Andrew Hibel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the HigherEdJobs podcast. I'm Andy Hibel, the Chief operating Officer and one of the co-founders of HigherEdJobs.

Kelly Cherwin: And I'm Kelly Cherwin, the Director of Editorial Strategy. Today, we're discussing strategies and moving across departments, or in many cases, moving institutions and how to best position yourself when you're changing roles.

Kelly Cherwin: Today we're joined by Dr. Cameron Beatty, assistant professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at Florida State, as well as program coordinator for the higher education program. So Dr. Beatty, I know I didn't read your entire impressive bio to our listeners, but you've had several different types of roles at various institutions across higher ed.

Kelly Cherwin: So please tell us a little bit about how your path has unfolded.

Dr. Beatty: Well, thank you for welcoming me and being a community with all of you for this -- I think very important -- topic of where we are currently in their landscape of higher education. I have a background mainly in student affairs in the sense of working as a program coordinator and advising the union board at Indiana University.

Dr. Beatty: I also have experience in [00:01:00] fraternity and sorority life advising chapters at Iowa State University, and my richest experience comes as the program director for the undergraduate leadership studies program, and then also a global leadership study abroad program to Sweden when I was at Iowa State University -- all really different roles and positions within a higher education, and I love this conversation because some people think you have to get pigeonholed into one thing, and I think I'm an example that that is not the case, especially working in the multi-layered context of different offices and departments within different institutions of higher education.

Dr. Beatty: And of course I've had faculty experience the past eight years, uh, working in various higher education programs at Iowa State, Salem State University, and now in my current role at Florida State University.

Andrew Hibel: I almost think Kelly would've had an easier description of describing what you do because you mentioned prior to us kind of coming live that you actually have a third role as well, that pretty much we should have just introduced [00:02:00] you and said, "He's at Florida State University and he does everything other than, uh, coach the football team."

Andrew Hibel: And so pretty much you're covering all bases there.

Kelly Cherwin: I love the fact that you said, I think sometimes people think that they're pigeonholed into, you know, a certain career or they've had this role before and they have to stay in that. And you're proof that you don't. So like we mentioned, you're the program coordinator for the higher ed program at FSU.

Kelly Cherwin: Can you tell us a little bit about how this degree sets students up for success in a variety of different departments across higher ed and what current professionals should be considering if they're interested in changing or moving departments?

Dr. Beatty: Yeah. Thank you for that question, Kelly. Let me talk about my context at Florida State and our graduate higher ed program because there are different programs that offer different things in higher education across the country. And with our program, we have a master's of higher education and we have a PhD of higher education. And at some institutions, the higher ed program, the master's degree, is sometimes a student affairs-focused or specific focus within the context of higher education.

Dr. Beatty: And [00:03:00] obviously our students that come to us to get a master's degree, many of them are interested in student affairs, but we say it's a higher education degree because they don't have to work in only student affairs programs or offices. There might be students that are interested in doing policy work or working in academic affairs, or even working in nonprofit context of higher education.

Dr. Beatty: And we feel like our degree prepares them to do any of those things. And there are some programs that have a niche of student affairs. Same thing goes for the PhD. There are students that wanna be faculty or wanna do research and there are students that wanna work at the policy level or go in and and think about what an ed tech means or think about what administration means and go on and be a dean of students or work as a director in various offices of higher education.

Dr. Beatty: We already say that our degree offers further skills to then be transferable to their experiences getting the academic theory, research, knowledge, and then applying that to whatever they want --how they make the degree work for them is how we try to [00:04:00] sell to students the opportunity to get the graduate degree in higher education.

Kelly Cherwin: Looking for more conversations in higher ed, we invite you to join the HigherEdMilitary community as we discuss issues, best practices, news, and general trends affecting our institutions and the HigherEdMilitary affiliated community. Inspired by the deep commitment to service that veterans and military connected faculty, staff, and leaders have towards the academic community, we at higher ed jobs established higher ed military as a resource for both original and curated news and information, as well as job opportunities from colleges and universities actively recruiting military-connected professionals. Visit us@higheredmilitary.com on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Andrew Hibel: In the past, being a job hopper or changing departments or institutions often could have a negative stigma.

Andrew Hibel: Is this still the case? And if so, how can job seekers best frame it in a positive way when looking for new opportunities?

Dr. Beatty: I can't say that that stigma is still the case. From a faculty perspective and even from someone that has worked in higher education in the past 15 years, I remember as people saying that you need to stay at a job for three [00:05:00] to five years.

Dr. Beatty: Uh, so people can see that you've gotten an experience. You can talk about the change or the impact you've made, and then you can either advance or move institutions. That is not the case. From the most senior level professionals in higher education all the way down to the entry levels, you see people moving either quite a bit from one office to another or from one campus or institution type to another.

Dr. Beatty: And with the great Exodus out of higher education during the pandemic. And now as we move through to the next phase of where we are in the pandemic, we're looking for people, number one, to fill positions within higher education. And number two, people are really capitalizing on being able to transfer those skills that they might have gained in one area. Maybe I worked in housing or residence life and now I want to go work in DEI or diversity, equity inclusion, education, and I can talk about my work as a call director and how that might transfer to working in multicultural student affairs or being a career counselor or working as an academic mentoring coach.

Dr. Beatty: So what I feel like now our goal [00:06:00] is as a graduate program is how do we prepare students to almost be a generous in the context of higher education. You might have an expertise in a functional area, and what I mean by functional area might be those things I just named, like residence life fraternity/sorority life, leadership programs, diversity programs.

Dr. Beatty: But we are all in the business of educating students. I think when we work in higher education, no matter if you're managing the budget or that you are being a hall director, our goal is for the success of the students in which we're trying to serve. And we can think about our skills in a more generalist way, and we might have a focused area or might gain expertise, but then those skills can then be transferred to another area of campus or another context of higher education.

Dr. Beatty: I think that just maximizes the long term goals of continuing to work in higher education. I think that just maximizes those experiences when we think about it that way -- in a more generalist way of thinking about gaining experience in higher education.

Kelly Cherwin: I love that you say that we all do have the common goal or the theme of [00:07:00] education, and I like how you're saying that, you know, we should aim to be teaching people how to be generalists.

Kelly Cherwin: So you referenced, you know, being in housing. So what, I guess this is kind of a two-part question. So what if I was in housing and there were other departments on campus that kind of piqued my interest, but I was a little bit unsure if I should dip my toe in the water over there and, you know, if that would be a good fit for me because I've been in housing for a while.

Kelly Cherwin: So what would you tell a job seeker, what they could do to kind of overcome that? But then on the flip side, how would the job seeker go about -- Maybe the person's currently working in housing and they're really happy, but they're like, "Hmm, I'm gonna see what else is out there."

Kelly Cherwin: How could they convince the person in that department, you said DEI, or someone else, that they are the right fit, even though they don't have that direct experience?

Dr. Beatty: Yeah, so for me, and I just had this conversation with someone, Kelly, when they've been in housing for years and they kind of wanna transition now to career counseling, right?

Dr. Beatty: And some people would say, well, those are two totally different [00:08:00] functional areas. And what can somebody that was a hall director, how can they be a career counselor? So, and what I say is, what did you do in your hall director role? Was your hall director only managing facilities? Were you able to advise students in programming?

Dr. Beatty: Were you able to mentor students or think about judicial affairs or other things within that particular role? And I think people in housing are the most generalist people that work in higher education, in the sense of they support students where they live. And what that means, they have to support the whole student.

Dr. Beatty: So how do you outline what you did in your role that wasn't just your job description, but it was the ways in which that you might have supported students, supported staff, and and thinking about that. And oftentimes those hall directors are mentoring RAs. They're mentoring their students that live in the building and in that mentoring, they might be doing some career counseling.

Dr. Beatty: And how do you articulate that in a way that then transfers, and you can say that, you know, in a career services office, I'm not only thinking about the professional development of the [00:09:00] student, but I'm thinking about how the holistic development of the student plays into how they think about their career.

Dr. Beatty: And for me, they're already doing that work. So it's giving them language to then be able to articulate that and then be able to transfer that into an interview or match the job description with skills that they've gained in their current role that might not be explicit, but you can use the language of that particular functional area to describe what you did in your current role where you might have a lot of experience, but don't think you have an experience in another area.

Andrew Hibel: Our family philanthropically has actually been involved with funding some internships within the academic and and nonprofit communities. And one of the things I've noticed is how receptive academia is if you're wanting to make a switch like that, that if there is a semester-long internship that you can do for credit for part of a master's program, they'd actually encourage you to say, go for it.

Andrew Hibel: Go be an intern in the career services department. Check it out. [00:10:00] Have a little bit of a taste test before you buy, if you will. With that, do you have stories that you can share where you've seen academic institutions that you've worked with or your peers have worked with that have found that sort of recipe to be successful for career transitions.

Dr. Beatty: I absolutely advise my students of that because when they practice it now, they're gonna practice it later in the sense of being able to expose themselves to other opportunities. So, for example, our current students, they have to do at least one internship outside of their graduate assistantship. We do have some students that work full-time while they're getting the master's degree and there's one internship requirement. They can do up to two.

Dr. Beatty: And what I tell students is, you should do something in a functional area you have no experience in, or you should do something at an institution type where you don't have experience. So I have the privilege of living and working in Tallahassee, Florida, where there's a large public, research one institution.

Dr. Beatty: There's a historically black college and university, and there's a community college all within a 10-mile [00:11:00] radius of where these students are learning. So I say, why not take advantage of this? Because you don't always get the opportunity to have these different institution types at your hand to be able to gain experience.

Dr. Beatty: So if they're gonna do two internships, I say try to do one in a different functional area and try to do one at a different institution type to see, to your point, Andrew, that to gain experience, see what you like. You don't know what you don't like until you experience it. And that's what I challenge students to do.

Dr. Beatty: And then I also challenge professionals to do the same thing, right? Is there opportunity to collaborate with a different office across campus to work with other people that might be doing work that you're interested in, but you might not have in your portfolio, but is there a way to collaborate on a project or to do a program for students, to think about, wait, well, what would it mean to work in this other functional area that I don't have the opportunity to gain experience in, but I could be creative in the ways that I might have access to that office and really think collaboratively about your own work and how that might touch other touchpoints in campus.

Dr. Beatty: And you're like, oh, I [00:12:00] never thought about working in disability services, but collaborating with that office has taught me what they actually do, and that's something that I might grow in and find enrichment in because of a collaborative project or initiative that I had with that office that might not have anything to do with my day-to-day portfolio.

Andrew Hibel: I think I just actually wanna highlight here and kick it to our listeners right here, right now. If you are somebody who's thinking about doing something like this and have a question for Dr. Beatty, please send it to us at podcast@higheredjobs.com or tweet us at HigherEdJobs. And I'm sure, Cameron, I'm sure you'd be more than happy to come back if somebody was to send us something and answer that question about doing an internship in a different field than you're in within academia and trying to balance that with your current full-time role in academia. Would that be something you'd be able to do if somebody was to send that back in to us?

Dr. Beatty: Absolutely. And I might have some tips because sometimes you have to think about the politics or the context of your [00:13:00] campus, and I'm happy to offer any advice that I can share.

Andrew Hibel: I hope folks, when you think about working in academia, take pride in things like this. In the corporate world, you're not gonna see competitors, if you will, foster the professional development of their work staffs of their competitor. In academia, we promote people. We want people to explore opportunities and just, it's one of those hidden gems of working for a college or university that if it is something you're thinking about, there's a real path there. So, uh, please send us your questions if you have any.

Kelly Cherwin: Nice. You're looking at me next. Okay. So Dr. Beatty, I wanna circle back actually to a comment you said earlier. I love the suggestion you have regarding testing out or exploring different types of institutions. You know, a private, a public, an HBCU. We had a previous podcast and we talked about culture. So, What if you know you meet everything in terms of the job description, you know, the duties -- you fulfill all those -- but what are your suggestions to people working in higher ed? [00:14:00] Because we're talking, you know, about making that leap to a different department or a different institution.

Kelly Cherwin: How do you know that you might be a good fit culturally there? How do you determine if this is a place where I'm gonna be feeling included and I belong there? Do you have any recommendations on that?

Dr. Beatty: I'm still learning that in some regard because culture changes, right? And culture shifts, and what people present as the culture might not be the culture when you get there.

Dr. Beatty: And I talk to my students about that often, and for me, it's oftentimes thinking about what do you value? And when you go, or when you look at the website or when you research the job, does what you value come up, right? So do you value diversity? Where do you see diversity at? Do you value an inclusive, equitable workplace?

Dr. Beatty: Well, how do you do that? Like what does that look like for you? And have an honest conversation with yourself thinking about that, and then go and start to do your research, right? And sometimes you really don't know a culture until you experience the culture. But when you go to a campus interview, what are some signs of a sense [00:15:00] of belonging for you?

Dr. Beatty: I just had a colleague that went on a campus interview and they didn't pick him up for breakfast. He had to navigate through the city himself to find the breakfast place. And he was like, that made me feel a certain way. And I was like, well, that may be a sign for you that that might not be a culture in which you want to work in, right?

Dr. Beatty: And then it's the littlest thing. And some people might say, hey, that's kind of petty. But if it's something that you value and you are getting signs that doesn't align with your values, then don't ignore those signs for the sake of getting another position or getting the salary that you want, because in the long term, you have to be right with yourself in the place in which you work.

Dr. Beatty: And so I can't do my best work if I'm not in a culture and an environment that I feel supported.

Kelly Cherwin: Thank you. I love that advice.

Andrew Hibel: Sometimes I think the challenge is working in academia, sometimes looking and seeing that the grass might be greener on the other side, and we all get a little bit of professional wanderlust as we look at colleagues and maybe the for-profit world that [00:16:00] seem to have richer experiences than we do. At least sometimes I think it's at least richer budgets than we do at times.

Andrew Hibel: What would you recommend for somebody who's tempted to look around when they're evaluating what they're really looking for, and maybe is there a place where they can then find it somewhere within academia without having to look on the other side of the grass?

Dr. Beatty: Yeah. I had this conversation with someone recently about the grass greener on the other side in the sense of that time of the -- well, I think we're kind of still in it -- but the great resignation of people leaving higher education.

Dr. Beatty: I just had a colleague come back to higher education that left a couple of years ago right in the middle of the pandemic. And I asked them, I was like, why? What happened that you made you want to come back? They said the work that I was doing there was not fulfilling my commitment that I originally had to myself of thinking about advancing access and equity in higher education.

Dr. Beatty: And they said they thought they were sold that they would be able to do some of those things at the corporate level. [00:17:00] And they said once they got there, they were constantly thinking about checklists or thinking about product and profits and, and they said, I just couldn't, I just didn't commit to the work the way I committed to the work that I was doing in higher education. I couldn't commit to a colleague at a desk next to me or someone on a Zoom call the way I could commit to a student sitting in front of me and me supporting that student and seeing that student on graduation day. And he said I was making good money, but the commitment that I originally made to myself of getting into this work was not there. And also that was a reminder for me, right? Because there's other opportunities out there that even as faculty sometimes that we look at and it's like, okay, well how can I do this in another realm? And then I look and it's like, well, well the work I get to do at Florida State University is so rewarding in the sense of the transformative opportunity that we get to do with students. And then a student emails you five years later and reminds you of a conversation that you had with them that you don't really remember, [00:18:00] but it was so impactful for them that it sat with them five years later, and we don't get to do that in other realms outside of higher education in that way, oftentimes. At least that's what, that's been my experience. And maybe it's different for others that might be working outside of higher ed, but the work we get to do is so rewarding that sometimes the grass isn't greener. The salary might be higher, the title might be fancier, but the reward of human development, of seeing lasting impact is sometimes not the same.

Andrew Hibel: That's so well put. Thank you for sharing. And I think it's also really, really observant that COVID has really made us rethink a lot of the ways we want to work, and it really is -- I think in many ways academic institutions responded nicely and moved with the times. But making sure that we keep challenging our leadership for putting I would say smart sizing what positions can be hybrid, what need to be, [00:19:00] physically based and what can be completely remote, and try to address it appropriately and equitably as opposed to saying, we want everybody back on campus or nobody needs to be back on campus. Everybody can be away from campus. Both of which we don't see much of those two extremes, but where in that middle are your institutions ending up and making sure you're intelligent with that?

Andrew Hibel: I think that will definitely help folks over the next few years as, as work life really kind of morphs a little bit from what it was pre-pandemic.

Dr. Beatty: Yeah. I really do hope that -- to your point, Andrew -- we come out better than we entered the pandemic, and we have to come out learning something in the context of higher education administrators and supervisors.

Kelly Cherwin: Well, I actually have one final question, kind of some words of wisdom here. I know you talked a lot about kind of making sure positions fulfill your own personal mission, and you've had quite an extensive career at different institutions. We all know that everyone's career path is a little bit different.

Kelly Cherwin: So what advice do you have for those people [00:20:00] who might feel like they have come to a fork in the road or they just don't know exactly what they might want to do. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Dr. Beatty: My thing is to always map out where do you see yourself in the next five years, right? And when I start to map that out, do I see myself at the same institution?

Dr. Beatty: Do I see myself in the same city? Do I see myself doing the same thing? And the answer is yes. That's fine, right? And for some of us, the answer probably might not be yes or we might be doing something slightly different or some advancement in our career. And for whatever that five years looks like for you, what do you need to get there?

Dr. Beatty: Is it another degree? Is it a larger portfolio within your office? Is it more supervision experience? What is it that you need to get there, right? And thinking about that, and if you wanna stay where you are, why? What is satisfying you and can you have an honest conversation with yourself? Is what's satisfying you now gonna satisfy you five years from now?

Dr. Beatty: And when you start to take that self-assessment, then you have to [00:21:00] think about an action plan, right? So I've been thinking about going back to school, and I have a PhD and I'm like, well, do I really wanna go back? I have the degrees that I need, but something around counseling has been drawing me and it's like, well, what would it look like for me to think about taking some classes in the college of social work to see if that's the next step for me?

Dr. Beatty: And when I tell my friends like, well, why would you do that? And I was like, well, something's drawing me, so what's next, right? And really thinking critically about what steps do I now need to take? What do I have in my network to support me in taking those steps? And then moving and developing an action plan and what those might look like.

Dr. Beatty: And for all of us, to your point, Kelly, if all of our paths look the same in higher education, higher education would look real stale. And we all have different paths for a reason because we're bringing those experiences together in hopes that we work collaboratively together by bringing those skills and expertise to execute whatever the goal might be.

Dr. Beatty: So how do you make the experience and make the degree work for you and thinking about moving that fork in the road, in the direction [00:22:00] where you wanna see yourself.

Kelly Cherwin: Thank you. You summed it up so well. Well, thank you Dr. Beatty for joining us today. It was a delight.

Andrew Hibel: Thank you for taking the time with us today. It was great to spend some time with you and it's wonderful having you on the show.

Dr. Beatty: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Andrew Hibel: Once again, if you have questions for Dr. Beatty, please feel free to email us at podcast@higheredjobs.com or tweet us at @HigherEdJobs, and we'll get him back on the podcast to answer your questions.

Andrew Hibel: Thanks again for joining us, and we look forward to talking soon.