Making Change: The Benefits of ctcLink

Director of Change Management Jane Beatty

Let’s continue to explore some of the aspects of what will change when we go live on ctcLink in May 2015. Some of us here at the college don’t use the legacy systems (PPMS, SMS or FMS). But even in those cases, ctcLink will improve our work lives. All employees will have access to a new self-service online portal, where you can change basic information–things like your address or phone number–without hunting down the right contact person or form.

There will be separate areas in the portal designed for Clark employees, students, and faculty, to adjust to their different needs. But if you’re both a student and an employee at Clark, good news! Your information will be automatically updated throughout the system–no more having to submit the same update to multiple systems.

Here is an example of an employee self-service screen shot–this is a mockup, but shows an example of what will be available in ctcLink self-service centers.

For those people at the college who use the legacy systems every day, the improvements will be more dramatic. Staff in Corporate & Continuing Education, for example, anticipate a significant change. CCE has been using a separate student management system for over six years; with ctcLink, they will all be using the same system the rest of the college uses, making everything from class management to student management much more streamlined and easily managed.

Faculty, meanwhile, can look forward to having a system that can apply a prerequisite screen for students’ registration after grades are submitted. Currently, faculty often wind up spending a lot of the first day of classes checking the prerequisites for each student, because students who passed the prerequisite class registered before the preceding quarter’s grade was submitted. Often faculty don’t even know students lack the prerequisite for the class, so they have to identify those students and find a way of speaking privately with them the first day. This just adds to the number of overwhelming tasks associated with the first week.

These are just a few examples of the changes that the new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system will bring to Clark College. Stay tuned for more examples and information on this change that Clark College, and all 34 community and technical colleges in Washington, will experience.

For more information on Clark’s adoption of ctcLink, visit the Change Management area on Clark’s intranet (login required).

Photo: Clark College/Jenny Shadley