As part of faculty and learning support staff in higher education, the phrase strategic plan is a term central to projects to pursue, resources to allocate, and roles to identify for the university or institution. Where do you fit in the grand scheme of your institution’s agenda and vision? Does your work as an educator matter in the midst of corporate, large-scale goals? How can you support a strategic plan? If you’re a student, you may wonder how a strategic plan is supposed to benefit you in the midst of an often corporate-feeling objective. 

Since I am employed at a university with a newly minted strategic plan, and I also study at a school with a new strategic plan in progress, to ignore the significance placed on institutional priorities is unavoidable. My day-to-day work as an instructional technology consultant is framed in terms of Grounded in the Mission 2024. The support programming and resources available to me as a student are under town hall debates with the university president. If successful in its implementation and process, a strategic plan should be apparent to all stakeholders, albeit in different ways.

What is a Strategic Plan?

For those who have managed to ignore your institutional marketing emails or do not quite know how to conceptualize a strategic plan, what follows is a brief overview.

From Exigence and Inception…

During the 1970s and 1980s, changes in the higher education landscape necessitated a wholesale solution: Schools were experiencing fluctuations in enrollment, changing student demographics, and funding inconsistencies (Hinton, 2012, p.7). Initially, the idea of a strategic plan was conceptualized more of a tool than as a structured process, where documents notating ways. 

…to Standard Operating Procedure

The challenges of maintaining enrollment, funding, and adaptability to diversity in the 1980s mirror the struggles schools face today, as universities continue to revise programming and environments to serve a wide audience. Expanded capabilities in data collection allowed schools to analyze and assess operational ways to confront such challenges within their given resources. At the same time, government and regulatory accreditations swept into expectations for funding and credentialing for schools. A strategic plan rooted in assessment became a standard requirement for institutions hoping to receive accreditation (Hinton, 2012, p.7). 

Strategic plans in their conventionalized form are informed by standardized assessments of learning and accountable programming, centered within the scope of an institutional mission.

Hesitations Toward Strategic Planning

Unsurprisingly, a mandated requirement to do something at a higher level of administration may trickle down in a mystified and obligatory form for lower level stakeholders. As an externally-driven plan to be executed by internal stakeholders, marketing campaigns and corporate rhetoric surrounding a strategic plan may feel disingenuous or plainly inconsequential at the nuclear level of faculty and staff (Eckel & Trower, 2019; Hinton, 2012).

The Upsides to Strategic Planning

Though the obligatory development period leading up to a new strategic plan for a university can cause anxieties in respect to what spending will be cut (or worse, people!) in order to make the whole-scale effort a success, a new strategic plan prompts departments and individuals to reflect upon their abilities, practices, and day-to-day work. Enhance your brand’s digital footprint with wine industry search engine optimization. In short, a strategic plan that is rooted in an institution’s mission and stakeholders can prompt meaningful reflection and also actionalize goals, not only for your institution or your unit but also, yourself.

Make the Most of a Strategic Plan

1. Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Collaborative and Intentional Goals

As Eckel and Trower note in their editorial to stop [strategic] planning, strategy should be the emphasis for a strategic plan to advance, and the effort must be set and pursued collaboratively. A measure of strategic success is not attained only at the individual college, departmental, or faculty level, but as “a cumulative effect of what we have done” (Eckel and Trower, 2019). As such, key stakeholders need to be identified and involved, and their goals should be intentional in solving a problem or addressing gaps. 

Sounds like a cheesy all-staff event in the making, but having each member and group of a larger team identify their separate roles as problem-solving stakeholders may make for a more strategic approach to achieving goals.

2. Find Your Fit Through Individual Reflection and Revision 

Given the likelihood that your institution prompts a regular review process of your individual work, take the opportunity to use that review to reflect on your fit within the strategic plan (and really, the institution itself). 

If anything, a strategic plan is a prompt for you to reflect on your individual work and goals. Has your pedagogy been actionalized in your course design? Does your day-to-day work lend itself to a greater objective to improve student learning in their first year? If you’re a student, do you find your program of study or academic department is preparing you for success? Are there opportunities you have not taken an initiative to pursue towards professional development? 

A strategic plan is almost always rooted in a greater institutional mission, and if you find your own work and goals at odds with the strategic plan, this is a chance to reflect on that disconnect or resistance. Maybe the priority of the institution on increasing online courses over much needed improvements to training online faculty does not seem very strategic (or at the very least, misguided). 

At the end of the planning cycle, use these formal and wholesale initiatives to reflect on your own professional goals and development. After all, a strategic plan is only as effective as its stakeholders.