Student Employee Development Process: Improving IT Operations While Developing Student Professionals

Our vice president recently instructed our IT staff that "our primary job is not to 'get stuff done.' It is to MENTOR our students to 'live and lead.'" That is a sea change for our IT staff and has forced us to rethink much of how we do our work. We're actively looking for ways to give our students more "real-life" substantive technical and professional experiences to better prepare them for life after graduation. This is hard to do. Our "process" has grown out of research into how others have tried to effect similar change, and our own learned experiences. The SEDP is a step-by-step process to help our team identify tasks and responsibilities that can be shifted to students; training, resources, and accountability we need to get in place; and managing the transition in a way that helps the students to be successful. We learned hard lessons from assigning work to student employees who weren't sufficiently prepared, essentially setting them up for failure. We've also had some great success that has deeply enriched our students' educational experience and improved our department operations. Participants will learn a six-step approach for deliberately shifting meaningful technical and operational work to students—without sacrificing compliance, service quality, or stability—while turning student employment into a true capstone learning experience. We have used this process in IT and other campus departments, so the content is relevant to managers across higher ed.