New Exec Skills
Executives with continuing education and lifelong learning programs will need to acquire new skills to keep their organizations thriving in the 21st century, LERN’s top consultants will tell participants at this year’s Executive Leadership Institute in San Diego, April 6-8. From their list, here are four of the new skills you now need.
Note: We interrupt this story to report that the photo above is an actual photo taken by LERN’s Julie Coates this month.
- Ability to Manage Long-Term and Short-Term Business Requirements
Dr. Layne Harpine says the ability to manage both short-term and long-term business requirements is new, especially in today’s economic environment with both external business environment and the internal institutional climate in flux. “It ties to leadership, change management, financial/data analysis, and strategic planning for example,” Harpine, Vice President of LERN, notes. “This topic is something we are even currently addressing at LERN,” he says.
- Value Creation
Value creation is one of the top challenges, and avenues for continued program success, for Greg Marsello, LERN’s lead consultant. Marsello travels all over North American and visits with local programs every business week of the year. “It’s not just how to create value for external customers and clients,” states Marsello. “It’s also about creating value for your internal customers and clients,” referring to central administrators and other entities within your institution.
- Technology Skills
Executive leaders can no longer just depend upon a resident techie to handle technology needs and suggest solutions to problems that can be solved with technology, notes Julie Coates, LERN’s Vice President for Information and Member Services. “Every executive leader needs to have a deep understanding of how technology impacts the present and future direction of areas within his or her scope of accountability and understand how to think about technology as an integral part of strategic planning and change management,” she says. This means being familiar with technological innovations and trends as well as understanding the potential and limits of current tech tools. The executive does not need to know how to do IT tasks, but does need to have mastery at the conceptual in order to be effective in building a successful enterprise, Coates concludes. Coates provides online consulting and answers to technical assistance questions for LERN’s 1,100 Organizational Members.
- More Sophisticated Data Analysis
We are quickly moving from analyzing basic program data to being able to improve profitability and registrations with ever more sophisticated data analysis, says William A. Draves, LERN’s in-house marketing guru.
Draves says that continuing education and lifelong learning program executives now need to develop much higher judgment and decision-making skills. “We now have the ability to get more data out,” says Draves, “Now executives need to be able to analyze that data better. Given your position as executive seeing the big picture in both your programming and marketing perspectives, you as an executive have a unique potential to discover new money making solutions in your data,” he says.
Dr. Harpine, Greg Marsello, Julie Coates and William A. Draves will provide concise executive briefings on these and other new executive skills for the 21st century at this year’s Executive Leadership Institute in San Diego April 6-8, 2016.
Top Networking Meeting for Leaders
The Executive Leadership Institute is a unique LERN experience in that it will not only have experienced leaders, but also new and emerging leaders participating. To be held April 6-8, 2016, at the Bahia Hotel and Resort in San Diego, the executive institute will feature networking and small group discussions among the participants, mixed with concise executive briefings. The photo of the boy riding a horse in the ocean this month was taken by LERN’s Julie Coates.
For more information on the Executive Leadership Institute, click here.
For questions or assistance in registering, call Tammy at (800) 678-5376 or email her at info@lern.org.