Talent Development launches new leadership programs

With hopes of advancing leadership skills among staff and faculty, Talent Development has launched three new leadership programs for 2025.

The free programs — ASCENT for emerging leaders, CORE for existing supervisors and an intensive, one-week Mid-level Management Institute — aim to help JMU employees in their jobs and contribute to the university’s impact on students and the community.

The idea for the three courses came from a need to fill gaps in the leadership-training experience, says Jennifer Testa (’05M), director of Talent Development. “Our desire was to have something available for everybody on campus, no matter where they were in their leadership journey,” she said.

While MMI is geared toward mid-level managers, ASCENT aids employees who are not yet in supervisory positions, and CORE focuses on supervisors of one or more employees looking to enhance their leadership capabilities.

ASCENT and CORE are 12-month, cohort-style courses with each meeting one Monday per month. Both courses will have an optional break month in July.

The three programs are designed to provide foundational and advanced leadership skills, focusing on practical, JMU-specific competencies.

Though this latest effort is something new for Talent Development, it’s a natural fit for an office that already provides a wealth of free workshops and training options for staff and faculty. It also builds on previous workshops that were successful for Talent Development, while also addressing gaps that Testa and colleague Ren Oliver (’07, ’24M) noticed in leadership programming.

“I think JMU is unique in our professional development offerings, as we have so much available,” said Oliver, a professional development specialist in Talent Development. “We have hundreds of workshops a year that are open to all staff and faculty. We’re also starting to facilitate more retreats with departments than we’ve done in a very long time.”

Having a wider variety of leadership classes sets JMU apart while also offering employees more on-site, leadership-training options, Testa says. “I think it’s safe to say any college or university you talk to is going to have leadership programming as one of their top priorities,” she said, “but this approach of making sure that everybody is covered at every level is not something that I’ve experienced. That doesn’t mean it’s not out there. It’s just not something I’ve experienced.”

Testa, who first worked in Talent Development from 2005 to 2013, has pulled from previous iterations of leadership-training options to help her build the three new programs. “At that time, leadership was one of our areas of focus and we had a program called Emerging Leaders and a program called Supervision 101,” she said. “We tried to target individuals who weren’t yet in leadership roles, but saw it in their future at the university, and also individuals who were new to leadership.”

“When I left and came back, some new leadership programs had been started, but they didn’t have that same focus,” Testa explained. “I knew that we needed to reinvent those.”

Additionally, she noticed a gap between Supervision 101 and another leadership program called Impact³. “If you were somebody who had been in a leadership role for any number of years, there was nothing for you. When I came back, that gap still existed. That’s where we came up with the idea of having these different levels of leadership programs,” Testa said.

“We couldn’t bring back exactly what we had before, because the university has changed and the needs have changed,” she said. “But we still needed to have something for individuals who weren’t yet supervising or managing, and people who were new to it.” 

Testa and Dr. Dirron Allen (’00), associate vice president for Student Life and Involvement, co-led the MMI held in early January. “It worked out well that we already have a competency model in Talent Development,” Testa said. She and Allen combined the existing Talent Development competencies related to the role with research he had done on being an effective mid-level manager. 

Additionally, since CORE and MMI provide some crossover of ideas, Oliver says several people have signed up for both. Others, she said, plan to take all three programs to help them become more effective leaders throughout their careers.

“I’ve talked to some people who plan on participating in ASCENT this year,” Oliver said. “They want to enroll in CORE next year, and then they’ll go on to the MMI the year after that.”

Associate Director of Enrollment Marketing Heather Davis (’14, ’19M) appreciates that MMI helped her gain insight from university leaders. In registering for the weeklong course, Davis hoped “to gain extra perspectives on leadership styles and methods” to “bring my best to the table each day.”

“I think the most important takeaway for me was the reminder that as a mid-level leader we do have a large impact on our areas,” she said. “We are running strategy, making things happen daily and ensuring we’re meeting our manager’s expectations, all while leading our own teams. It’s just as important for us to take time for analyzing, planning and development to ensure a great environment for our colleagues.”

One standout for her was the networking breakfast, where participants could ask questions of university leaders and learn from their experiences. “It was also rewarding to connect with colleagues across campus who are in similar positions,” she said. “We learned we had a lot of common challenges and goals despite working in completely different areas of the university.”

In designing MMI, Oliver and Testa talked with various campus employees to identify topics that were important to them and what they were looking for in a leadership class.

ASCENT is supplemented by ideas from the book The Truth About Leadership by James M. Kouzes and Barry Posner. “Despite political change, social change, any sort of change in the world, those fundamental leadership attributes don’t change,” Oliver said.

“My vision of it was to be cohort-style,” she said of the programs. “I wanted something where people felt like they were part of a class. They got to know their other classmates really well.”

Though this is the pilot year for ASCENT, CORE and MMI, interest around campus has been positive, and most seats were already filled by late in the fall semester. Oliver expects the programs to fill even more quickly for the 2026 sessions. She and Testa also hope to partner with various campus departments to provide more leadership programming.

“Leadership programming for instructional faculty is very different from leadership programming for classified staff, yet there is crossover,” Testa said. “For now, we’re trying to make sure our department has something available at every level.”

“Eventually, we’d like to collaborate across campus so that no matter who you are, in what area you work, and what your main responsibilities are, you will know where to go to get the development that you need.”