Dear Colleagues:
February is an exciting month for our office, as the first “HR@UW Learning Cohort” launches later this month. After much planning led by Sarah Carroll in collaboration with a Visioning Team including several colleagues across campus, this exciting new initiative will be our pilot experience in our competency-based learning model. We have about a dozen people already involved, and there remain a few additional spaces if you want to do so! In addition, Josh Schwab is now launching a new “Intro to HR Technologies” series of three online modules, especially prepared for new HR and Payroll professionals on campus. This will allow new staff to immediately become acclimated to our dizzying array of resources and gain comfort navigating them before entering more formal training. Josh is also developing additional online training resources that you will be able to access in the next month or two, partnering with other OHR departments to make such training more accessible and sustainable.
We also continue to explore the value of supporting our varied communities of practice now serving the HR & Payroll communities. Sustained efforts by the Global Professionals Network, Payroll & Benefits CoP, HR Design/Academic Units CoP, and working groups on “Orientation of new HR Professionals” and “Implementing eTime” have yielded excellent insights and learning. A new group this month came together to explore the value of a learning community for Academic and Auxiliary units, and we will see if that makes sense going forward.
There are numerous other learning opportunities featured in this newsletter and appearing on the HR CoP Calendar. I encourage you to visit the calendar regularly… and to add events that you want your colleagues to promote and attend. Our efforts will only succeed through our collective investment in them… it is challenging, to be sure, when we have so many tasks to complete, but it is also an amazing opportunity for us to embrace.
Harry
(Oh, yes, I also want to welcome Spencer Young as Student Intern to the HR-CoP Team! While his work will be more ‘behind the scenes,’ he is already making valuable contributions to our efforts in ways that will become clear this month)