Your Career

Both the volume of training obligations and the time required to keep up appear to be ballooning.

Many campus administrators are fixated on protecting the institution from all manner of risks, real and imagined. A major consequence of all that wariness: Faculty and staff training requirements have multiplied like mushrooms after a spring shower. Of course some training can be a very good thing. One of the painful lessons of the pandemic was how unprepared many instructors were to use their campus learning-management system for online teaching. Yet faculty and staff members today get a steady stream of links to the latest training and retraining programs — only some of which they actually need to know to do their jobs well.

Having to endure so many of those programs has made faculty and staff members acutely aware of what works and what doesn’t. Among the common-sense fixes that campus administrators could make: Coordinate and pace training requests in relation to the rhythms of the semester. If you’re serious about encouraging faculty participation, don’t send out training invitations in the week or two before classes start, or just as winter or summer break begins.

Continue reading: “Suffering From Training Fatigue? You’re Not Alone,” by Jane S. Halonen and Dana S. Dunn

Is AI literacy becoming a necessity?

Lots of professors are skeptical of generative AI, and some don’t want to incorporate it at all into their teaching. But is AI literacy becoming a necessity for both professors and students? If so, who gets to define it, and who should teach it? If you’d like to share your thoughts on this topic, please fill out this Google form.

Share your suggestions for the newsletter with Denise Magner, an editor at The Chronicle, at denise.magner@chronicle.com.

What we’re reading

Here’s more on career issues and trends from around the web. See something we should include? Let me know.

• In the Harvard Business Review, the “case for sabbaticals” and how to make the most of one.
• The latest Work Friend column in The New York Times explores the question, “When is neurodiversity an excuse for rudeness?”
• A report in The Wall Street Journal on how, for the first time, half of private-sector workers are saving for retirement in 401(k) plans.