Rachel Duval 0:03
Thank you all so much for joining us this week. The panel that you're about to experience is going to be recorded for the higher ed jobs podcast. It'll be a discussion featuring five staff and faculty members from the very local University of Louisville. The panelists will share their expertise and student success, program development, leadership and funding that fosters institutional commitment for the military connected community at U of L. The panelists discussion will include creating buy in and leveraging existing institutional mechanisms, establishing a veteran employee resource group, hiring military connected staff and faculty and funding best practices and strategies. You all will help welcome our panel up here.

Andy Hibel 0:51
Thank you for that lovely introduction and thank you for having us. I'm Andy Hibel. I'm the chief operating officer and one of the co-founders of Higher Ed Jobs. In 2020, we founded another site called Higher Ed Military that was specifically designed to serve this community. And with that, my co-host and partner in this endeavor, Kelly Cherwin.

Kelly Cherwin 1:13
Thanks, Andy. Andy said, I am the co-host of the HireEdJobs podcast. I'm also the director of editorial strategy. So

MW 1:20
thanks for joining us for the conclusion of our panel discussion recorded live at Naspa 2023.

Jeff 1:26
And how can you how can you help them move that to the next level?

Kyle 1:31
Sorry, last time I'll speak, I promise you. Jeff mentioned the Kentucky commissioner of Military Affairs. I assume most of you have something similar, whatever state you're from. He talks about networks, and I'll share a story about us. So I went to our system vice president for government relations about 27 months ago and said the instate is a new center for military connected students. The university can't afford it. What do you think we should do? And my good friend Shannon Ricket said, okay, here's what we do. We get Casey May on board. That's the line of the governor. Then we find a legislative champion in the House and push it from both ends. In Kentucky, the governor is Democrat. The House is is Republican, if you know. And that's what we did. And the end result was $600,000 directly into the state budget by the governor. For us to renovate a facility and to create our new space. And so I think that goes back to what I was talking about outside the echo chamber. AVP for government relations, not somebody you traditionally would talk to or affiliate with military connected student issues, right in the day to day. But because that conversation happened and because she had a good idea and because we have that network, we're able to get get that done.

Megan 2:36
I love the fact that you guys all had additional comments to say. And I want to thank Jeff for offering to be contacted. And that's one thing, as you guys were all speaking and your passion, your excitement. Andy mentioned that when we first came to this conference four years ago and I think one of the biggest things that we've learned at hired military is how, how authentic, how, how connected, how much you want to help each other, help the military connect the community. So like everyone was saying, use each other, reach out to the panelists, reach out to each other, reach out to us like we just we love this community. So with with that said, anyone else have any other comments before I flip it over to Q&A? Okay. So like I said, we're going to leave a few minutes for some some questions. So if you are able and you want to come up to the microphone and ask your question, please announce your your name, your institution, your role. And then if you have a specific person that you would like to address, feel free to do that. So and if you aren't able. Monica, our wonderful Monica, works with Higher ed military. We'll bring the microphone to you.

Andy Hibel 3:41
If you don't feel comfortable having your name and institution announced on the podcast. You don't have to share that.

Jonathan Steele 3:48
Good afternoon. How are you? My name is Jonathan Steele. I represent the University of Oklahoma. The question that I have, I work in our diversity, equity and inclusion space. And one of the things that I noticed is that because of everything going on in our state currently with executive orders and things of that nature, when you talk to people who are military connected, they don't see themselves in diversity, equity inclusion spaces because of what has been said about DEI work that is over there and military folk are over here. What have you all done to try to And I heard some of that and I think you mentioned some of that. How do you continue to bridge the gap and what have you done that has not worked so that I don't do the same thing?

Kyle 4:44
That's a great question, which whenever somebody says that, that means there's really no good answer. I will tell you, you know, my my response is that, yes, we have the same issues and challenges. And I think the more you can tie the fact that there's a high degree of representation in the military community to whatever resources you have dedicated your institution for, DE&I I think that helps bridge that gap. You're right. It is almost a cultural thing. I think, again, starting with the small things, if you don't know who your veteran center or military connect the center is or where they are, go find them and talk to them. Talk to them about what you're trying to accomplish and have them explain to you what they're trying to accomplish, what their challenges, their students face. You could do shared programming. You could put on event for for students of underrepresented minorities, period without a DEI topic regardless of whether there was a military connected student or if it was a student from a general population, I can't say general population that sounds like prison. A student that wasn't military connected. I don't know if that many sense or not. Hopefully some of my colleagues here have some good ideas.

Jeff 5:54
So the program that I was speaking about earlier is we call it the Master Educator courses with the Army. We intentionally design it so it has experiences about the college students and the various populations of college students who exist. And we make it very clear that there's a population and you're part of that population that we actually want to focus on too. And so I think it's about how we think about belonging and the sense of belonging and how we. And again, it's it's going to be something both the Caseys are presenting on, I think, in this next session. But I think what we want to do is we want to make sure that everything we do is very clear to this population. That's that we are responding and we are trying to figure things out in order for us to do that. We're going to have to have full participation. And so I think what we have to then figure out is how do we convey that? And I know Oklahoma has a very challenging time, particularly as of the last few weeks. So and Kentucky's about to experience it as well. Is is how do we convey that to others in our state as well as even sometimes in our administration? And so I think we need allies like like Kyle mentioned, the Kentucky Council for Military Affairs. We need them to understand that, too. We need to send KDBA so they understand that as well. And then also our state, which happens to be the Council for Postsecondary Education, that they see it as well. I think they do. However, we need to remind them of that. So if we all work together to remind everybody that's part of D-I, that's part of a sense of belonging on our campuses, it will make a difference for all of us. Then it will make a difference also on who we hire as a presence of having more veterans on campus.

Andy Hibel 7:25
I'd also add from from a recruitment standpoint, we're not talking about retention of students nowadays. Retention of students is really, really important. But the first time in the nearly 30 years of of higher ed jobs we've actually seen retention of employees is so important. With the resources stretch where they are, the idea that and let's let's not talk about diversity, equity and inclusion just in a vacuum, but let's add belongingness to it. Somebody's feeling connected to your mission, and they're at a place where they feel a part of something bigger than what they do day to day is a key benefit of these institutions we work at. And the more we embrace that, that's part of the benefit of working there, the more people are going to want to stay. How many friends of yours and think about it across the campus work in a situation where you're like, There's no way I can do this in this sort of work life situation, but I really believe in serving this, that or the other thing because it gives meaning to my life and I think to me, I don't know the answers of how to frame with legislatures and chief executives of states at this point. And I understand the nationwide politics behind it. But when it comes back to maybe, I think, Jeff, you're the one who said it like being the institution that you are and finding a place for everybody there is what this is all about. And at the end of the day, going out and trying to recruit somebody to fit back in a position, not only is that an expensive endeavor, that whole process, but think about all the lost productivity of the months or we've heard from in the fundraising side of things. We've heard years that positions remain open and you're a frontline fundraiser. What does that institution lost?

Megan 9:10
If I can add one more thing to that. You've really got me thinking about what doesn't work or what lessons have we learned and something that we've hinted at that I want to be explicit about is making sure that we're connecting research to practice. That might be institutional research. I think part of what Kyle was telling us was historically, our institution wasn't doing a great job of conceptualizing the military connect experience, quantifying it, qualifying it, understanding it, thinking about what that could mean for employees and for students. And that doesn't work. So within the institution, there's an opportunity collect better data or to educate people. When you're doing surveys about your student population or about why your employees are leaving or whatever it might be, consider this perspective. There's also, of course, more traditional scholarly research out there that does give us a lot of evidence about what doesn't work from the military connected students perspective. There's we need more research about the military connected employees perspective, but we can go to the literature to see examples of what doesn't work around how faculty might be treating staff or students who identify as being military connected around the way they see messaging and where they see themselves represented in the institution. So that gives us a really strong launching off point for how can we do better and where do we go next? I'm working actually with Casey and other colleagues at the at the University of Louisville to understand ROTC and specifically actually, Jeff and I are doing a study about this, too, how institutions do or do not understand ROTC as as a common example of a military presence on campus. And one of the things that's coming through in both of those studies is that institutions don't seem to be making consistent effort to understand ROTC, a partnership possibility, ways to expand that over a century year old tradition. That's part of many of our campuses and all of our states and territories. But when we understand the outcomes of ROTC, our research tells us that they promote independence and obviously career preparation and effective citizenship and effective leadership and diverse ways of thought and diverse team compositions, all the things that we say we're so proud to be doing in higher education. We've got these pockets where it's happening quite well. We're not even really looking at them all of the ways. So connecting research to practice and being deliberate about where we have a good sense of what hasn't been working and where we compel ourselves to to leverage that, to start to start changing.

Kelly Cherwin 11:41
Thank you for that question. Let's go to the back.

Jason Walker 11:44
Okay. Howdy. My name is Jason Walker. I'm with Texas A&M University in Texas, and I will address my question to Jeff, but would love feedback from anybody that has thoughts you've triggered in me. For the first time, I thought that there is a path to funding beyond development. We have a great foundation and a great team that's focused on military related development. But my question is, and I don't come from academia, I actually come from the corporate world. And so my question to you is kind of a business question, but what is the the business driver that would lead a professor or a dean to have an interest? Is it just strictly are you just wanting to do a good thing for people that matter? Or is there a business driver that you can tie to so that there's also a business case?

Jeff 12:36
That's a great question. So with my team, we actually sit down and talk about value propositions and so and we have to figure out how we pitch things and frame things around that. So one of the things that we did, again, as I mentioned with the apprenticeship project, we had to explain to them like, why would you want to do this apprenticeship? Like, what's an apprenticeship? First of all, isn't that the same thing as a co op or an internship? And it's not, by the way. So and then so we had to explain it to people and then we had to actually come up with items of explaining to them. So one of them is it's going to help people on apprenticeships. You're going to get paid in your area to learn your job and you will get a job, earn and learn. So we had what we call it. And then so then we explained how we were studying it too. We were trying to figure out how many of them got jobs better for it and how much better was a paying job. Some of the jobs actually were paying as high as 46% higher, by the way. So that's what we had to show them. And what we are showing to our deans and to others and chairs some of this data around that we did it intentionally on certain programs. We didn't focus on everybody because, one, it just wasn't going to work. If we we cast too broad of a net, we were going to lose everybody because it was just too large. So we focus first on engineering and then we go over to the business school. Then we moved over to public health. We're doing it now with our education college in my home college. So but we didn't do it right away because I needed to have wins. So I will say there are baby steps that you have to take. We've been doing these projects for 12 years. I've been doing it here at the university a little over ten years, but I did it also at another institution prior to this, too. So I will say in total, I've been doing it for 12 years. It does take a lot of convincing because people don't understand why sometimes you want to even invest in the military. So show them the outcomes. One of the things I remember when I first started here at the University of Louisville, one of the first things someone said to me, an administrator said to me was, Hey, you're working with the Army. Why don't you teach them leadership? And and then, of course, you know, my background leadership. That's what I teach, right? So I was like, with all due respect, I think from what I understand the history of leadership theories, some of it comes from the military, actually, particularly the army. So I'm not sure we should do that. Why don't we teach something else that's related to that, like social influence and other things like that? And then once they started getting more exposure, they started to say, Oh, this is what you're talking about. Also, I even had results. A lot of evaluation reports also helped, too, because every single time we did a project, I had an evaluation report to show the growth as well.

MW 15:10
For more than 80 years, Stars and Stripes has been with you on the front lines, reporting the news and stories impacting the military community from breaking news to providing vital resources for education services, transitioning from military life and financial guides, we will continue to be with you wherever you are. Stay up to date with the number one independent source for military news at Stripes. com.

Kelly Cherwin 15:34
Thank you, Go ahead.

Candy Tillman 15:36
Hi, I'm Candy Tillman. I run 50 strong and we support lots of strong employers that are doing an awesome job with talent management workforce development of military community. I first just want to applaud this group for expanding this conversation beyond higher ed as an education institution, but that well toward the concept of higher ed as really strong employer partners in our community. So thank you for that. You talked a lot about ROI business case value proposition, internal selling, crawl, walk, run. These are concepts that in private industry we have to talk about a lot. So you all mentioned grants and outside funding often. And I'm curious in the context of benchmarking and best practices, have you done any or do you have feedback on how higher ed can potentially learn from those in private industry that are already doing this really well and frankly don't have the luxury of relying on government grants to, to open pathways for strong military talent?

Megan 16:44
Yeah, I always say higher ed military is that like at first I was like, no, jealous, I want to do that. And then I was like, No, they're going to do it better, smarter, faster. Let them do it. And they have. But it's exactly the kind of thing that I think the market need it. And I think it's also the hub for these conversations that we're having. And I glossed over industry a bit when I was saying, here's the norm or the real world and then here's the military and here's higher ed. But that's not productive or accurate. I think a really strong next step would be completing that triad, because when I talk informally to my friends and colleagues who are CEOs or managers or what have you, or even when we lose people in higher ed who we want to hire veterans and we lose them to industry because of the onboarding experience, the recruitment, the benefits and salary, the partnerships, all these things that are in place. We have a lot to learn from industry, and I hope that we would that that would be a reciprocal relationship. So I think that's actually a really nice next territory that we should be.

Jesse 17:44
So the one thing I have that's been a bit underdeveloped, higher ed, I mean, this group collectively comes together to try to recruit more talent, right? But University of Louisville doesn't have a dedicated person to just focus on military connected folks. Right. And industry does a really good job of that. My husband was retired as well. His first job was at Humana Military and they have a dedicated group recruiter. We we don't do that well. So this is sort of a because it's a passion of ours. And we know that military talent is desperately needed in higher ed. And we're also wanting to take care of our fellow military connected folks. We really fail in that dedicated space and making sure that we are resourcing that person to recruit and handhold right. The whole process through what is a good fit for them. Our U of L health system. So we have an entire hospital system and the CEO reached out to me and said, How do I get more veterans? Right? The same conversation you all are having with some of these industry partners to say, I want more veterans, How do I do it? And I'm like, Well, you need to hire somebody to hire veterans, candidly, because it's a full time job to connect with these different transitioning service centers and to get the word out and to find the right talent and to mirror up the different systems to work together. It is a full time, dedicated job to do that. So our goal is to hopefully place a transitioning service member into that space is my long term goal for that. And then hopefully our health care system can help in that space, but we don't do well in that capacity.

Jeff 19:11
So I've lost a lot of staff in my center to corporate and and most people would say, Well, you don't want that turnover. Do I want it? I want a lot of them who are veterans who join us for the first time. It's their first job right now, transitioning out of the military. And then for them to go on and find that corporate job in some cases, because we do a lot of corporate related work and they double their salaries. I mean, we can't we can't compete actually triple in some cases. So we can't compete. And that's okay because so long as I feel good that they got their first job with us and they became successful after us, even more successful. And so that's number one. Number two, I would say is the things that we learn is project management and corporate versus what we do for project management. Very different. And then the third thing is the level of mentoring. While we are hire ed and we say we mentor people, which we do, the career ladders are different in higher ed and we don't have the same career ladder options as corporate does. So I think we have to figure out how we can learn from them and how to do career ladders. And the third thing I would say, which is what Megan was touching on, we really do have to work all together. So we've been trying to do that here in this community. But I will say we still have a long way to go. And so if there's anything and especially for you, Candy, if there's anything you can teach us, we would love to learn.

Andy Hibel 20:28
Thank you all. I think it's a wonderful place to leave the conversation. Thank you, Ellen. Thank you, Jesse. Thank you, Jeff.

Jesse 20:35
Andy.

Andy Hibel 20:35
Oh, no, thank you, Megan. Thank you, Kyle and Kelly.

Thank you, Jesse.

Thank you. That's quite kind.

Okay.

Megan 20:53
So on behalf of the University of Louisville, we just really, sincerely appreciate you giving us an opportunity to try to share in the space and learn from you all and showcase our university. We do some stuff well, we do some stuff very badly, but we're here to learn. But anyway, thank you for hosting and we appreciate it.

Andy Hibel 21:10
And thank you all. I can honestly say this is something for us from the podcast perspective. When we started it two years ago, we never mentioned to anyone like, Hey, we should do this with a live audience. You guys have been great to the point where I don't know about you, Kelly. I'd actually think about doing this again, so thank you for not scaring us off. Thanks a lot.

MW 21:36
Thanks for joining us. And remember, if you have any questions or comments, reach out to us via email at podcast at higheredjobs. com or @higheredcareers on X. Thanks for listening. We look forward to talking soon.