BELOW IS A GOOD EXAMPLE OF ONGOING EDUCATION:
She takes the philosophy of lifelong learning to heart for both herself and others. She holds an A.A. in Communications and has taken more than a dozen additional community college and university extension courses, including telecourses in business law, business management, small business management, geology and psychology; online courses in grammar, editing and technical writing; and classroom classes in accounting. She also attends company-sponsored, hands-on training sessions such as courses in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint; Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop; and “Managing Multiple Priorities.” In addition, she creates custom classes when she identifies a training need. Our employees wanted to learn some specific highly-technical functions in Excel that were only minimally discussed in the standard courses being offered by the company training department. She surveyed the staff on their needs and availability, worked with the company training vendor to develop a program and, after filling most of the seats with our staff, marketed the program to other departments, lowering the individual cost per person for the training. For her IAAP colleagues, she created and manages an annual, day-long “Tips and Tricks With Microsoft Office” workshop. When any of the local IAAP chapters need a fill-in or last-minute speaker, she becomes the trainer with three different educational presentation topics: group discussion facilitation, resume development and office organization. She passed the CPS (November 2007) and the CAP (May 2008) exams. She has achieved the Advanced Communicator Silver (ACS) and Competent Leader (CL) awards in Toastmasters. She attended the 2009 IAAP EFAM Conference and participates in and encourages others to attend the bi-monthly IAAP division leadership forums and the semi-annual Toastmaster district conferences. She has worked to enhance the skills of the division’s administrative staff through the creation and development of the Policy Division Admin Group. She has invited executives and representatives from the company’s IT and HR departments to discuss corporate-wide systems, resources and challenges; and when office organizational systems and outside catering were identified by the group as topics of interest, she brought in the appropriate vendor representatives.