Faculty Credential Management: Five Essential Elements

Maintaining credentials on the academics in your institution is essential. We all know that during certain accreditation visits, accreditors will ask for them. Faculty credentials, however, are often needed multiple times a year by different departments. They are used for grant proposals, evaluation, promotion, recognition, sharing faculty expertise, publicity, student recruitment, and more.

Having this documentation and information available when you need it is important; but what does it take to have a good faculty credential management system?

Cloud-Based

If your academic credentials are still managed in a file cabinet in the Provost’s, Dean’s, or Human Resources offices, it’s time to join the twenty-first century! Not only does a cloud-based solution save trees and physical storage space, it allows the appropriate documents to be shared with the appropriate people when needed, without hunting and begging.

Secure Location

With the rise in identity theft, securing your faculty’s personal information is of utmost importance. Addresses are on almost every faculty member’s CV, and even more alarming is the fact that transcripts before the early 1990’s frequently used Social Security numbers to identify students. If you are gathering and sharing paper documents, the security of those documents is always in jeopardy.

User-Friendly

Let’s face it. Complicated systems that require hours of training for faculty to use are not effective. Faculty and administrators have more important things to do than spend hours trying to figure out how to use a complicated system that only makes sense to a programmer. While academic papers might win points for being somewhat abstruse and recondite, the same is not true for the software programs. The credential management system must be easy to access and intuitive to use.

Reporting

Are you or your assistant using a spreadsheet and manually checking documents to see if each faculty member has updated their credentials? This is obviously not an efficient process and it leaves a lot of room for human error. You should be able to easily run a report to see who has and has not turned in their information. You should be able to run reports on key information and quickly send notification to faculty who are missing items.

Easy to Share

From presenting a list of faculty accomplishments on your website, to providing an accreditation team with faculty credentials during a visit, you want to make it easy to share the needed information. A seamless system for document sharing, or providing the appropriate file for upload, will save time, frustration, and money.

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The right credential management system could save your institution hundreds of wasted hours finding, filing, tracking, and following-up on documents and information that is needed multiple times a year. Attaché by Prof360 is an innovative credential management solution that allows easy access on a cloud-based platform. With its user-friendly design, your faculty won't mind uploading their own documents. If faculty credentials are stored in different locations, it's time to centralize them to save time, money and paper.