Committee Chair

Taylor, Jessica N.

Committee Member

Crawford, Elizabeth K.; Rausch, David W.

Department

Dept. of Applied Leadership and Learning

College

College of Health, Education, and Professional Studies

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

Within the last decade, Cleveland State Community College has gone through many changes, including transitioning between five different administrations from 2021 to 2025. With this change in administration, there have been many different philosophies of how professional development should be handled at the college. The priority of professional development has shifted between very high and very low, and the ownership of active initiatives was unclear. Recently, college administrators have implemented a program intended to allow PD at the college to have more structure and visibility within the employee community. Literature in both Higher education and other industries discusses the importance of professional development (Cruz, 2018; Danvila-del-Valle et al., 2019; Maier, 2022). It is imperative that the processes related to adult learning are integrated into any workplace in order to get the most out of the workforce (Brieger et al., 2020; Bui et al., 2021; De Matas & Keegan, 2020; Lee et al., 2022). While higher education is used to working with student learning, it is important to look toward other industries for training processes (Donovan et al., 2023; Reynolds & Dolasinski, 2019). Throughout this program evaluation, qualitative and quantitative data were used to determine the effectiveness of the professional development program at Cleveland State. The data indicate that the program is mostly meeting the stated outcomes. Employees are learning, developing, and maintaining positive relationships throughout the course of their work. The evaluation results suggest that while the program is mostly effective, there are areas in which college administrators can focus to continue to improve the program.

Acknowledgments

To Dr. Crawford and Dr. Rausch, thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to me and to offer advice when I found myself in what felt like an unprecedented experience. I am grateful for the time that you offer to me and all of the students in the LEAD program. I never thought I would be here, but your words of encouragement and nuggets of wisdom encouraged me to keep going. To Dr. Taylor, my chair, you encouraged me to ask questions and never once made me feel as if I didn’t belong. Thank you for sharing your experiences with me and laughing with me about mine. Thank you for pointing out areas of improvement while letting me know that my work was good. Thank you for weeding through the quagmire of grammatical mistakes and finding the meaning and letting me know it was there even when I didn’t see it. Most of all, thank you for being human and seeing me as human. I can’t say thank you enough for your time.

Degree

Ed. D.; A research project of practice submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Education.

Date

12-2026

Subject

Career development--Education (Higher); Community college administrators; Organizational change; Self-managed learning

Keyword

Professional Development, Community College, Employee learning, Higher Education, Self-Directed Learning, Workplace Learning

Discipline

Community College Education Administration

Document Type

Doctoral dissertations

DCMI Type

Text

Extent

xv, 212 leaves

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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