President's Message

by Marianne Bays

As I write this, my year term of office as IPMAAC's President has just begun. Throughout the year, I will be sharing my thoughts and information on IPMAAC plans and activities with you in this space. Right now the two things most on my mind are: 1) IPMAAC's professional development activities, and 2) a follow-up on the decisions that were made by the Board of Directors at our October meeting.

Professional Development Activities

IPMAAC's bylaws state that a fundamental part of our mission is to encourage, give direction, and provide means for the delivery of training and education efforts to upgrade the expertise of personnel assessment professionals. My question to you is, how can we do this more effectively?

It strikes me that we have a wide variety of member training needs as well as a variety of training/education delivery mechanisms (e.g., this newsletter, our annual conference, training workshops, electronic and print technical reports, etc.) and that, perhaps, we could do a better job of matching these to each other. I've asked five members of IPMAAC to join me in thinking this through on an ad hoc Member Development Study Team.

Nancy Abrams and Judy Trabert, as 1996 co-chairs of our Training Committee, are focusing their efforts on formal training workshops and pre-conference workshops. In addition to identifying training needs for our existing workshops (the T&E and Exam Planning workshops), they are working with their committee to develop a new IPMAAC workshop on Oral Examining. I've asked Bill Waldron, chair of our Professional and Scientific Affairs Committee, to focus on identifying new challenges to assessment professionals and ways in which we can help them prepare to meet these. Kristine Smith, our 1996 Conference Program Chair, is the fourth member of the team. She is working with her committee and presenters to label conference sessions as beginner, intermediate or advanced, and also to specifically prepare a "foundations " track of sessions for the conference. Feedback from prior conferences suggests that this will help us to better meet attendee needs. Paul Kaiser, chair of our 1996 Continuity Committee and IPMAAC President-Elect, is the final member of the study team. Paul's charge is to review and consider needed revisions to our current training policy and practices and to prepare and present proposed changes in these to the IPMAAC Board at our June meeting.

In addition to this study effort, Beverly Waldron, our new ACN editor and her Associate Editor for Council Affairs, Mike Willihnganz, have accepted the challenge of working with IPMA staff to establish and publish a national "event calendar." The goal is to provide our members with better information on professional development opportunities offered by other assessment organizations and by the various IPMA regions as well. She and her editors will also continue to scout out and publish articles on technical, legal and other issues relevant to the assessment profession.

Thirdly, Brad Jensen, Jim Johnson and Bill Waldron (who refuse to be called the Electronic Communications Network Steering Committee, let alone choose a chair for that committee, leave me no choice but to dub them IPMAAC Webmasters Extraordinaire) are working to enhance our on-line offerings to IPMAAC members in ways that directly support our professional development mission. They have provided a facility through which members have the capability to easily share documents with each other electronically, to link to other Internet sites with information of interest to our profession, and to conduct E-mail discussions on professional/technical issues. They are also creating a technical FAQ page (i.e., a place where "frequently asked questions" and their answers can be shared) and are adding web pages on IPMAAC training and on local and state government assessment technology innovations.

The more input we receive from members in all of this, the better the possible result, so I encourage all of you to contribute your ideas on the important issue of member training and education.

October Board of Directors Meeting

The IPMAAC Board of Directors meets twice annually - in June (in conjunction with our annual conference) and then again in October (in conjunction with the annual IPMA training conference). Below, I've recapped some of the items dealt with by the Board at the October 1995 meeting in Baltimore.

Chicago, Illinois was selected as the site for the 1998 IPMAAC Conference. The Board policy on conference site selection was discussed. To the extent possible, the IPMAAC conference will regularly rotate through the four regions of the country: Southern (e.g., New Orleans, 1995), Eastern (e.g., Boston, 1996), Western (e.g., Newport Beach, 1997), and Central (e.g., Chicago, 1998). Conference sites are selected on a three-year plan of operation. The 1999 conference site should therefore be in the Southern region, and will be selected later this year. (Site suggestions from members are welcome.)
The Board reviewed the effectiveness of IPMAAC's strategy of offering skill-based workshops and sessions which are aimed at non-selection specialists at IPMA regional and national conferences. During 1995 we participated in the IPMA annual training conference in Baltimore, t he IPMA Central Region conference, and the IPMA Federal Section conference in Washington, D.C. These sessions, on subjects such as survey use and performance management, were well attended, suggesting that the strategy is working. We will continue to us e the same approach in our involvement in upcoming regional and national IPMA conferences
The Board agreed that the collection of recently published ACN articles on employment practices in foreign countries would be of wider interest to HR professionals. It was proposed that these articles be edited into an IPMAAC journal article for IPMA 's Public Personnel Management. Dan Masden, our past ACN Editor, has been asked to take on this challenge.
A new generic IPMAAC Training Brochure is under development. The aim is to develop a marketing piece that will describe IPMAAC training capabilities as well as our ability to tailor courses to meet specific jurisdiction needs. The brochure will highlight the topics and subtopics for which we have training capability and our ability to deliver cost-effective on-site training, relying on a cadre of regionally based trainers; and
IPMAAC's Electronic Communications Network (ECN) is currently and will continue through 1997 to be supported without organizational funding. Expansion of the IPMAAC resources made available to members through the Internet is anticipated, however. As IPMA begins its own Internet site development, links will be created between sites. There is a need to monitor usage and costs and determine if there is a need for a budget allocation to support the ECN after 1997.

As I said, these are just some of the highlights from our meeting. What you didn't get to see in the goofy picture of Jim Johnson passing the gavel to me (which was printed in the last ACN) was my passing of an official wooden crab mallet (Baltimore has some great eating and drinking spots) to him in exchange. And you can ask Kaye Evleth about my pool table prowess later that week (I whupped 'em!). So, rest assured that the IPMAAC Board of Directors had some fun in Baltimore, too. That's as it should be, isn't it?