EWS: Creating a Culture | Origin: ACCSC110
This is a general discussion forum for the following learning topic:
Preparing for ACCSC's Essential Workforce Skills Programmatic Certification -->EWS: Creating a Culture
Post what you've learned about this topic and how you intend to apply it. Feel free to post questions and comments too.
Culture is critical! It is like the blood in our system to keep us alive. So culture is huge to an organization's success. It carries the mission and vision, and it's the oxygen that allows for change and innovation. Without culture, one person is excited about change, but if the environment is rigid, then change and innovation goes nowhere. It creates resentment in employees, disregarding and opposing anything new, creating a lack of team effort or collaboration. To implement EWS, it must start within so that it can impact the students, thereby creating a culture where EWS is nurtured, evolving with changes and innovations, and creating a growth environment for both students and staff.
Get everyone onboard with importance and understand of what EWS is. Once the level of understanding is there a culture then can be formed. Allow each instructor to point out where and how they address EWS in their term. Once this foundation is created, it can bring about conversation of how and when to implement more opportunity to incorporate EWS.
That when we implement this we need to think about attitudes, perceptions, and capability.
Culture is massively important but arguably one of the hardest things to pin down. Culture is more than what you say, it's what you do each day and *what students see each day*. It is very easy to give lip service to the culture you'd like to have while actually engendering a lesser, more permissible culture.
We realized we have plenty of competing culture--emphasis ONLY on technical skills that doesn't call out where in our program we DO teach/value some core EWS, even among our staff first. So for us, framing language with staff and students (as Billy mentioned above--and not just giving lip service to an ideal that isn't being acted upon) and then calling out when we're doing it right is one step. Next, that we aren't recreating the wheel--we simply need to identify more explicitly what we do in the informal ways and call attention to how that is also key to building our students' career success. Mapping in detail is going to be both very helpful and very challenging.
Culture is the essence of a program and one of the greatest indicators of its success and longevity. If people are serious and committed, the mishaps that come will amount to very little in the long run because of everyone's devotion to the program working. Reminders of what our purpose for being here is can help us all refocus on what is important. That's the healthiest culture to foster: one of focus and priority.
Creating the culture you want to see, begins with an institution's leaders and their values. The more buy in from the top, the easier the transition will be.
Culture is defined as sharing our vision as a business to develop our staff to be more effective and put our customers first. Our ability to communicate our passion for education is how we will grow the business.
This module was very informative. I learned that EWS are important skills to be implemented in the classroom and at the organizational level as part of the culture of the workplace.
We've talked about "soft skills" ever since I started in career education in 1996. The idea of mapping EWS and aligning program level outcomes, course curriculum, and extracurricular activities is surprisingly new to me. It creates a way to systematically improve our delivery of essential workforce skills that are so crucial to our students' success. This is especially important for the younger students, who don't seem to bring that with them from their life experiences so far.
By learning and applying EWS I can enhance my effectiveness as a professional, contribute positively to my workplace culture, and position myself for long-term career success. These skills will not only benefit me professionally but will also contribute to my personal growth as well.
The key factors are attitudes, perceptions, and capabilities, which are not only an afterthought but an inherent part of an intervention process that must be nurtured, monitored, updated, and followed.
