Part II: How Can We Better Train New Enrollment Staff?

By Aaron Basko, Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services, University of Lynchburg

I have a professional dream—to change the way training is done for new admissions counselors and financial aid staff. Maybe it seems lofty to impact an industry in such a broad way, but the need seems so obvious that I believe the opportunity is there.

My proposal is to create an enrollment academy to train new staff for the field. The academy’s task would be to equip aspiring admissions and financial aid employees with all the tools they need to immediately contribute to the success of an enrollment team.

Boot Camp Basics

Imagine being a director of admissions who could hire new counselors who would not need to be trained on territory management, or how to use a CRM, or how to make a financial aid call with a family. As a financial aid director, imagine being able to find fresh staff who were already familiar with federal regulations and knew the basics of packaging and verification. What if you could go to a list and identify trained staff who either lived in your area or were willing to relocate there?

This would revolutionize the hiring process for many enrollment operations. What now often takes months could be condensed down to a two-week operation. Sort the list for qualified candidates for your area, view their pre-recorded interview video, read their instructor recommendation letters, and start your search process in the final phase. Of course, you could still consider candidates outside this system, but it would provide a baseline to efficiently start your applicant pool.

Helping Candidates

The academy system would also be a boon for job seekers. Currently, there is no path of entry for someone who wants to transition into enrollment with no related work experience. Here would be a way to demonstrate commitment to entering the field and to gain the skills necessary for success. Academy training would provide a way to get on the radar of all of the institutions within the job seeker’s desired geographic range.

But let’s say, as an institution, you like hiring your own graduates because you feel they better understand the experience students will have with your institution. You could easily identify promising candidates from your tour guides or office workers and enroll them in the academy. In fact, this would make an amazing perk to offer your senior guides. You would be fostering career development by helping them to achieve a credential and additional recommendations.

Better Job Fit

Having a training option like this would also prevent some heartbreak. It is really tragic to have to tell a young person in their first job, “This is not the right field for you.” You know you are damaging their ability to move successfully in another direction, but it happens frequently.

Wouldn’t it be better for candidates to know ahead of time? This is why many nursing and teaching programs try to build in experiential learning early in the student’s program. If you faint at the sight of blood or don’t relate well to children, it is far better to know that early.

Let’s face it, people don’t know what we do in enrollment. It is a mystery to many on campus, and I still have to explain it to my own family some days. Yet we expect that candidates will know whether working in this field will be a good match for them. By using the academy training program, candidates would get a first-hand look at what skills will be expected of them and whether those are the skills they want to use.

Candidates would receive coaching about how to work within an enrollment team, what a supervisor will expect from them, how they will be assessed, and what to do if things go wrong. I hear frequent complaints about young workers who don’t know basic etiquette, like showing up on time or dressing according to the office dress code. We assume these things are either innate or come by osmosis, but we owe it to our new staff members to train them explicitly.

The Advantage of Cross Training

The academy system also provides an opportunity to tie the areas of admissions and financial aid closer together. Enrollment offices often suffer a lot of dysfunction because of the differences in thinking and approach between the two areas. An enrollment academy can ensure that each area has at least a rudimentary understanding of the work of the other.

Imagine the training as two tracks that borrow from each other. Students will receive exposure to both areas and then choose their path. This has multiple advantages.

First, all candidates have an opportunity to test out each specialty and figure out which is a better match. Then, they will also meet potential colleagues from the other track and can assist each other throughout their careers. What have historically been two separate professional networks in the past now become interconnected. Also, if later in their career a candidate decides to switch sides, they will be better positioned to do so.

From the college perspective, the benefits of this two-track system are obvious. Every graduate of the training program, regardless of specialty, will come with a working knowledge of the other area, adding strength, redundancy, and empathy to the whole team. When the team needs to recruit more seasoned professionals in the future, employees will have networks to draw from on both sides of enrollment.

A Future Worth Pursuing

The benefits of a training academy of this type are many and powerful. What remains is to determine what structure and format it would take. Will one of the large higher education consulting companies or “ed tech” organizations launch such a training program? Would it come from institutions themselves working together, or perhaps from an association? Would it require an in-person element, or be offered remotely? How long would such a program be?

This kind of venture would take vision and organization, but the results could revolutionize the experience of entry-level hiring at institutions across the country. It could also give access to many more talented young people and bring both diversity and a higher level of professionalism to our field.

My goal for our profession is that it would be recognized for the highly skilled, demanding work that it is. The work that we do is critically important to higher education and to future generations of students. But respect for our profession will need to be earned, and the best way to achieve that is by preparing the most professional, skilled, and emotionally intelligent practitioners we can. No one else will do this for us. It falls to us to invest in our own future success.