Higher Education and Academic Research Community

Share some of your ideas on the individual professional development that change practitioners should undertake? Are there any unique elements to ready someone for a career within higher education or academia?

For me, finding skill alignment with stakeholder groups builds trust. Professional development is a great way to achieve this. People tend to feel more understood if I exhibit at least some knowledge of instruction (faculty), higher education admin. (administrators), and ed tech. (students).

Great topic, Mary. For general professional development, I always encourage practitioners to upskill in Data Analytics and Visualization. Being able to quantify adoption and present data-driven insights to leadership is becoming non-negotiable.

​For Higher Education specifically, I would suggest studying Agile mindset application in bureaucratic structures. Academia can be traditionally slow-moving. A practitioner who knows how to introduce "sprints" or iterative change within a semester-based timeline is incredibly valuable. You also have to be prepared for a distinct stakeholder map-faculty buy-in is a completely different beast than corporate employee engagement.

Great points everyone! Tanya, I can especially relate on the importance of data analytics + visualization and the realities of navigating academic bureaucracy.

In my experience in higher ed, one of the most underestimated capabilities is having a consistent, transparent way to track change across a highly decentralized environment. As we know, universities juggle dozens of initiatives across colleges, departments, and administrative units, and without a shared view of timing, impacts, and stakeholder capacity, even well-designed projects can unintentionally compete with one another.

I actually created the ChangeSync platform for this exact reason. During a large ERP implementation for Arizona State University, I saw firsthand how difficult it was to quantify adoption, align activity timelines to semester cycles + fiscal year considerations, and communicate change impacts in a way that resonated with faculty, deans, and administrative leaders. The platform was built to solve those challenges, offering a way to visualize adoption, track stakeholder saturation, and surface cross-initiative dependencies so leaders can make informed decisions and practitioners can demonstrate progress with clear, data-driven insights. 

When we pair that kind of supporting infrastructure with the agile mindset you mentioned, using short, iterative cycles within the constraints of academic governance + bureaucracy, it becomes much easier to move change forward in an environment that isn't naturally built for speed.

The next skillset was then building the interpretation of the data and the storytelling that supported what we were going to do with it and why.