

When they say yes, I want to learn more right? That can be that can be a way to signal and then all of a sudden in my mind I'm thinking Oh well what? What else can we like? You know help you learn and grow into.

Yep.

That's awesome I doing.

I want to respond, but I'll leave it to you first. If you have anything you want.

The learning aspect is the biggest one for me. I always said I don't know everything, but I'm willing to learn and I think that that is the attitude that you have to go into it with. You know it. It definitely. When I came to RHB, one of the things I said was I was really excited to learn from Dom. So you know I was excited to be on his team and and learn from him. So I think it's it's also about you know can you can you understand where you're where you are going and where you want to be?

By learning new new pieces of the system as they change and grow because they will right things, things change and so you have to also be nimble in, you know, do you can you dedicate time to learn? And if you can't, you know can you advocate for yourself to say hey, if I learn these new skills? These are the things we could do. So yeah, I think learning for me is the big one. Yeah, being open to it.

I would echo that and it was exactly where I was going to go is the.

I've often come across folks who.

The issue isn't acumen or capacity or capability.

It's in willingness.

And for those who are interested in moving into a data centric environment, expression of that willingness.

Right, maybe it is a little bit of time outside of the schedule and I'm not promoting like everybody working 100 hours a day like that's just not right. I do. That's not right. The but the larger point is, is that you know it was a say yes mentality. It was a willingness to try something new or to reinvent something that that was the one thing at my former institution. I was always, they're like, well, this is how we do it. Why?

Because this is how we do it.

Why like going through the actual exercise of? Why do we do what we do?

And a perfect example, why do we ask the questions on our application that we ask?

Well, because we have to ask them for whom.

Is it part of our decision making process? Is it for another department? Perfectly good reasons?

Yeah, yeah.

But if you don't have a good reason, you shouldn't be asking the question, and those are the kind of things like that. Why questioning the and the willingness to sort of dig in.

I think is is some of the the the best unstated.

Expressions of interest in growth and show the leadership right. It's showing. Not saying, I think that's really a critical part to it.

Yeah.

All right, I'm going to jump in here and say we've got about 12 to 13 minutes left in our session and we want to take time for the questions that have been rolling in, so I'm going to interrupt you here.

We've actually had several questions that you may have answered already with some of the things that you've talked about, but I'm just going to throw them out there if you want to give some specific answers to them. So several people put in questions with their registration asking about slate certification processes. If there are free classes available, what's the best way to organize a strategy to learn what slate has to offer and how you might recommend?

Quantifying that either for yourself as your stated skills, or when you're looking to hire people, what would you be looking for in terms of slate skills? That's kind of a lot of things, but I think they all kind of go together.

I would well so one for the certification part. I probably would pass that back to you.

So if if there if there are any more formalities around that, I things have been teased over the years, but I don't know if there are necessarily anymore formalities to that.

That's that's actually a great point. Umm, we do have a couple of. We have several paid courses actually that anybody, if their institution is willing to. You know, let them go through that course. They are welcome to take it to learn various aspects of slate, and there are certificates at the end of it that you can print and give to your supervisor. Put up on your wall, you know whatever you want to do with that. So in that sense it is. There are certificates related to those courses.

We also have the Community moderator program, which I'm sure you guys are. I know the three of you are familiar with, but our community moderator program is Slate users, not people at technicians who work in the Community forums because, as has been said, the the community really is such a strong element of slate learning slate and learning. What slate can do, and that's even come up a couple times in the chat with people.

Talking about Facebook groups and finding mentoring and things like that. It's the slate community, and so the community moderators in those forums are a really big way to get that.

I don't really want to say level of certification, but that kind of thing that people are asking about where it's a recognized thing that technicians reaches out to people to say hey, would you be willing to be a community moderator because you help people and you know what you're doing? And you've shown that and those would be the the things on our end that we would say, you know, here's what we have to offer in terms of something that can demonstrate your skill set.

That's great, I can say for.

And I'm seeing a lot of it sort of flow through there are there are.

Large groups communities sub communities of the slate community in Slack and Facebook and obviously in the forms in the community, chats that you can draw on, but I would say once you're.

Once you've developed to a certain point, it's not about drawing on.

It's about providing 2.

And and so as you start to get to those points, people will see it. You don't even need to tell people they'll see it right. The higher Ed for as big as it is. It's a very small community.

And and and and. Do you think that?

That in large part.

People like Jess and and and leadership. They're always looking.

They're always looking for that succession plan right the next.

Step in institutions evolution.

In terms of other courses and coursework outside of the learning labs and and and.

Other developments that the technicians has.

Are OHB has some some?

Posts some some webinar. Previous webinars. We're constantly sort of developing new content with webinars to just get out into the community to help people understand how to use certain pieces of tool or how to think about certain pieces of the tool.

So those kind of things are out there.

They may not necessarily be right in in the spaces that you're looking in terms of like directly in in community forums, and those sort of things, but but certainly the the preferred partnership organizations are going to have some things and and and for what is worth, we've got.

You know our our our aspiration is to be able to be able to do that right to be able to have tools, learning tools for the community to continue to expand and grow with.

So, so those are out there, more of them are coming. We're constantly sort of trying to think of ways to continue to educate the community and and keep innovating ways to educate right the.

The entire community.

Great, thank you. We've got a question here.

About

any advice or suggestions for managing up, or maybe just communicating with your current leadership, a couple of things, one of them being that going back to I think it was just talking about if I win the lottery and I'm this late captain everything's going to be OK. You're you, you guys are going to be OK and then also.

If you communicating with leadership in advising them which.

Which vendors they should work with in terms of having to integrate all of that with slate and vendors that do or don't have an out of the box integration with slate?

Yeah.

I'll I'll jump first into this one and I I did put a bit of a response in the in the chat to the question that Kristen Allen had asked. You know, I.

I've seen leaders who totally get it, and I see leaders who don't get it, but like.

There's there's a pie and you can send spend a certain proportion of time on each, but you can't add 10 hours to the day, and so while it can be challenging, one of the things I suggested in the chat is.

Well, here's how much time it would take to, you know, create a new integration for this vendor who doesn't have one prebuilt.

Which would take time away from, you know, these other two or three things which is most important, which is most strategic to you, and it can take a little bit of time to to influence up and to guide a leader to to see that they're going to have to make strategic choices. But we are. The bottom line is it's we're in a world where, especially right, as we all think about. OK, now there's there's virtual and there's in person and there's the hybrid and people want to do and and and.

I want to do this and this and this, and for staff burnout purposes, right? For fiscal budget purposes.

The decision and hopefully a good leader, understands that sometimes it has to be, or it's this or this. So in my office we actually talk about the big rocks. Like if we're gonna fill up a jar and there's only so much space. Let's put the biggest, most strategic rocks in first, and then we can put in smaller rocks and then sand and so on and so forth. And you know the influencing up can be challenging to to stand. You know your ground there, but you know, having an opportunity or a regular meeting to talk about.

You know, here, here, here's my To Do List, right? Let's review where we are with each and which are the biggest priorities for you and a good leadership. Understand they're going to have to be choices that are made. And the other thing you can do is I put the chat go work for someone who understands Slate and is a slate leader. And who gets it right like this is me. Hardball like if we have more, you know openings in our in our staff, right? Like I love slate. We love the slate work. It's hard work that we all do right? Meaning our enrollment goals. But like go work with people who understand.

And who value how hard it is to juggle all of those things, right? I think that's the other part of this career trajectory conversation that we're having is, like you want to go someplace where you're valued where there's joy in the work, right? I'll get off my soapbox there, but.

Now that's brilliantly said brilliantly so I to the integration question I can answer just really quickly.

It's it's tricky, right? It's a for profit marketplace that.

Is innovating constantly? I mean that is technology right?

And and people were always gonna come out with new products that do very specific things that look really cool and slick and.

Man, if we could put that in, that would be fantastic.

99% of the time it can be.

The integration components are sometimes very complex.

There are.

There are companies that work in the middle and those companies, that's exactly what they do.

They work right in the middle, there are.

But but Slate is uniquely positioned with the ability to consume information from lots of different places and lots of different ways.

And and and I've appreciated that about the tool where most of the time we don't need the middle person.

But sometimes you simply do right. There are too many walls in the network that are required to be able to traverse, and you've got to get some IT help and you've got to get some other people involved, and that's that's where some customer service training came in. Because you can kind of massage some people, and because everybody's too busy. I mean, it's not like we're just sitting around waiting to do work.

If you can get them to see the benefit that's going to offload, maybe something from their plate.

Because you're able to do this thing that now they have to do.

You might get a win and and that's where so integrating is people integration and system integrations. Kind of all in the same time.

There are tools out there, there are lots of really wonderful vendors that work in that integration space. The creativity sometimes comes into play and I would say that's a space that I work in. A lot is just how do we go about doing this? Because maybe the most direct path isn't the best path.

But yeah.

Sorry, I don't want to interrupt, but we're about to run out of time here, so I don't want you to get cut off halfway through this will. This has been recorded. It'll be available in about a week and a lot of questions were answered in the chat, so feel free in about a week. Go back and check the recording and check that chat again for answers. If we didn't actually get to your question, but thank you all three of you, Dom Joanna. Jess. Thank you so much for this. This was fascinating for me and I'm sure for everybody else here and thank you.

And it's better.

Everyone who attended, we hope you enjoyed it and we look forward to seeing you at Summit in June.

Thank you all.

Likewise.

Hi everyone.

Bye.