As administrators in student affairs, we are evaluated primarily on the scope and quality of our efforts in providing programs and services. But three other areas of professional performance may also affect our career progress, and they are going to sound familiar: teaching, scholarship, and service.
We are not faculty members, of course, and so those three areas do not govern our promotions, as they do for professors. But the work you do in each one can play a role in how you advance in student affairs.
Let’s first consider teaching. Some student-affairs divisions center their programs and services on student learning. In such divisions, any teaching experience you have in a traditional classroom will obviously be valued highly. However, when it comes time to weigh your eligibility for hiring or promotion in student affairs, you may find that not all teaching experience is seen by your peers as equal.
Just as is the case for faculty members, teaching “in the discipline” of student affairs (e.g., teaching courses on conflict management, leadership, the first-year experience, or multiculturalism) is likely to carry more weight than teaching in a traditional academic field (e.g., English, history, engineering).
Even when your office is not explicitly centered on student learning, your teaching experience may give you a leg up in decisions on hiring and promotion. But that will depend on your ability to relate the experience to the skills and knowledge valued by your student-affairs office. For example, it may be helpful to highlight the skills you gained in advising, communication, or organization from your classroom teaching. Positive comments from student evaluations of your teaching may hold particular sway in the eyes of student-affairs practitioners.
Whether or not scholarly activity carries any appreciable weight in hiring or promotion decisions in student affairs varies by institution. Universities with graduate programs in counseling, higher education, or student affairs are more likely to value an administrator who has published articles in refereed journals on those topics, or has given conference presentations.
Scholarship in a relevant area of student affairs may also help you, careerwise, if your student-affairs division is looking to raise its profile. For example, say your research agenda is on the socialization of women in professional fields. That may make you more worthy of promotion if your institution has an assessment interest in the experiences of female students, particularly in graduate programs.
Involvement in professional associations—including giving conference talks or holding regional or national office—is valued in student-affairs divisions across a host of institutional types and circumstances. How much weight is given to those service activities when it comes to hiring and promotion will, as usual, vary.
Both scholarship and involvement in professional associations can play a role, especially for student-affairs professionals in senior positions. Building a reputation in the field—either in a particular area of practice or for more general knowledge of student affairs—can bring opportunities to serve as a consultant or speaker. Those activities can, in turn, carry weight when you are seeking to move up the administrative ladder.
Perhaps the area with the least potential impact on your career progress in student affairs is community service. If that kind of service is important at all in hiring or promotion, it is probably so only at the more senior levels of the profession. Perhaps the recent decision by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to create the designation of “Engaged Institution” will raise the importance of community service in administrative-performance evaluations. It may also be the case that community engagement carries more weight in regional public universities or special-mission institutions, such as historically black colleges or tribal institutions, where that service is closely linked to institutional mission.
These observations are based on my nearly 30 years of work in student affairs. They are no doubt shaped by my own experience as someone who has done some teaching, been active as a scholar and in professional associations, and been modestly involved in community service at institutions where that was encouraged.
Perhaps most important, I have come to believe that the decisions we make to be involved as student-affairs professionals in teaching, scholarship, professional associations, or community engagement are probably best informed by our own interests and values rather than by whether they contribute to our career progress. We control the former; others control the latter.
