Employee Degrees Data Issue Documentation

Issue Summary

One element of data required for Unified Accreditation is the highest degree attained by our instructors. The UMS is in need of ongoing processes for data gathering and review of this data. This workgroup will investigate the creation of communications to increase usage of the Faculty Center for self-service, as well as an annual review process to improve the data quality of the highest degree earned by instructors.

September 2021 Proposal Forum

Resources

• Employee Degrees proposal
• Proposal Forum Presentations Slides

Forum Notes

• Collecting info on degrees attained by employees through the years
• HR has process for reporting on the data that is entered in MaineStreet HR
• Needed especially for terminal degree info for non-tenure-track faculty
• NECHE also collects some staff degrees: librarians, advisors, & others
• Data is collected at time of application for employment and brought into MaineStreet; however, it is not updated unless specifically requested
• Self-service functionality currently exists in the Talent Profile tile (new in the last few years)
• Would like to request all employees take advantage of the self-service profile and update their earned degrees--with request maybe coming from Campus Leadership
• Would also like to have info on in-process degrees & create regular review of data quality
  • Identification of all terminal degrees in addition to PhD
  • Review based on timestamp of most recent review by employee

Comments & Questions

• New adjunct professors are going through Hiretouch, so should be able to be brought in from application.
  • If faculty has already entered terminal degree, annual notification could be a nuisance
    • The plan is to exclude from recurring communications individuals with a terminal degree already on file. More discussion regarding target audience & frequency is needed.
• Wondering if there is a simple button for no changes needed.
  • Being looked into with IT
• Wondering about list of degrees available to select in PeopleSoft being incomplete
  • This could be expanded
• Is there a way to ask them to add detail if their degree is basic or incorrect?
  • Yes, they can edit currently showing degrees.
• A forum participant said that two of their four degrees are not accurate and they came recently from HireTouch.
  • For this comment, we will need to look into the data feed with IT
• Keeping the field of study for the degree is also important. Faculty needs to have a terminal degree to be tenure track, but the field has to be in one the faculty is teaching.

Resources & Research