I was cheering when I read the announcement of the ACPA Credentialing Implementation Team. After spending a long time this year in my doctoral program reading the literature about “student affairs as a profession” and the quest for legitimacy, it’s about time that someone took the lead on either making credentialing a reality or forcing its death.

I have big dreams about the role that credentialing can play in our field and rather than spend these 550 words criticizing a process that hasn’t even started yet, please indulge me for a minute in exploration of three questions that are on my mind when considering the credentials idea.

Is the master’s degree in student affairs/development/administration the only route into our field?

My answer is no, but my answer is also based on my belief that if our profession seeks to advance its identity as a discipline and set of core competencies we need to reconcile conversation.  A credentialing program will never replace the level of inquiry expected of graduate study, but it could add to the knowledge of someone with an M.B.A. who arrives to our field with a strong content understanding of leadership development from a business program.  With credentialing, that person can pursue a credential in student leadership education through a curriculum endorsed by our profession and arrive with both the content and the context needed to work in a leadership office.  In absence of the credential, I’m not as confident that this candidate understands working with college students.

Is the pre-service educational preparation supposed to last a lifetime?

A couple of projects so far in my doctoral program have explored professional education and the attempts at the scholar/practitioner balance as well as the attempts at creating professional development experiences on campuses in light of travel funding cuts.  Long story and long papers short – we haven’t figured this out yet.  I think a credentialing program will be an opportunity for us to pick up where our graduate programs leave off.

Given multiple points of entry into the field, some of our educational backgrounds have nothing in common. With a new set of core competencies for our field we now have a viable “road map” to our standards on the job.  There now needs to be a common framework for how to get from the standards for entry into the field to the standards for mastery of the competencies that can be consistent across campuses.

Could credentialing support those who want to change functional areas?

As our field becomes more and more specialized, it seems harder and harder to switch functional areas after you have accumulated some level of experience.  I envision a technology credential for someone working in a residence life position or a diversity education credential for someone working in a campus center management position.  In both of these scenarios, there is relevance for skills in both the current and future areas of work. On the resume, the addition of the credential tells me as a hiring manager that the content of that person’s background is more than just a passing interest or a short-term committee role.

As ACPA’s team begins its exploration of the idea, what questions do you have regarding the process?

Wow, the opening of school season is pretty interesting.  From about the middle of August, the panic of preparing for the new academic year sets in in a variety of forms.  Some seem like they are preparing for opening of school the minute the graduates cross the stage.  Others make it seem like no work gets done over the summer and we cram it all in two weeks before semester classes begin.

The dialogue during busy seasons on campus is always fascinating to me.  It always seems to twist back to a comparison of who is working hard versus who seems to have nothing going on. I see the “Busy Card” get played left and right in various interactions and I cringe every time I observe the “one up-ing” that seems to emerge when people talk about workload.  We’ve all been tempted to play the Busy Card before. I’m guilty of it too.

I’d like to alter the dialogue during the next round of Busy and focus on how to make the campus environment a kinder place for collegial relationships.  To do this, these are three things I’m going to try to remember when Busy comes around again and I hope you will join me!

1. Busy is an explanation, not an excuse.

If you fall short on something you said you would do, nothing about Busy excuses dropping the ball.  If you figure out that you missed something, just be honest that you have fallen short on something and either renegotiate a new deadline or just take care of it.  The busy pace of the opening of school wasn’t really a surprise, was it?

2. Busy is relative.

All of us have varied degrees of ability to balance multiple projects and handle multiple tasks.  When the person you believe has four things to do all year plays the Busy Card, I know it’s hard to swallow when you are tearing your hair out at the idea of another 15 hour day.  Temptation may be to try to “one up” this person, but we have to understand that the comparison game means nothing.  This person who chooses to share frustration with you is also struggling and struggling in their own way with their own definition of being overwhelmed.

3. Busy is our situation to manage.

Depending on our roles and functions on campus, workload may emerge as much from our own creation as it is from our institutions.  My colleague Michael Miller and I surveyed SSAO’s and campus activities professionals for a workshop presentation about work/life balance.  We found that SSAO’s and activities professionals have a difference of opinion on where the source of responsibility for workload might be.  Our SSAO’s were citing the individual activities professional as primarily responsible for their own workload and the activities professionals were more frequently citing supervisors and institutional expectations.

If we are honest with ourselves, we do get to make a lot of decisions about our work.  Whether our zones of responsibility are broad or very specific, it’s a rare case where a student affairs professional makes absolutely no decisions. Did you really need the hand-tied ribbons on the Convocation programs?  Did you really need that new outdoor concert you added this year to Move In Weekend?

Let’s think about what kind of campuses we could create if we instead focused on managing our own lives instead of critiquing what others are doing (or not doing!).  If we could focus on being the best versions of ourselves and our own departments, I think a more balanced work life may be closer within reach.

Can you share anything you’ll do differently next time “Busy” rears its ugly head?

I had the great opportunity to present with my friend and colleague Michael Miller of Fun Enterprises at the NACA Northeast Regional Conference about a topic that was near and dear to both of our hearts.  It emerged from a conversation one day about how it took major life events to give us both perspective on the idea of balance.  For him, it was a goal of losing 100 pounds and for me it was becoming a parent.  For both of us, we talked about how we hoped that our colleagues and the newer professionals we both mentored wouldn’t ever get to the point where only a major life event would be what would get life’s priorities in check.

We prepared a session on the dreaded “Work/Life Balance” topic. We decided that the NACA public probably didn’t only want to hear our stories and that we had had just about enough of the hundreds of “here’s how I did it” panel sessions about work/life balance.  We also decided that we wanted to have some “tough love” conversations about some conditions facing campus activities professionals.  We were curious about whether the state of the union was because of “the field” or whether it was something we were creating ourselves.

The answer… survey time!

We created a survey that yielded information from 59 respondents who were campus activities professionals at varying levels of experience as well as senior student affairs officers.  We asked them to answer a survey that listed conditions that campus activities professionals believe challenge the idea of work/life balance.  Each statement asked a respondent to assign a “source of responsibility” for that challenge.  For example, for a statement of “I miss family commitments due to work obligations,” a respondent had to choose whether the cause of this condition was from the individual, the supervisor, the institution, the campus activities profession, or the student affairs profession as a whole.

The survey taught us a few things about work/life balance, but it also showed us a few things about “managing up.”  Talking to supervisors about work/life balance challenges is something that truly takes a knowledge of communication as well as a knowledge of your supervisor’s ideas about you and your workload.  Over the course of my next few blog posts, I’m excited to share the survey results with you and talk more about what we discussed in our session.

To start, let’s talk about managing our calendars.

For those of you who find your calendars nearly overflowing with one-on-one meetings with student leaders, we asked for assignment of responsibility for the condition of “I need to have weekly one-on-one meetings with the student leaders that I advise.”

56% of the overall respondent group said that the individual is responsible for that condition.  This means that many in our survey group believe that you are the one who decides that this is necessary.  When the senior student affairs officers were looked at separately, 65% of them assigned responsibility to the individual, with the rest responding for the campus activities profession or the student affairs profession as a whole.  Some campus activities professionals believed their supervisors were the ones responsible for determining the need for the 1 on 1 meetings, but none of the SSAO’s believed the supervisors or the institution had this expectation of campus activities staff.

When participants were asked what work/life balance issues were within campus activities professionals’ ability to change, one of our top four themes across response groups was “intentional use of time.”  From the outside looking in, many believe that we could do a better job with choices we make about how we spend our time.

What can we do with this information?

If you’re at your wits’ end with your calendar, talking to your boss about your large number of required 1 on 1 meetings may not be the best start as they may not agree with you that it is a required part of your work week. Instead, it’s time to take control.

Summer is a great time to think about planning your calendar for the fall.  If you’re feeling like there’s no time to get any work done because of meetings, start examining your standing meetings. Are these standing meetings needed weekly?  Are you the right person to be involved in these meetings?   This should inspire some critical thought about whether you really have to have that student group meeting at 9 pm on Sunday nights.  Sometimes you really do, but only after long and detailed discussion of every other possibility I hope.

So, do you feel you can take control of your calendar?  Or, do you let your calendar manage you?