Reimagining Onboarding for Student Help Desk Teams

Sarah Buszka: Welcome to the EDUCAUSE Rising Voices Podcast where we amplify the voices of young professionals in higher education. I'm Sarah Buszka and I am joined by my amazing, incredible, awesome, spectacular co-host, Wes Johnson.

Wes Johnson: Hey everybody.

Sarah Buszka: And we're members and friends of the EDUCAUSE Young Professionals Advisory Committee, also known as YPAC. I am really excited for today's episode because I think for many of our listeners, you probably know that both Wes and I come from help desk backgrounds. We both started our careers working in a help desk as student employees. And we've learned a lot along the way, right? You know, here we are. A whole lot, right?

Wes Johnson: whole lot here.

Sarah Buszka: But we both have a really kind of soft spot, I would say, in our hearts for students working in a help desk because we both know firsthand how tough it is to go into an environment, especially for me in an entirely student-run help desk in 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was one of the only women employees working in that space. We had almost 80 student employees and I felt like I had no idea what was going on. And it's really tough, right? There's a lot going on in these big universities and there was a lot to learn. and that onboarding experience and getting everything downloaded into your brain doesn't happen matrix style, right? We have to find some way to do that in a really professional and helpful way. So I'm thrilled today to have this topic where we are going to be talking about how we onboard student employees appropriately and set them up for success by working in a help desk. So Wes, would you be willing to kick off and introduce our guests for us?

Wes Johnson: Absolutely, and we got another fire lineup of guests for you. Starting off, it's Katie Brown, Director of IT for Digital Learning Solutions at Purdue Northwest. Katie leads LMS administrators and the Student Life Operations and Support Team, including app developers, system administrators, and IT business analysts across all Purdue campuses. She brings a BA in Education and an MA in Technology and eight years of teaching experience to the role. having joined the IT division in 2016 as an educational technologist before advancing to our current position as director. Welcome Katie. And then we also have Alex Sharpe. Alex is a junior communications major with a specialization in broadcasting. So maybe he'll take over the show for us one day. He has spent two years with the PNW customer service center where he now serves as a student supervisor. Katie, Alex, welcome and thank you for joining us on the show. We like to kick it off with the hardest question first. Katie, I'll start with you. What is your superpower?

Wes Johnson: I think you are muted. There we go. Yep.

Katie Brown: My superpower, that's a great question. My superpower is connecting with people. It's finding joy in things when we're talking. It's reading them, relating to them, connecting with them on personal levels, professional levels, whether they're full-time employees and people of similar professional caliber as myself or similar age as myself or students that you know I have the joy of working with on a daily basis so connecting with people and hopefully elevating them up.

Wes Johnson: people connect. like it. Alex, what about you? What is your super?

Alex Sparke: would say my superpower is probably anticipating behavior and using that to be able to solve problems.

Sarah Buszka: Ooh, we have a psychologist in here. We got a, you know, detective in here. You know, communications broadcast. Wow. That's a great superpower. Not a practice, right? Well, I think this would be a good kind of segue actually. Katie, would you be willing to maybe share in 30 seconds, a high level overview of the program that you've helped create at Purdue for us and our listeners?

Wes Johnson: Yeah, that was super impressive.

Alex Sparke: practice these days.

Katie Brown: 30 seconds, okay, we gotta time it. All right, a high level program. So in the shortest summary possible, we've come together with representatives, of faculty, faculty representatives from Purdue Northwest and Purdue Fort Wayne. We've also bridged connections with student employees at Fort Wayne Northwest, and then also brought all of that knowledge that's campus specific and centric to our Purdue system across the IT units.

Sarah Buszka: Hahaha

Katie Brown: into a course that builds a foundational understanding of here's Purdue IT, here's our mission, here's our leadership, here's our units, here's our people, here's what we strive to achieve in terms of excellence. And then it segues that into and here's the units that support that excellence, both in the front-facing side for the service desk, as well as other units that that service desk will liaison supports over to for escalated help. And so it kind of leans into some interactive components of, See this in action, go connect with a mentor, apply what you're learning, and then demonstrate that mastery so that you are feeling confident and empowered to go and take clients and help them, meet them where they're at and provide solutions, fulfilling your role as a service desk employee. 30 seconds, did I get it?

Sarah Buszka: That's great. yeah, absolutely. Well, maybe on the flip side of that, other side of the same coin, this is maybe again for you, Katie, and I welcome your perspective too, Alex, because of course, know, being front, you know, kind of front lines, you might have a different lens. What problem were you trying to solve that really kind of led to the spark of creating such a program that's so widely dispersed and coordinated?

Katie Brown: And I love this question because this idea of what we were able to accomplish is something that actually has been brewing in my head for many years, ever since I've come into higher ed from my former education background of how can we pair professionals with real life opportunities to dig into their careers, right? So we are setting them up for success when they leave us because that's our goal in education, right? Is to prepare our students for the real world. And so beyond college, how can we do that? And I saw some natural opportunities over time with how can we connect and lean into different departments, whether it's the College of Technology or engineering or education, for example. And so how can we connect those folks to call upon the skills that they're already learning and experiencing in their classes and apply it in a real world context? And so the timing of this project really kind of paired well with a couple of pieces. And the first was there was an opportunity for Purdue for a call for proposals with a D2L Innovation Grant. And so that alongside an organizational change where Purdue sub IT units across Northwest, Fort Wayne, and West Lafayette were kind of coming together in a new umbrella, under one umbrella I should say. And so all of us were trying to figure out what campus specific knowledge do we need to make sure we're prepared and equipped to know. And then also what's common across our campuses so that we have some system-wide commonalities that we can identify. And so that service desk sits at the heart of who we are in IT. And so how can we develop an onboarding course that can lean into that and then spawn beyond that as we're preparing to do this summer with other IT units? And we plan on expanding this project to include networking in the coming summer months.

Sarah Buszka: (08:31.81) That's great. Very exciting. Network is, networking is huge. I remember dealing with those issues all the time as a student employee, having no idea what to do when it came in, but it has a very high impact rate.

Wes Johnson: That's, yeah, that is excellent.

Sarah Buszka: (08:44.3) Alex, I'm curi- go ahead. We're just connected.

Wes Johnson: So Alex, yeah, going to same place there. We're going to same place. So that's right, we're right here. So on the other side of that coin is a participant as someone who was coming in fresh. What were some of the benefits? Did they hit the mark? they solve the problem they were seeking out? What has been the benefits for you?

Alex Sparke: Absolutely. I think one of the bigger problems we had before we started this project was structure in training those new hires. There wasn't a whole lot of that before. So giving them a course and a way to say, here's what we are, who we are, what we do. And these are some great first steps to take provided a lot of help and relieved some of that nervousness and tension from not knowing anything into. sliding into it, learning, getting every, common information under their belt and being able to take that into their later stages of training and start getting to customers quicker.

Wes Johnson: No, that's, that is great. I know it's always been a challenge and one that I wanted to address. So in my past, get to give a little bit of it. I also started in the help desk, but actually, uh, interestingly started as the manager. A long story short, it's, it's hard being a help desk manager. So it's not always the most popular job, but it was one that I took on. Yep. Yep.

Sarah Buszka: In true West fashion, this is why he's the amazing, the singular.

Alex Sparke: Yeah, for sure.

Wes Johnson: So one of the big challenges, particularly because I was working for an R1 institution, but it had a fairly small team in comparison. So it was about eight people and about half were students and then half were full time. One of the biggest challenges with particularly a small team was essentially it was a crass course when you came in. Like you all mentioned, we sit at the center of it all. So you don't just have to know technology services. You kind of have to know how the university works. how other administrative units serve things, the culture of particular colleges as they come in. so though we weren't able to produce something quite like this, it was a quick acknowledgement of we need some way to bring folks in to ground them on where we are. They might come in thinking I'm just gonna solve technology issues. How do I start my computer? And that's actually not a common part of the job, but not all that that job entails, particularly in higher ed. So it's nice to hear that. this effort was able to attach some of those things. So to continue on that, I'm gonna jump back to Katie. Looking over the notes, I believe that to put this together, you actually got input from several different areas. So it wasn't just like a group of leaders that came together. You wanna talk a little bit about that and maybe how that helped improve some of the outcomes that Alex is backing as a participant?

Katie Brown: (11:31.46) Well, and Alex was an equal contributor to the development process along the way, right? And I think that's what's most important here is we paired pre-service teachers, right? So juniors and seniors in their education profession across regional campuses who maybe didn't come with IT background or knowledge, we brought them into the fold. We also brought education faculty who have pedagogical perspective, campus uniqueness, thoughts, ideas, teaching world knowledge. And then we also had Alex and another help desk employee come in and say, hey, here's the technical skills we need. Here's the tools that we use. And so we had a wealth of folks involved in curating this. And we worked through some struggles of how are we going to make this worse? Where do we start? What's really essential for our service desk employees to know with interacting with clients? What tools do they need to be successful? What are the services that they provide? And to your point, Wes, earlier, of What are the other units that provide support across IT as well so that they know that successful handoff can be accomplished? And so I think it's essential to call out this cross-campus navigation and collaboration that we experienced here because we worked on different time zones. We were coming together and finding times to meet, to have side work, to pivot our development process of, we think this is going to work. Wait, this doesn't really match with what we had envisioned. And then also really being fluid with the pedagogical side of what do we want these student service desk employees to be able to do? And how are we going to validate that that mastery of that content is achieved? And leaning into some of the LMS and the new features and functionality that are there, that's where some of my expertise was able to guide us along the way of, there's some AI components we might lean into and have us, you know, give us some perspective. so we use that, firsthand knowledge and experience to give our pre-service teachers an exposure and opportunity to think like a faculty. How would you design this course? How would you assess learning? and then Alex would bring forth some creative ideas too of, let's give them some videos and let's have them, you know, watch what they're going to experience with a client, ticket situation or issue.

Katie Brown: And then let's have them go and do it. Let's have them help. Let's have them pair with a mentor and connect and reflect. So I think some of those key pieces and key people were the reasons why we've been so successful with our piloting of this course and now stretching it to even further groups across IT.

Sarah Buszka: Yeah, that's really important. what I'm hearing too is like almost like a role playing aspect of this too, where you get to have some structured content delivery through a standardized process, like a course, right? But then you get to do that in person, hands on, kind of testing what you just learned in a safe space. Is that a fair assessment? Okay.

Katie Brown: I think that's, think that's key, right, is a lot of what we do in IT needs to be, need to experience it, right? And most other professions too, we need to experience what we're expected to do. But we also want to give them the confidence of any employee, whether it's a student employee or a full-time employee, right? Build up their confidence to feel successful ahead of actually going and tackling that. And so, We even were able to connect with folks who went through our pilot course and have a focus group of questions and hear their thoughts of what did they think went well? What would they suggest we improve? And from that, we were able to take some key additional modules that we need to add and add next ahead of our future launch because we're missing some call-outs of empathy and connecting with. various emotions of clients when they come in. You're both shaking your head. You remember, you you have folks coming in with different emotional states and so how can we... And I think in general, all the ranges, right? And so really, you know, and especially as student staff, giving them the keys of how...

Sarah Buszka: I remember all too well.

Wes Johnson: Still get

Alex Sparke: 100%.

Katie Brown: a script that they can follow, key phrases that they can lean into, addressing that emotion first. So good thoughts and reflections along the way with Alex's contributions as well as others.

Sarah Buszka: Yeah, and I think, you know, go ahead. thank you. So Alex, I'm going to Alex too. you know, out of curiosity, you know, again, this is coming from me being a student employee. I also was a manager and helped us call those types of things. I'm curious to hear from your lens, like the pre and post impact of this program and the training, right? And you had a very instrumental hand in leading this change. And I'm curious just to hear your reflections on.

Wes Johnson: So Alex, you got it, go ahead sir.

Sarah Buszka: how would have described how folks were, frankly, like how successful they were and how they were approaching the role pre and then post this program and the impact that you've seen.

Alex Sparke: Yeah, absolutely. think before this project came to be, anytime that we were training new hires, it was here's all of our documentation, read it, study it, and then you're going to get two weeks of shadowing. And it was just kind of almost like throwing them to the wolves and they were learning on call as they went issue by issue. So the final product and the outcome of that was giving them a great baseline of some of the most common issues. and thing and things that we support so that they know, if we're setting up an account or we're resetting a password, these are the steps. These are the questions I need to ask. There's an issue in a classroom. What information do I need to collect in a way that the other teams, if we have to, if we have to send somebody out to go do something, what information do they need in that moment to resolve the issue without any further delays?

Sarah Buszka: That's great. Yeah. When I heard you describing, you know, the pre-training, which was sitting and reading documentation and then doing it live, I had a little PTSD shiver because that's what I had to. And we didn't even have a two week trial. was, okay, sit and read docs for 10, 20 hours and then you're live on the phones. Have fun.

Alex Sparke: And a lot of people don't learn that way. So the course was a really great way to say, here's some bullet points. Here's a video you can watch. Here's an interactive quiz. Here's a service desk employee. You can interview and ask questions. So there were a lot of different avenues for new hires to learn in the way that they need to. And that's such a great bonus for to have in a program like this.

Sarah Buszka: Absolutely.

Katie Brown: And I might also say too, I think it's essential, right, to your point of where you got to find that information in a list of documents and other resources. But hopefully, another goal of this course, maybe on the side is go and refer back to this, right? know, refer back to this course. It's still there for your learning and your reference. And you can lean into that instead of expecting that to be memorized all in your head at all times. Did you find Alex that that was also something our new hires took advantage of too?

Alex Sparke: Absolutely. A lot of that core common knowledge is right there, a click away, instead of having to search through a Google Drive or a OneDrive or documents scattered all over the place in knowledge bases. It's just such a consolidation, quick references, and just something that's available for them at all times.

Wes Johnson: So Alex, I'm curious staying on you for a second. The program itself sounds excellent. So I'm taking my own mental notes here on the side about things I might take back to my support teams. But a running theme on some of our previous episodes up to now, particularly for young professionals has been like involvement as a SME early on in the development of things. So kind of testing that theory. I'm curious, how important was it to you to be involved in the building of the program? as well as like how did that benefit if it did, you your prospects or your development as you professional, a young professional in the field.

Alex Sparke: (19:51.21) I think the program, like I've said, was a great way to set future students up for success by giving them that hub and that streamlining. when it came to... Excuse me, can you repeat the question? I'm so sorry.

Wes Johnson: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, no worries. So I'm curious about the opportunity that you had to actually help build the program. So you had an opportunity to input into the program itself. We've had a running theme of some of our previous episodes where folks have asked for those kinds of opportunities and that that was a part of our professional development early in our career. So I was curious as also someone who benefited from the... the end of the actual building of the program, were there any benefits for being involved in the actual building of the program?

Alex Sparke: Yeah, was able to, a big part of my role was collecting the information for my campus and saying, this is what my campus does. This is what Fort Wayne does. This is how West Lafayette does it. Being able to find the processes that were similar and different and organize it in a way that made sense so that we didn't overload people on information. the starting, like you're starting with verification. And from that point, when you're talking to a customer, Here's where you can go. It's building them a flow chart of information that builds as they go. So as soon as they get the easy part down and they know the common things, they can say, here's issue specific questions. So giving them that kind of that overview, the list and the outline of issues and being able to organize that information in a way that makes sense for them.

Wes Johnson: So then I'll, actually I'll open this up for both. So Alex or Katie, feel free to jump in. You know, some institutions, I'm keeping it to higher ed, but there might be others, may not have the resources or the right skillset to build something like this internally, particularly from IT. It sounds like y'all had a very unique mix and I caught on with Katie of using previous experience to help benefit something that. You know, you might not have connected as easily without that experience per se. What would be some steps you would say to either leader or to the young professional that's trying to figure out how do I do this? And maybe my campus doesn't have a program, but what steps could I take to reap some of the same benefits and outcomes that y'all were hoping to get out of this program? Yeah, absolutely.

Alex Sparke: Yeah, may I? So I told this story to all of our new hires. We did little one-on-one interviews with them towards the end of their training to see what's comfortable. What do you still feel like you need some support with? And I told this story to them. When I first started on the job two years ago, I was really awful about gathering information and asking the right questions. So when I had a little review, I became very intentional about note taking and writing down all of the details as I went in order to build that muscle memory, get a username, get a serial number, things like that. And as far as skills go, think that resourcefulness is the skill that is one of the most important to build. Cause sometimes you can be the first, you could be the person to deal with an issue for the first time and how you handle it in that moment. If you're able to solve it or not, the information you collect in the documentation is going to be the baseline. in the future should that problem be reoccurring. So the problem solving and the resourcefulness, knowing where to look for information, and even if you're on your own, what you can do to solve those problems that nobody's seen for the first time.

Wes Johnson: Excellent, Alex. I say resourcefulness is like one of the key. If you can find someone that'll figure it out, you got someone who can take on a lot, a whole wide array of things. I'm curious, Kade, do you have anything you would want to add to that or another perspective?

Katie Brown: Absolutely. I think that's a great starting point for me to launch into. And I think to my superpower of connection, I think for folks who may not have access to grant funding or resources, start with what you do have access to. And that's people, right? And collaboration across departments within whatever campus is there or whatever teams are there. Starting with if someone has an idea or a vision, listen to that idea, right? And see who could bring perspective. to accomplish this goal. May not take senior level leadership buy-in or any of that nature or funding of any kind, but really who has an idea and who can help see that vision through? And it could be student employees. If a student employee has an idea, raise that idea to folks who can support you along the way. In fact, you know, they've got great ideas and so how can we see that to fruition, right? And also to be... be a good listener, right? Be a, let say, an active listener with folks too. You know, and maybe the timing for such an idea isn't available or possible right now because this thought of mine was brewing for many years, but when and how can you make that happen? And then too, if you don't know who those people are, who might bring that perspective and knowledge, we need to ask questions. We need to have the courage and be brave at any level of our jobs and any portion of our field or... or level of our career path and dig in hard to that because life is changing, the world is changing and very rapidly and so we need to rise to that occasion and rely on each other.

Sarah Buszka: I love that. That's a mic drop on our show. Definitely. We have mic drops pretty much every episode. Thank you for saying that, Katie. I'm going to just say it out loud again. Like we need to listen to student employees and bring them in and treat them as if they are part of the team and not any like second-class citizen, right? Because they are the ones who are doing this work firsthand and who better to ask and bring along in the process and frankly,

Wes Johnson: Absolutely, it's like, yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sarah Buszka: let lead some of these processes and show off those skills and develop those leadership skills, right? That's our responsibility working in higher education, right? We're here to prepare them for the workforce. So that's my little mic drop. But rounding this out to give everyone an opportunity for a mic drop moment, one way we like to wrap up the show is to give our guests an opportunity to leave our audience with one takeaway. message or lesson that you would like to share with our listeners. So Alex, I'd like to start with you. Do you have one lesson or message or key takeaway that you would like to leave with our audience today?

Alex Sparke: Let's see, I would say confidence at least and in the spirit of collaboration, knowing that you can being in the bubble of just the service desk, you should break out of that bubble and be comfortable interacting with all the other teams. We're not locked to the desk. We have hands on desktop people, audio visual networking, and all of us work together in the same team. So going and knocking on those doors saying, How can I solve this? What would you do in these situations? Things like that is just kind of the way to build that collaboration and trust between all the teams and bring everyone together so that you know that everybody's on the same page.

Sarah Buszka: (27:20.43) That's great advice. You are the help desk whisperer. Katie, what about you? Any final takeaways or messages or lessons you'd to leave with our audience?

Alex Sparke: Thank you.

Katie Brown: I think Alex was right on target. And I think that stretches up through all levels of any company of any employment pathway. You know, we need to remain in touch with others, right? I learned so much about the service desk just with my role as an LMS expert in this project worked. And so it's essential that we stay in touch with each other. We continue to understand and recognize the impact that everyone has because We're all here for the same reason and that is for students and for their learning and for their success. And so at that core mission, how can we support that? We need to remain connected and listeners once again with each other. So I think Alex, you were right on target. Go knock on those doors, go make those phone calls and don't be afraid to do that. You may need to step outside your comfort zone or talk to folks you haven't engaged with before. That's part of part of life.

Alex Sparke: And if I may, you did that for me too, encouraging me not to just provide information to you, but go into the course and say, give us an outline, start to structure it as somebody who's never touched any learning management systems like that. Being able to learn how to do that and get another piece of knowledge in an area that I didn't have was really helpful because I can now, even if somebody will come in with one of your issues is saying, well, let me take a look at it first before I send them off to you.

Sarah Buszka: Right.

Sarah Buszka: That's great. Thank you so much, you two. think these were certainly many mic drop moments here at the end of the show. And I think just a great showcase of, you know, being successful and working together and keeping that university spirit and mission in mind and centered. So thank you both so much for joining us on the show.

Katie Brown: (29:23.48) Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate everyone's time and coming together and this opportunity to highlight some of the work we're really proud of and we're going to continue doing. So many thanks.

Alex Sparke: Thank you so much.