RIA 2000 A/S Skills & Recruiting Survey Results|
RIA 2000 A/S Skills & Recruiting Survey Results |
By May 2000, about 21 of your and your colleagues responded to this survey. Following is a summary of the responses. (An Excel spreadsheet of the submissions can be downloaded by clicking you may "right-click" on this link and then select Save Link as... (Netscape) or Save Target as... (MS Internet Explorer) from the pop-up window.)
Responses came from:
 | Eighteen Colleges & Universities and 3 other organizations |
| Nineteen US institutions and two Canadian institutions |
| Institutions which had from 9,000 to 250,000 records and were raising from $600,000 to over $100M annually. |
| Institutions which had from 2 to 76 total Advancement staff and from 0 to 20 Advancement Services staff. |
For the Advancement Services Director the following skills were identified as most important (in composite with different institutions ranking them somewhat higher or lower):
| #1 was knowledge and experience with Fund-Raising and Development Operations |
| #2 was a virtual tie between Project Management and Personnel Management |
| #3 was the ability to communicate |
| #4 was skills with reporting tools (Is this seen as part of communicating?) |
| #5 was familiarity with your Institution (mission, people, procedures, etc.) |
| #6 was experience with Accounting and Reporting Standards |
| Each receiving at least one first place vote, but generally much farther down the ratings for the Director were Programming, Database Management and Data Administration/QA skills. |
| The other more technical skills only received a smattering of lower ranking "votes" |
For the Reporting Specialist the following skills were identified as most important (in composite with different institutions ranking them somewhat higher or lower):
| #1 was (surprise!) skills with Reporting tools |
| #2 was a tie between knowledge and experience with Fund-Raising and Development Operations and Programming skills |
| #3 was PC skills and experience |
| #4 was a tie between Technical Database Management skills and Interpersonal Communications skills |
| The other skills were significantly lower rated with the next level of emphasis going to Data Administration, Web, and Project Management skills. |
In terms of Sources for hires, Internal recruits and other non-profits seemed to be the preferred sources. CASE, Educause, NSFRE, or other organizations came in next, then for profit technical organizations. Jon Lindsay at Baylor observed that the sources for Director might not be the same as those for the Reporting Specialists. We might want to consider that distinction later.
Fourteen of the 21 responses as to the Approaches used to locate these folks identified Local and Regional Advertising first. The next preferred approach was Personal Referrals. Web Job Posting sites was ranked third. (Were respondents being nice to me because of my job posting site or did more people that were familiar with my site respond to the survey?)
The most common incentive mentioned was tuition benefits for both the employee and family. Other benefits were mentioned including leave policies, flex time, working from home, health benefits, training opportunities, retirement plans, institution location, etc. with the general observation that these are offered to all employees. (I was disappointed that no one mentioned a Red Corvette or the anecdote that is linked to that option. Maybe you were just being polite.)
Comments:
| Pat Reynolds at Binghamton included Integrity as a key attribute of both positions. I expect this and numerous other personal characteristics are expected in all candidates. |
| Jan Schofield at Towson noted that she'd rather hire an "IT manager" with good technical, project management and communications skills and then "teach them accounting, reporting, and development operations." That very issue was one of the things that triggered this survey. I think it is often an issue of if you have one very capable person in either of these two positions, the institution will look for the complementary skills in the other. |
| Gail Thayer of Purdue did not fill out the survey but sent me an insightful memo instead. Her observation was that "the most important skills" of both positions is an ability to do a reasonableness check on numbers and the capacity to understand the difference between data and information. If your institution has received a $1M gift this year and your gift totals are under $1M, do these folks notice the discrepancy in reporting that they develop and present to management? Gail spoke of making sure you start with "clean" data and then summarize it into useful information. As she observed, "No analysis is sometimes worse than no report." |
