paper -
89 Kicking It Up a Notch: Adding Spice to Your Student Training Program
Celisa
Mettler Manly, Cornell University
Does your recipe for success at the HelpDesk or in the
Labs include student employees? If your recipe seems to have lost its zest, you
might want to "kick it up a notch," as Chef Emeril Legasse would say,
by spicing up your student employee training program.
Even a good training program can become a left-over if
reheated year after year. This presentation discusses the challenges of revitalizing
a solid technical training program for student employees. Evaluation of the
training program at Cornell University was conducted on a session-by-session
basis in 1998, 1999, and 2000*, providing a quantitative basis for this
discussion.
Technical staff at the CIT HelpDesk successfully
redesigned their student employee training program in order to achieve the
following objectives:
* Prepare
new and returning staff to provide top-notch support from day one
*
Recognize the different learning objectives of new and returning
employees
* Improve
employee participation in training
*
Establish our expectation for professionalism
*
Integrate training with other IT units in order to consolidate costs and
effort
* Collaborate with service owners in developing
curricula
* Have
FUN!!!
This presentation will identify the specific challenges, as revealed in the program evaluation data, and the solutions that worked best at Cornell. This presentation will also show the evolution of the training program from a single track course for HelpDesk employees to a multi-tracked conference accessible to student employees throughout Cornell Information Technologies.