LEAD Awards 2018: Interview with Deborah Adams, UNG - For Aspiring Leaders and Current Managers

For Aspiring Leaders and Current Managers

  Category: Certificate Program with Emphasis on Leadership and
  Organizational Development
  LEAD AWARD RANK: 5
 
  Organization: University of North Georgia Professional and Continuing Education
  Program: Leadership & Supervision Master Certificate
  Program Director: Wendy T. Estes, Ed.D.
  Visit: www.ung.edu/ce
 

 
Our editorial team interviewed Deborah Adams from University of North Georgia Professional and Continuing Education at the LEAD2018 Awards this past February. Here are some excerpts from the exclusive interview.
 
What is the overall objective of your program?
The Leadership & Supervision Certificate Program is designed to help those who aspire to be a leader, who are moving into a leadership role and help current managers improve their leadership skills.
 
Who do you impact with your program?
The target audience are individuals who want to improve their management and leadership skills in order to advance or change their career.
 

What are the lessons you’ve learned this year from facilitating your program?
Every semester we look at the current environment and business needs to determine which topics we should offer. Through conversations with business leaders and past and current students, we adjust our programs topics to meet the needs of our community. Our goal is to provide training to increase the economic development in our community by providing workforce training to our students.
 
How do you measure the return on investment and success of the program?
We measure the success of our program through both revenue generation and the training we have been able to provide to our community through workforce development.  Our region looks to UNG to train and develop the local workforce. It is important that we continue to provide quality training to our region in turn increasing the economic impact UNG has on our communities. Every course we offer has a course evaluation that students are required to fill out prior to completing the course. With these evaluations, we are able to gauge the success of the program and any parts of the program that may need to be enhanced or changed for the next cohort.
 
What lies ahead for the program and how will it continue to succeed?
This certificate program continues to grow. In addition, we have grown our contract training sector of this program allowing us to customize our leadership training specific to individual businesses or industries in our region. This allows clients the opportunity to meet their individual needs with specific examples throughout the course that employees face on a daily basis. We have found that this approach provides a platform for team development and engagement and companies have seen increased productively after the training sessions.  In 2018, we expect that both our open enrollment courses and our contract training courses will continue to grow and expand.