Engaging in Service as a Faculty Member or Administrator

June 13, 2023 Watermark Insights

Each semester, faculty members have many responsibilities, including service to their institution. Managing service data is essential for colleges and universities to conduct comprehensive faculty reviews, publish accurate faculty accomplishments, and build trust with students and sponsors. However, institutions need to use high-quality data management systems to ensure that important information, like service data, stays up to date. 

What Is Academic Service?

Service for higher education institutions is the act of faculty providing their time or resources to the university, student body, local community, or an external organization. When faculty are participating in academic service, they are going beyond their teaching and scholarship requirements.  Through service, educators can help improve the institution and offer their expertise to other communities that can benefit from it.

Service can take on many different forms, including:

  • Institutional service: Faculty members can help complete and improve widespread institutional initiatives, like promoting or participating in a program that increases their campus's cultural diversity. Other examples include serving on a curriculum development, program review, or self-study committee, contributing to a faculty search process, serving on a hiring committee to help choose new faculty and administrators, and being a faculty advisor for student organizations.
  • Community service: The surrounding community can also benefit from faculty members' expertise. Faculty and staff volunteer opportunities for the community might include running a clinic or center to help the public and hosting public presentations or seminars.
  • Professional or academic service: While faculty already have teaching and research requirements set by their institution, they should always continually strive to grow in their professional or academic field. Professional service in academia can be organizing or leading a conference, developing and leading a workshop or panel, or serving as an editor for a professional publication, like academic journals.

Regardless of how you choose to integrate service into your current academic schedule, your participation will strengthen your institution's initiatives and presence.

group of people in blue shirts and hats planting a tree

Importance of Faculty Service

Faculty service provides the chance to spread their expertise and contribute their unique skills and knowledge outside of their traditional academic responsibilities. However, faculty service also can significantly benefit your institution by supporting the mission of the university.

Each academic institution has its values, goals and targeted outcomes, which it can use to determine where they need to make changes and carry out initiatives. Through service work, faculty can support their university's overall growth and development while also backing policies that they are passionate about or areas in which they have experience and subject matter expertise. Faculty can use service opportunities to help their program, department or school, and university at large grow, evolve and improve.

Service can also help universities stand out and add value to their school. Prospective students, families, and other important figures, like donors, employers and sponsors, like to know what sets the university apart and see how they serve the student body and communities beyond the university. Displaying your faculty's service accomplishments can illustrate how your university encourages and delivers impact beyond the certificates and degrees it provides.

Tips for Engaging in Service

It can be challenging for faculty and staff to find the time for service work and to decide which initiatives to pursue. Try these tips to help you embrace the service mindset:

  • Follow passions and interests: You can enhance your service experience by dedicating your time to a project you are passionate about. This can help you narrow down what type and form of service you take as well — if you are more hands-on, for instance, you may want to do community or student work. However, if you are passionate about making large-scale changes, you might get involved in developing and assisting with university policy or a continuous improvement initiative.
  • Use research and expertise: If you work in a very specialized field or you are trying to utilize your research, you can use your expertise in that area to develop a service program that perfectly fits the knowledge you can provide. Especially if you are currently researching a topic, immersing yourself in service related to that research can help keep you engaged with your academic endeavors.
  • Look for areas of need: Service is essential for improvement and growth. If you are looking for service opportunities, search for areas of improvement in your program, department, school, or at the institutional level, as well as in your surrounding community and academic field. With your level of expertise, you can help argue for the need for change and have the qualifications to help carry it out.

As a faculty member, you already have a lot to manage each semester. While service is essential to your institution, be sure to establish limits for yourself to help prevent burnout. You want to give your best to your service projects, so choosing less can help you give more to those programs you select. 

Though there is a certain humility that accompanies service work, it’s also important to articulate and celebrate your contributions. Being open about your commitments and discussing their impact on your workload with your supervisor can encourage better balance and mutually-aligned goal setting. This can also foster a more holistic understanding of the various ways you are contributing and adding value.

How to Add Service to Your Faculty Profile

You can add your service to your faculty profile efficiently with Watermark's Faculty Success solution. While other data management techniques may require hours of manual documentation and distributing paper files or PDFs to share achievements, our faculty activity reporting software allows faculty to automatically update and showcase their accomplishments by simply uploading their most recent CV or adding an activity on the fly.

How to Add Service to Your Faculty Profile

Using an intuitive and automatic system has many benefits including:

  • Organization: When using a data management solution like Faculty Success, you can store all your data in one central database, allowing your institution to maintain organization across departments or campuses. When you need to access that data, you will know exactly where you can find it, saving faculty the hassle of reporting the same information yet again, and university staff the time and energy of searching for it.
  • Easy access: Better organization allows for easier access. Faculty and administrators  can pull from this data hug whenever it’s needed, and trust that it’s up to date and comprehensive. Whether you are recapping your accomplishments for annual review, applying for promotion, or building a grant proposal, you and other faculty members can locate and share the right activity data with ease.
  • Accuracy: Manual data entry allows for a higher possibility of human error. Instead, when you use an intuitive system that transforms a word processing file into structured data, with each piece of information in a defined place, you reduce the risk of mistakes and foster more accurate reporting of that information in the future.
  • Automatic data updates: Faculty Success is a comprehensive and intuitive program with many applications from tracking faculty service to managing tenure applications. With this software, faculty can produce up-to-date CVs on the fly for their various professional pursuits, making it quick and easy to always put their best foot forward. You can also use our software to ensure website information and other data points update automatically as faculty enter their latest accomplishments.

woman in orange sweater and blue framed eyeglasses, smiling with arms crossed

Highlight Academic Service With Faculty Success

Faculty work hard to help improve their university and impact their students and communities through teaching, research, and service. Higher education institutions can use that information to build trust between students, families, and faculty themselves, as well as give accurate data to important sponsors and donors who can further help the university grow.

Request a demo today of our Faculty Success solution and begin your journey toward better data management and celebration of your faculty’s impact.

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