URMIA Matters

Episode 29: Education Plan Updates & Future Professional Development

November 04, 2020 URMIA Season 1 Episode 29
URMIA Matters
Episode 29: Education Plan Updates & Future Professional Development
Show Notes Transcript

As the call for 2021 presentations goes out, host Jenny Whittington talks with Gary Langsdale, URMIA’s education manager, and Craig McAllister, URMIA board member and executive director of risk management at the University of Miami. They explain how the framework of core competencies will explicitly guide the selection of URMIA's professional development offerings for members and others in higher education risk management.

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Jenny: Hello everyone I'm Jenny Whittington URMIAs executive director and welcome to URMIAmatters, our podcast. So today I have two wonderful guests with me returning to the podcast. First I have Gary Langsdale, URMIAs education manager. Gary, will you say hello?


Gary: Good morning or good afternoon everyone.


Jenny: Thank you, Gary, and my other guest today is Craig McAllister from University of Miami . Craig, will you do the same? 


Craig: Hello everyone. 


Jenny: Awesome. So today we are going to be talking about URMIAs education plan and some tweaks we've been doing to it, the history of the education plan and we'll do a little bit it.. we’ll share some information about the call for presentations for our spring programming. So I'd like to start off with Gary talking about a little bit about the history of the education plans since you've taken it over and for all the podcast listeners out there, if you can just give a little history about what URMIAs education plan is and how we're using it.


Gary: Okay, thank you Jenny. So URMIA has an education plan that is designed to meet the needs of our institutional members to provide them with a thoughtful way of getting education about important topics that are related to the four competencies that URMIA has put together that are important for higher ed Risk Managers. The education plan was developed first by Glenn Klinkseik back in the teams in the two thousand teens, which is longer ago than it sounds like. In any case it’s been around a number of years, but we are working hard now to tie the plan, which is to provide adequate members educational resources to these core competencies and there are four core competencies. One is technical skills for Risk Managers, second one is strategic management skills, third is inclusive leadership and the fourth is organizational engagement. So one of the things that we've done is forecast programs that fit each of these four core competencies so that Risk Managers will have a rounded set of information that's current that's presented that they could take a look at and make and emphasize any areas where they think that they’d like to hear more or could use some refreshers. We are in the process of changing the Regionals- this is the silver lining to a dark cloud of COVID, that it gives us an opportunity to take a look at the spring conferences and we're going to make them themed around these four core competencies, generally. So there will be four sets of educational sessions that are timed, but spread out a little bit, we don't want to jam everything into a day or two it'll be spread out a little, but we're looking for presentations that will feed these competencies so that perhaps in February, and I’m making this up, somebody might be interested in technical skills and the one in March might be more towards strategic management and so on so that Risk Managers can hear more and the affiliate members can hear more about these various topics. Then we're going to build more presentations as we go that will in the future fill out the program of presentations over time so that the Risk Managers can keep fresh on their education.


Jenny: Thanks, Gary, that was great. And I know Craig from your perspective as a board member you watched the core competencies be shared with the membership several years ago and you've been managing or overseeing this part of the Strategic plan, will you speak to how the education plan is working for you?


Craig: Sure. When I joined the board in 2017, I was asked to chair the professional development committee and I've always found that for URMIA I consider that our true core, our core competencies. An institution is to provide professional development to our members, to really be that resource for higher education risk management. My thoughts have been that we take the core competency document that we developed and make sure that we had educational materials that matched up with each of those competencies and their sub content that goes with it for the headers underneath. So when we have taken the core competencies and Glenn had done quite a bit of work on this and Christine and now Gary, to take the core competency making sure that we have appropriate sessions at the conferences, but now expanding that so that our webinars, our podcasts and others, our virtual shows are able to provide the content that goes with that. It's really tying that all together ultimately so then when somebody looks for a risk and needs/wants education on that, it matches up with the core competencies that this all comes together.


Jenny: Thanks very much that was a great explanation. So I know that the core competencies, like Gary sad, are divided into those four quadrants that I know that we’ve tried to embed in all of our conferences to date and I know we just had a meeting earlier this week to talk about this kind of pivot plan for the spring 2021 conferences so I know that we are planning to launch the call for presentations that the membership is usually really supportive of and anxious to hear about so we are planning to launch the call for presentations on November 4th, so there will be specific guidance about which subjects we’re looking for. Now, Gary, I know specifically in the education plan the last iteration that I saw that I know you're, there are specific topics that you're looking for and I know we still have some in the pipeline that are being worked can you speak to that at all?


Gary: Sure. So, we have a number that are in the pipeline that we're hoping to push out between now and the spring sessions. We've got one that's coming up on the risk of virtual classrooms and labs. The presentation that we had earlier today, so the virtual labs is more of a technical risk management skill. Earlier today we had a presentation about managing the risks of emotional intelligence which is more about inclusive leadership, that core competency. We are working on one for the age aware risk manager- how to work with different demographics within your staff and your institution, which is more of an organizational engagement and we've got one coming on experiential education and one on traumatic brain injury and what's going on in the courts with the concussion litigation. So those are ones that we've got coming that fit one or another core competency but we are looking so frankly... I'm flexible. I’m anxious to see what people want to present and what they want to talk about that might fit this within the framework of these four competencies. Each competency has half a dozen sub competencies and we'll provide, as you mentioned Jenny, a little bit more guidance about that so the people can see and have it top of mind, but we're pretty flexible. I think that there's plenty of room for creative ideas about presentations that will meet the needs of our members.


Jenny: And I know um, on the call earlier this week, Craig, we had talked about you’ve been part of the the annual conference programming group for a few various years and we had, I believe the goal was at 50% of the each annual conference program that was the target, so 50% of the breakout sessions should be aligned with the education plan. Can you speak to that structure a little bit? 


Craig: Certainly, the, by providing content that matches up with the education plan we’re more of a guaranteed to have those topics covered but the 50-50 split is there also so that our members are able to provide the content that they would like to and also brings in for the hot topics of the day. Many times some of the best sessions we get are ones that come in at the last minute because they're covering that new risk, such as covid-19 and how everybody had to pivot on that starting in February and January last year. 


Jenny: Yeah, that’s a good point and I know as we have rethought of, reimagined the regional conferences in the spring, our target is to really have a program every week during the Spring months, so two will be focused on the core competencies, one will be focused on a hot topic, if you will, and then one will be focused on will be more of a COVID conversation style or a zoom or a breakout session so we can get together and have more of a roundtable discussion because URMIA is famous for our roundtable discussions and our members get so much out of it and I know Gary over the years you've led many a roundtable for URMIA, can you speak to some of the advantages of those round tables?


Gary: It gives everybody the opportunity to participate in a much more active way to feel like they're part of the conversation rather than just another presentation coming at them. I've always been a big fan of that or being able to ask a question in the middle of the discussion or make a comment. Some of the best conversations that I've participated in have had that very active component where even the facilitator of the conversation is learning at the same time that everyone else is about what's going on, the perspective from a large school, a small school, a religious school, a state-related… Everybody’s got a different perspective that bring very valid issues to the table in different aspects and thoughts about how to solve an issue. 


Jenny: And Craig I know you two have led, facilitated in some of these discussions over time and I think we all learned a lot through the the virtual annual conference that we just did. I had a lot of fun facilitating some of the breakout groups. Are there any topics that you think that we should be looking at based on any of your current discussions? I know we'll have some covid  conversation coming up on just the changing landscape. I know I've been part of many calls lately where it's just the amount of change and the amount of plans that you go through during a day, the amount of fire drills you go through a day can be pretty challenging. Do you have anything to offer about that ?


Craig: I want to echo what Gary was saying-  that some of the best conversations come out of the round tables and that's because there is that free flow of information and especially now we're all working virtually, the more we can come together in sessions like this is even more important for that sharing of ideas. We don't want to lose that connection that we have to our community. As far as you know topics for the future, topics for now I think that if we took any of our existing risks that we were concerned about and put the overlay of extra complexity from COVID on it, that we could have a really good conversation. I do think that the returned international travel will be an interesting topic. I think the continuing of research and how we do that with different types of protection will be an interesting topic and as I said,  just what is the new normal when we're back on campus. We still will have students, still will have faculty, we’ll still have guests and employees and patients and everything that goes with this, how will we have to change to operate in the new environment. 


Jenny: Terrific. I know one of the things we did talk about earlier this week was the education plan when Glenn shared it with a board all those years ago in the teens as Gary said. It really focused primarily on the annual conference, but I think in this day and age of virtual programming it's a great time to expand the education plan across all of our channels. So that is one change for the podcast and Craig will be a future podcast guest host for us, so thanks in advance for doing that Craig. So we're really trying to use the podcast to be a different way of getting out some programming and you know in a different format, so I really, I wanted to give a shout out to all the members listening that we will be launching this call for presentation but we are also looking for podcast material, we are always looking for insights articles of depth, we have lots of ways to share the great work that you guys are doing and we know you guys are tremendously busy right now doing great work and solving problems and we want to hear about it so this is just basically a shout out to everybody listening to not be shy, to reach out to any of us any board member any staff member if you have an idea for some content, like Gary said, we are open-minded and I think in this day and age where things are changing so so quickly we do have we have the ability to bring programming quickly to especially those round table discussions and we are going to be doing a series of those. So Gary and Craig, did I leave anything out? Any closing comments before we wrap this up? 



Gary: Well I, just to echo that we are neutral as to the mechanism of delivery. You mentioned more material by podcasts and insights articles and conversations and webinars, who knows what the next technology will be that we’ll adapt, but I think that we’re looking forward to providing, continuing to provide great information to our members to help them in their journey to help their institutions.


Craig: I just want to say that we’ll continue to remain flexible in how we provide our information. Risk managers need to do that, and URMIA certainly will.


Jenny: Yeah, I appreciate that. And I just wanted to say a general shoutout, URMIA is starting our membership renewal campaign, so we just want our membership to know how much we appreciate you, how much we look forward to your future years for URMIA and you’ll be getting lots of information from us over the coming weeks about the dues renewal process but we appreciate you membership and thanks so much to Gary and Craig both, that we really appreciate your time today and look forward to having you on another podcast in the future. Thank you guys, that’s it for URMIA matters this time.