Page 13 - CT Innovation in Education, June 2022

INNOVATION IN EDUCATION | TABLEAU – LEARN MORE AT TABLEAU.COM
A Data-Informed
Approach to Recruiting
and Retaining Faculty
At one Texas university, a deep dive into data is helping ensure equity and diversity in the workplace.
SHIVA JAGANATHAN
Chief Data Officer and Executive Director of Institutional Reporting, Research and Information Systems University of Texas at Austin
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS
at Austin, data plays a key role in helping
us build a diverse faculty and ensure pay equity, which keeps us competitive with peer institutions and attractive to a wide range of students. A faculty that is diverse in terms of gender and race leads to new avenues for research and higher student satisfaction.
Our equitable hiring practices rely on
a holistic process that involves using peer comparison metrics and taking into account the diversity of thoughts and skill sets that
will benefit the university. To ensure that our salaries are equitable, we leverage metrics such as student evaluations of instructors, faculty productivity data, community involvement and peer comparison analysis of awards, citations and other scholarly activities.
Improving Faculty Awards
with Data
UT Austin has a strong commitment to nominating faculty for major awards across racial and gender lines. However, we wanted to pinpoint any gaps in the nomination process to make sure we retain talented faculty members by recognizing a diversity of research.
We chose to partner with Tableau because
the company offers a user-friendly process for developing self-service dashboards. In this case, an
awards analysis dashboard helps us quickly identify under-awarded faculty in each department and drill down into race/ethnicity and gender information.
As a result, we have achieved better equity in the awards nomination process and improved our faculty recruitment and retention efforts.
Boosting Productivity and
Satisfaction
In addition, the training that Tableau offers has allowed us to retain talented data analysts who value the opportunity to become information developers rather than simply consumers
of data. By empowering our staff members, Tableau’s technology and support have boosted productivity and job satisfaction.
And the impact of data doesn’t stop with employees: Students also benefit from self- service portals with dashboards targeted to ensuring their educational success.
By putting valuable information into the hands of decision-makers, UT Austin is building a data culture that improves our current performance and prepares us for whatever challenges might lie ahead.
Shiva Jaganathan is the Chief Data Officer and Executive Director of Institutional Reporting, Research and Information Systems at the University of Texas at Austin.
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