What is The Future of RDs? – Jack of All Trades or Master of One?

“A jack of all trades is a master of none,” might just be the phrase epitomizes my experience as a Community Director.  For the first hour of the day, I was a conduct hearing officer when I was reading incident reports and sending charge letters.  I immediately became a supervisor and an advisor when my RA stepped into my office to talk about their RA role and their experience as a student.  Later that afternoon, I was a learning designer in the curriculum meeting and then an event planner when I met with my building council to plan a walking tacos event.  I became a finance associate as I was placing the order for that event and submitting documentation to spend state funds.  Some evenings, I was off the clock, but others I was a first-responder, mental health advocate, and an aspiring detection canine (as I sniffed around various doors trying to ascertain which one was the source of the pervasive odor of cannabis).

When I look back at those times, I feel a mix of pride, nostalgia, and relief.  Truthfully, I wonder how I got it all done.  Knowing that the human brain isn’t built to multitask, the part of me that strives for efficiency and streamlined processes always thought that specialization would offer a better solution.  For example, rather than having three individuals in a one multifaceted role: an event planner, a conduct hearing officer, and an educational designer, we would get a lot more events planned, conduct cases heard, and facilitation guides written if we had one individual – ideally whose talents aligned with the work – specializing in each role.  

However, it isn’t quite so simple.  I’m reminded that the full phrase is “A jack of all trades is a master of none but oftentimes better than a master of one.”  So much of the magic comes from interdisciplinary work and connection that comes from a multifaceted role.  When the event planner also has a background in education, the event can combine engagement and learning.  If a student knows the hearing officer is the building council advisor, they might be less intimidated walking into a conduct hearing.  When the person who responds to your crisis is a familiar face, the support you receive can feel less clinical.  Further, as I stepped into a new role, I was grateful for the breadth of experience the RD role provided.  My current work focuses on residential education, but I’m still able to engage in the discussions of a leadership team since my background includes various aspects of housing and residence life.

While the thought of breaking up the RD role to allow for specialization feels like a direct attack on my idealism and nostalgia, these aren’t great decision-making tools.  The reason the breadth of the RD role worked well for me is because it felt like an appropriate step in a long-term progression; I went from RA to GA to RD with aspirations of a career in higher education.  Hence, I never felt overwhelmed by new information, and the skills I was developing felt valuable.  However, RD recruitment currently feels constant, and the candidates with a traditional ResLife background are few and far between.  My institution has seen and hired candidates with backgrounds in business, social work, K-12 teaching, and more.  While some may have been student leaders as an undergrad, not many were RAs and even fewer were GAs within ResLife.  Additionally, these folks have varying aspirations.  While some are thinking of a career in higher education, others are looking at future paths outside of higher ed, strategically using the educational benefit to pursue MBAs, JDs, or advanced degrees in other fields.  

One possibility is that we are just engaged in a waiting game until the ripples of interruption from the pandemic fade.  However, it’s hard to see an end to that ripple effect with new students and professionals experiencing the “new normal.”  If we embrace this norm rather than fighting it, accepting that talent pools may not include candidates with a traditional higher education background or aspirations within the field, creating specialized roles may be a viable solution.  With that in mind, such a transition still requires a great deal of ideation, and there are numerous components to be considered.

• Batching Tasks – A first step to considering how to break up the RD role is grouping tasks that would utilize similar talents and fit into 40 hours weekly.  Perhaps we group conduct, crisis, and student outreach into one role and curricular development and LLC coordination into another.  One of the advantages of this process would be the ability to create roles with fewer but more specific qualifications.  For example, maybe the work of managing a front desk and its schedule may be more fitting of a Graduate Assistant than a professional, and a professional who works primarily with event planning and logistics may need not need a master’s degree.  Some tasks may even be able to be delegated to student staff, automated, or eliminated altogether.
  • This sort of grouping also allows for more strategic and equitable compensation.  The workload of any RD is hard to predict, but there’s certainly an issue with the model where an RD with 12 RAs and 600 first-year students has the same title and benefits as the RD with 7 RAs and 300 upperclassmen.

• Redesigning Training – There are advantages to cross-discipline collaborations when folks with varied background enter ResLife.  However, it also means that we can’t assume that pro staff will be familiar with names like Astin, Perry, or Chickering.  “Dualism and relativism,” “self-authorship,” or even just “challenge and support” won’t be a common starting place.  Identifying the core philosophy and competencies of a department’s work and utilizing very practical models and theories that align with them may be more effective in teaching those without a background or long-term aspirations in student affairs.

• Rethinking Professional Development – Learning new functional areas and attending higher ed webinars and conferences will likely remain standbys for those pursuing a traditional higher ed career, but they might be useless to someone seeking an MBA or JD.  If we acknowledge that entry-level professionals might have varying aspirations, we need to consider what we might offer in terms of professional development.  The educational benefit of working at a university might be a given, but do we allow PTO or even professional development funds to support attendance of non-higher ed conferences?  

• On the flip side, it would also be important to expose those interested in higher education as a career to components of ResLife and other functional areas not included in their specialized role.  This might involve mores specific professional development planning with those folks to expand their responsibilities.

• Preparing Mid-Level Managers – One of the advantages of having many RDs with a uniform job is that their manager has uniform supervisory responsibilities.  While their style may vary based on the individual they supervise, the rough style of supervision, like the agenda for a 1-1 meeting, is likely similar.  Having a set of different roles would require a separate approach and standards for each role.  Ensuring mid-management has resources to supervise effectively will be key.

• Maintaining Intentional Redundancy – Handling an absence of any length or a vacancy will always put a strain on a team.  Still, the process of covering these responsibilities is easier when a team of RDs has the same job since everyone knows how to cover the vacant role.  To make a set of specialized roles work, it would be necessary to plan in some redundancy so that a single vacancy doesn’t lead to an inability to complete a certain type of work. 

• Improving Communication Networks and Systems – One of the benefits of the current model is that an RD is likely the central node of communication for everything occurring in their building.  They’ll likely notice if a building council is trying to program at the same time as another event, and when they see an incident report come in, they’ll be able to recognize if the name is a student staff member or a student of concern.  Decentralizing responsibilities will require that we plan more thoroughly our methods of communication to ensure that collaborations are strong and that details at the intersections of separate roles are not missed.

I’m not certain that creating more specialized roles in lieu of the standard RD position is the right move; there is a tradeoff from transitioning from “jacks of all trades” to “masters of one.”  It’s easy to find reasons why this transition from the status quo might be suboptimal, but it’s important to also acknowledge flaws in the status quo itself.  Switching to a model of more specialized roles for folks with different talents and career aspirations would broaden our applicant pools — perhaps eliminating the masters requirement for some roles, allow us to allocate resources to the facets of the RD role that need the most attention, create more fairness in workload and compensation, and relieve the bottleneck that results from a relatively few leadership roles compared to entry level jobs.  While it won’t solve all problems and may even create new ones, the option of specialized roles is at least worth considering as we navigate the modern challenges of residence life.