Techniques Nov-Dec 2012 - 10

Leadership Matters

Hiring the Right Person for the Job: The Key to CTE Center Success
and who has mastered the same 21st-century skills they will teach to the students. Once the job description has been posted, applications will undoubtedly flood the center’s inbox. Most directors are accustomed to filtering the piles of resumes to pinpoint degrees and job experiences and to evaluate technical skills, as well. Indeed, resumes do well to identify the necessary, standard qualifications. However, hiring the best CTE instructor for the position and the team requires looking below the surface-level characteristics presented in the resume.

phoTo courTesy of isTock.com/J-elgaard

By Julie Jordan, Kristen Dechert and Heather Wainwright HiRing CaREER anD TECHniCaL EDuCaTion (CTE) inSTRuCToRS
who are trained and inspired to become highly effective teachers is the most important task of any center director. Few CTE leaders, however, have any training in selecting new hires who are best suited for instructor positions. Meanwhile, hiring mistakes render both tangible and intangible consequences. Bad hires potentially damage programs, diverting salary, benefits, training and supervision time to ineffective instruction. Finding themselves ill-prepared for further study or work, students who experience bad instructors may even abandon their efforts in a program. The school’s reputation may be negatively affected, both among students’ friends and family and with industry and business stakeholders, which can impact ongoing recruitment and collaboration efforts. On the other hand, a “good hire” is more than just a quality employee—this person is ideal for the job and a good fit for the program. Good hires can foster student recruitment, enthusiasm and retention, professional development and achievement, and program development and expansion. When the right person is hired, CTE centers can strategically reach goals, and student learning can dramatically improve. In order to hire well-suited instructors, CTE directors must properly construct job descriptions, identify applicants’ qualifications and competencies, and train themselves and their hiring committees to conduct interviews that deliberately extract experiential and behavioral details that reveal candidates’ true potential to be effective teachers. In other words, CTE leaders must dig deeper than the resume or the traditional job interview and discover more detailed information about applicants’ experiences and knowledge bases.

Digging Deeper to identify Effectiveness
As is often the case in CTE, technically competent professionals leave industry and join the educational ranks. Certainly, our students benefit from this partnership with industry, but sometimes the transition from industry to education is a difficult one for the teacher. Just because a person knows the content of a course does not always mean they are prepared to teach the material to young people. Therefore, looking beyond surface-level qualifications listed on the resume can help CTE directors determine which applicants will most likely be effective teachers and fit well with their programs and students. One method for looking below the surface is for a CTE director to identify and define specific competencies desired in a teacher. For example, one director may want an engineering teacher who is self-motivated and who will take initiative with the robotics competition. Another director may want someone who works well on a team and can set challenging
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Screening for Surface-level Traits
Developing a solid job description is the first step to hiring the most suitable candidate. CTE instructors must work with students in three main areas: technical skills, academic skills and 21st-century skills. Understanding the needs in these three areas should guide development of a job description that explicitly iterates expectations for a CTE instructor who is technically and academically competent

Techniques

November/December 2012

Techniques Nov-Dec 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Techniques Nov-Dec 2012