Close Up
Career training labor of love for Hennessy
Following some “soul searching,” Kelli Hennessy left a career in health care administration to develop and teach career and personal development classes at UB. Photo: NANCY J. PARISI
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“Even if I teach the same class every week, it’s always a different experience because the class is always so different.”
When Kelli Hennessy was a student at Ithaca College, her classmates envied her singular drive and focus. A chance conversation with a doctor while working in a medical office as a high school student led her to enroll in Ithaca’s distinctive program in health administration.
“My friends in college said they were jealous of me because I always had a direction, whereas they were all undecided. And it was just because I had a conversation with that doctor,” says Hennessy, who now manages career and personal development programs for University Human Resources’ Office of Organizational Development and Training (OD&T). After graduating from Ithaca, Hennessy immediately landed a job at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. After two years there managing outpatient clinical operations, she returned to her native Buffalo, where she assumed a similar position at Roswell Park Cancer Institute.
At Roswell for eight years, Hennessy rose rapidly through the administrative ranks, but missed having direct contact with the very people she’d set out to help by entering the health care field. “When I began my career in health care, I was coordinating chemo treatments with patients and their families and doing things that were more hands-on,” she says. “But as I moved up the career ladder, the work became more ‘behind the door.’” Still, Hennessy observed how much she enjoyed developing hospital staff training programs at Roswell, which at the time did not have a centralized training effort.
At this point, Hennessy did “some soul-searching” and made the decision to switch careers, subsequently earning a master’s degree in organizational communication and leadership from Canisius College. She joined UB’s HR staff in June 2008, finding it a “perfect fit” for her graduate degree and altered career path.
Today, from her office in Crofts Hall, Hennessy conceives, develops and delivers a wide range of classes for UB employees. Others within OD&T, headed by Scott Morris, associate vice president for university human resources, plan orientation and software programs, while Hennessy’s focus is career and personal development. It’s clearly a labor of love as she and her team offer classes on communication, coaching, resolving workplace conflict and other topics. Currently, OD&T is offering about 50 instructor-led courses each quarter; training programs are offered year-round.
Hennessy also helped develop UB’s Collaborative Performance Management (CPM) program, an intensive series of instructor-led sessions and self-paced e-learning courses for supervisors and managers—45 hours of total classroom time—that continue over a four-month period. CPM coursework concentrates on developing UB managers’ relationships with their employees, accenting skills in communication and coaching, giving effective feedback and learning to collaboratively create performance agreements with employees. CPM class members are organized in two groups of 20 and remain together throughout the four months. “You get to know the people in your group and develop resources across campus that maybe you never had before,” Hennessy explains.
Except for a handful of courses taught by outside trainers, Hennessy and her colleagues write all class materials and do so with the adult learner in mind. “We write them purposefully to be based on adult learning theories, which basically say that you must engage and involve adults hands-on—they don’t like to learn by lecture. So we map out each course to ensure that we have enough activity and engagement—through group discussions, cases studies and other activities—to make sure people are interacting with each other.”
Hennessy says HR’s training program has been well received by participants and is attracting a great deal of outside interest as wekk. “We’ve been getting calls from other SUNY schools and from outside the state of New York asking, ‘Where did you get that program and where did you buy it from?’ I feel like we’re really setting the standard.”
For Hennessy, the joy of imparting knowledge and insights to others can’t be equaled. “Even if I teach the same class every week, it’s always a different experience because the class is always so different. We get a really nice diverse mix of people from across campus from a wide array of departments—that’s really exciting.” In one recent class, for example, Hennessey welcomed individuals from Campus Dining and Shops, Residence Halls and Apartments, Career Services and UBMD, among other units.
Like those she teaches, Hennessy is intent on gaining additional training that enriches both work and life. An avid cook who loves to travel with her husband when time permits, she recently took up piano lessons and admits that it’s quite difficult—“like learning a different language,” she laughs.
“But I’m always looking for ways to advance,” she says. “I love to go to training programs that other people have because I learn tricks, hints and tips. I’ve even attended programs on topics that I teach and I still learn something new. Depending on who the instructor is and who’s in the room, there is always something new to discover.”
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