Helpful Hints for Working on your Tenure and Promotion Package!

From members of the CPD

Debbie Guelda

• Tell YOUR story
• Speak to your niche-how have you moved your department, college, university in a positive direction
• Always connect everything you do to the Shared Fundamental Values, Strategic Plan, Master Academic Plan.
• Don’t bury the gems (make your good work prominent in the narrative)
• Organization, organization, organization
• Make relevance of what you include clear (how have the 32 student thank-you notes shaped or reinforced what you are doing/want to change?)

 Keith Gora

• Make it “you.”
• Highlight the accomplishments that excite you the most.
• Make it representative of what it would be like to work with you as a colleague. To what degree are you creative, analytical, practical, detail-oriented, big picture-oriented? Let it show.
• Define the niche you have carved for yourself in each of the five areas, and how your contributions from within them are unique.
• The final format should be a collaboration between you and the readers. Yes, you can format it any way you like, but having tenure is being part of a team.

Season Ellison

• Solicit letters from people who can each speak to different elements of your work so that there’s great variety in the letters. Ask for letters from people outside your departments, colleges, fields. Choose a few letters very carefully that help you to tell your story and then actually use the letters to help you write your narrative.
• Try making a single Adobe document with links. That took immense pressure off me configuring and reconfiguring D2L.
• Don’t wait too long to get started and don’t underestimate the amount of time it takes! I pulled my first (TWO) all-nighters in a very long time. Don’t be like me! 😊
• Make sure you show how your professional development applies to your position. That was one of the biggest compliments I earned through this process.
• Save the document in many different places: on your computer, in OneDrive, in Dropbox, on an external hard-drive, on a friend’s computer. Peace of mind, my friends! Save it to many different places OFTEN. More than once, I ended up with a corrupt file and lost an hour or two of work, which is exhausting during an all-nighter!

Mahmoud Al-Odeh

• Get recommendation and support letters from your department members.
• Support your document with numbers. e.g. teaching effectiveness percentage.
• Show the reflection/ improvements have been done based on student surveys and feedback
• Include pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words.
• Take advantage of admins’ office hours and meet with them. Let them know who you are.