If you are a first-time attendee at the HighEdWeb conference, you might do a double-take when you look at the schedule and notice a track marked “Management and Professional Development” (aka #MPD). After all, this is a web conference! One might be forgiven for thinking it should be full of nothing but code, content management systems and cat gifs. “Management and Professional Development” just sounds so… corporate. You’d almost expect to hear Jack Donaghy psyching himself up in front of the mirror. And yet, year after year, #MPD presentations wind up being among some of attendees’ favorites (indeed, last year’s Best in Conference presentation came out of #MPD).
Why do #MPD talks seem to so frequently resonate with the HighEdWeb audience? Well, Lori’s already spilled the beans about how HighEdWeb is made of people. And in #MPD, people are what we focus on, whether it’s bringing out the best in the people on our own teams through department-level planning, handling the politics of cross-campus collaboration or figuring out how not to burn ourselves out as makers who wind up in leadership roles.
This year’s track covers all of those bases and more. We’ll discuss the human elements of a wide array of topics. ranging from content strategy to analytics, representing diversity to implementing governance, digital skills transformation to emergency preparedness, and RFPs to intranets.
If you’ve been in the field for any length of time, you probably know that building websites is the relatively easy aspect of our job. It’s navigating the interpersonal relationships, hierarchical bureaucracies and quixotic quests for collaboration that can make it hard to get things done effectively and efficiently. Luckily, our incredible lineup of #MPD speakers is here to empathize, enlighten, and help.
So join us at HighEdWeb 2018 and plan some time with the #MPD track — you (and your team) will be glad you did!
— Aaron Rester and Lacy Paschal
