Should be encouraged to take advantage of the suite of UHRS/FMS/UITS classes held on the IUB (and sometimes IUPUI) campus. These are usually free, or have a small fee (normally for the UITS courses). Supervisors are encouraged to let support staff take as many of these classes as are relevant and useful, within the constraints of their work schedule.
Should be encouraged to attend UHRS/UITS classes, and may attend a local/regional conference in their professional field. Generally, no more than one local/regional conference should be attended each year** with an expense cap of $2,000. It is up to the supervisor to ensure there are sufficient funds in their budget to cover professional development requiring travel. At the supervisor’s and fiscal officer’s discretion an employee could supplement, with personal funds, the school funds to attend a national/more expensive conference, or could opt to travel only every two years to attend a more expensive conference. The school will work with supervisors to seek out options, and to try to meet employee’s requests, within these guidelines.
** With current budget constraints, the school is requesting that Jr Professional Staff only travel to one conference every other year. Jr Professionals are encouraged to consider other inexpensive professional development options during their non-travel year such as one day conferences in Indianapolis, as well as the large number of generally free IU professional development offerings. It is hoped that this is only a temporary change to this guideline.
Should be encouraged to attend UHRS/UITS classes, and may attend a local, regional or national conference in their professional field. Generally, no more than one conference should be attended each year. It is up to the supervisor to ensure there are sufficient funds in their budget to cover professional development requiring travel.
Being an educational institution, the school encourages all staff to continue their education. IU does offer a Tuition Benefit to employees to allow them to take classes. This benefit usually makes the class free (except for the mandatory fees). Generally, time spent attending class does not count toward an employee’s hours of work. However, if the class being taken is directly relevant to the employee’s position, and will help them with their duties, then it is legitimate to recognize some/all of this time as professional development. As such, time in class can be included as part of the employee’s work hours, at the supervisor’s discretion. An example could be if an IT employee needed to learn a new programming language for their position. In this case, taking an IU class in this language would be directly relevant to fulfilling this work place need and therefore could be included as part of their work hours. Other examples maybe less black and white, but it is important to work with employees to encourage them to develop professionally. Since it is the school’s stance to encourage education, supervisors should be willing to make reasonable accommodations to an employee’s work schedule to facilitate class attendance.