Work Tasks and Skill Set Uncovered: An Interview with Elizabeth Lepkowski
Elizabeth Lepkowski, Education Manager, American Society of Anesthesiologists
I occasionally encounter customers of our Learning Management System that are unaware of the need to hire people to support the system. Or they end up hiring a person who does not have the technical skills to administer the LMS. Sometimes customers make the false assumption that any administrative assistant can do the job. So I set out to ask veteran Association Education Managers and Learning Management System Administrators their opinion on how to hire the right person for the job. This blog entry is the first of a series of posts on this important topic.
The following is an interview with Elizabeth Lepkowski, the current Education Manager of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, a 53,000-member organization. As Elizabeth put it, “People don’t wake up one day and think, ‘Oh, I’m going to become an LMS administrator.’” Elizabeth cut her teeth as a LMS Administrator at the American College of Chest Physicians and worked to implement their first LMS, CourseStage. (Full disclosure: The company I manage, Web Courseworks markets the LMS called CourseStage.)
In the following clip, Elizabeth summarizes the interesting and sometimes surprising combination of skills that an LMS administrator needs to have. These skills range from various functional competencies and management skills to personal characteristics that help them excel in the job.
In the following clip, Elizabeth gives very helpful guidelines about specific questions to ask applicants. She explains how to dig deeper to determine the applicant’s level of experience using related software. There are also tests that can be used to help determine “level of tech savvy” and the applicant’s attention to detail.
In the following clip, Elizabeth tells how she looks for applicant degrees in training and organizational development and human performance. She also suggests looking for specific areas of experience when interviewing.
It is important for an LMS Administrator to have experience manipulating spreadsheets and data compiled in CSV files. In the following clip, Elizabeth touches on various specialized ASA projects that require these skills in order to enroll large number of learners.
In this clip, Elizabeth talks about the three levels of LMS Administrators at her organization, the American Society of Anesthesiologists. This includes the experienced administrators (Tier 2) who uses the system to assemble tests and courses in collaboration with subject matter experts. It is a helpful way to organize various task functions within the LMS team. This allows people with different areas of expertise to work together to make the LMS work for all areas of the organization.
