Meeting & Agendas

The meeting was called to order at 10:00 a.m.

The meeting was opened with a welcome and introductions of new members and then existing members briefly introduced themselves as well. New members to the committee include Marcela Nouzovska with ACC CE, who is beginning the collaboration with our department; Jen Moran-Parker with The A List an Ashby Staffing Company, who can help provide more understanding of what Austin employers want in the current market, and Ginger Morris with the Office of the Attorney General representing legal administrative concerns.

Deborah began the discussion to review the minutes for the September 28, 2020 meeting. Deborah explained that the committee discussed changing the name of the department from Office Administration & Technology to Business Office Technology due to a request from Dr. Cook to align the name of the department with the Houston Community College Business Technology Office Administration program. Deborah shared that the name of the department may need to change again to more clearly represent the nature of our program with additional input from hiring managers and staffing agencies represented on the committee. It is currently under discussion. The committee unanimously approved the Fall 2020 minutes.

Deborah shared that the department has begun a new collaboration with area high schools for an articulation path for students to gain college credit for ACC Excel, PowerPoint, and Word office administration courses while still in high school. Students will complete the MOS Certification and then they will receive dual credit for the corresponding office administration course. The first cohort moving through the program will finish this Spring semester and we will see the results after that.

Deborah began the discussion by announcing that we have been asked to align the department with the Continuing Education (CE) department to create a more seamless pathway for students to obtain academic certificates after completing the CE Administrative Assistant program. This change will be implemented in Fall 2021. Deborah then shared that the Provost, AVP, and Dean have a new grant coming through, the Community Colleges Growth Engine Fund Grant, and have chosen our department to collaborate with the CE department to create new pathways for students to articulate into college credit programs and be able to effectively transfer between the two programs. Additional goals include creating badges or new certificates for a Customer Service certification and Google Suite certification. The committee will be considering 1) what are the regional industry standards, and what skills are hiring managers looking for, and 2) how can the department create these new certificates to fill the needs of local employers. The committee needs to move quickly because these changes will be implemented in Fall 2021, and Deborah asked the committee to begin discussing what changes the department needs to put into place to meet these goals. Jen Moran-Parker began the discussion by stating that the employers she works with want employees that can sell very strongly and was very supportive of a Customer Service certificate addition to the program. She noted that her clients need very strong customer service skills over the phone, in particular. Jen also added there is a renewed demand for data entry skills with employers. And employees need to be able to find familiar data sets in different types of documentation. Jen also noted that a working knowledge of QuickBooks is very much in demand now, and employers need a well-rounded administrative professional that can enter data and run basic reports in the application. Smaller employers need this type of admin assistant for their offices. Debbie Jamieson then agreed and noted that she is doing more budgeting work in her job because they have relationships with many different vendors, and also need to allocate the budget appropriately at the beginning of every fiscal year. It needs to be correct so every department will have enough funds to operate for the year. Budgets must be divided into categories such as training, consumables, vendors and emergencies and admin assistants need to have a good understanding of financial concepts. Deborah agreed that understanding financial budgeting was expected when she worked in administrative positions and is important to keep in mind while considering expansion of the department program. Darrell then agreed with the previous speakers that having a working knowledge of an accounting application such as QuickBooks is a very important skillset to prepare to work in the current regional marketplace in Central Texas. Darrell asked if the program has any courses that address this issue and Deborah responded that the department does require Business Math that covers common financial tasks encountered in a business office including tax preparation, payroll computations, insurance coverage and claims, and understanding interest rates applied to financial instruments. Deborah agreed that some kind of basic accounting or QuickBooks course could possibly be added to the curriculum. Mary Joy added that project management is important in her work at St. Edward’s University and she uses Smartsheet for this. Roberto then added that the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) has identified targeted occupations in the Austin area and these occupations are on the TWC website. He mentioned that TWC is a partner with ACC as a training provider, and TWC will only pay for training that is related to current in-demand occupations. He suggested using the guidelines for training that are already developed through TWC and qualifies for financial support through the federal WIOA program administered by TWC. He checked the occupations on the TWC website and found several relating to bookkeeping and accounting that are supported by these programs. He pointed out that if students cannot find enough funding through ACC, they could check with TWC regarding payment for their college classes for certificates. These accounting certificates are mainly included in the Accounting Department at this time. Roberto provided the link to the TWC webpage and this will be included in the Committee Meeting Notes on the Google drive. Deborah then asked Marcela about the CE certificates offered at this time. Marcela said that TWC does send a lot of students to the CE program and provides financial support for students earning these certificates. The Accounting certificates include 48 hours of accounting and 28 hours of QuickBooks training, totaling 76 hours. This is a very popular certificate and CE does have an articulation agreement with the ACC Accounting Department for students to qualify for the college credit certificate if they want to continue further. Marcela thought that accounting courses could be added to the Admin. Assistant certificates, but this would make the certificates longer. Feedback from students is they don’t need the accounting part at entry-level jobs. Marcela mentioned CE had tried to teach QuickBooks without teaching basic accounting principles, and it was not very successful. CE has not yet decided how to make the accounting course any shorter than it is. Marcela also asked Roberto and Jen their thoughts on finding students using Business Office Technology or Office Administration. Jen thought the Business Office Technology name is vague and it might be hard to find our Administrative Assistant programs using that title. Debbie also agreed that the name Business Office Technology has not been successful yet in the industry, due to it not being recognized as keywords for Administrative Assistant programs. Marcela also asked how will students find our program using Business Office Technology and the committee agreed that is would be more difficult to find office administration courses using Business Office Technology. Roberto also thought that the Business Office Technology name is too vague for potential students to find the program. He feels the title needs to be more specific using recognizable industry terms so employers and potential employees can find our administrative assistant programs online. Ginger joined the conversation and while she feels a background in accounting is helpful, she is more interested in how much administrative experience candidates have. She feels experience is more important than level of education. She does appreciate that accounting and QuickBooks is very good, but also needs employees that are highly organized and can type very well. She does not see many younger candidates that can type well enough to accomplish the job duties. Deborah agreed that the department does have a lot of students that have not learned touch typing, and we do require touch-typing courses and data entry in the programs. Ginger agreed that many candidates do not understand the value of touch-typing skills and asked how can we communicate this to potential students. She noted that more people do not know how to write checks anymore due to the prevalent use of digital banking. Deborah agreed and reminded the committee that these topics are taught in the department’s Business Math course. Deborah then asked Ginger what skills could be taught in the courses that would meet the administrative needs in her office. Ginger replied that administrative assistants must be able to multi-task and communicate clearly with all external vendors and internal administrative levels in the office. Admins need to know many applications such as Excel and accounting programs such as Salesforce. They also need strong record retention skills, especially in a legal office where records have varying lengths of required retention and all records must be accurately tracked and accounted for. Debbie Jamieson confirmed how important accurate record retention is and requires strong attention to detail, follow-through, and categorization, so records may be found if necessary. Ginger added that her office is going paperless and admins need to be able to scan into pdf and retain documents in the original form, so knowledge of document formatting is very important. Ginger also mentioned that time-keeping is very important and strong data entry skills and knowledge of time-keeping applications are valuable in her office. Matilde also agreed that knowledge of accounting basics, spreadsheets, Word, PowerPoint, Adobe Acrobat, Smartsheet, and keyboarding skills are very important in the workplace now. She mentioned how important it is to make students aware of the skills that jobs require, and to offer mentoring for students to be able to transition from school to employment. She also mentioned conducting online meetings in Teams or Zoom or other applications is very important and to always stay abreast of new applications in the work environment. She asked if effort and persistence can be taught through the program, and encourage students to embrace lifelong learning to advance their careers. Deborah then asked the committee if knowledge of Google Suite was important in their experience. Jen replied that employers do want Google Suite skills in employees and this would be very beneficial to students going into the workforce. She added that she also sees more demand for MAC OS experience as well. Mary Joy agreed that St. Edward’s also uses Google Suite. The committee unanimously agreed to continue to develop curriculum ideas to expand the program to meet the current and near-future workforce needs in the Central Texas Regional area.

Deborah informed the committee that the department is in the process of hiring one new full-time faculty, and one new adjunct instructor to add to the team and we will keep the committee updated on this process at each meeting.

Deborah ended the meeting letting the committee know that we will create a folder on Google drive with the minutes and helpful links included, and members will be able to leave comments if they wish to add something after the meeting is concluded. The meeting was adjourned at 11:00 a.m.