The Professional Development (PD) feature on myFolio provides staff and faculty with an intuitive platform to document, submit, track completion of, and reflect on professional development activities.
- Approval workflow for PD items can be configured by the school's myFolio Admin.
- myFolio has a notification icon that will indicate PDs awaiting approval and PDs that have been approved/rejected.
- The Professional Development Report consolidates PD activities and provides summary information, filtering capacity, and data exportation.
Creating the Professional Development Request Form
To set up the Professional Development Workflow, click Manage then Professional Development.
Make sure the Professional Development toggle is turned on to enable PD tracking.
Title your form and provide any custom instructions. These will appear at the top of the page when users submit a professional development form.
In the next box provide any custom instructions for the reflection notes users are prompted to write after they have completed their PD.
Next select the default currency for new professional development requests.
Now you can add custom questions to the professional development form. For each custom field, provide a question or prompt title and select the response type. The responses can appear as a short text field or a long text field. You may also add optional template text to the response box. To add additional fields, click add custom field. When you are finished adding questions, scroll to the bottom of the page and click update.
Customizing the Approval Process
There are three options for the Professional Development Approval process - no approval required, sequence, or pool.
No Approval Required
If you select no approval required, users will be able to save Professional Development submissions to their profile without going through an approval process.
Approver Pool
When using an Approver Pool, you will select users to form a group who can approve requests. Once you set the number of approvals required, any of the individuals in the pool can approve the professional development submission. A submission will have to receive the number of approvals required in order for the submission to move from submitted to approved. All members of the pool will receive a notification when a PD form is submitted.
To add users to the pool, search or click the name of the person. Then set the number of approvals required from the group by typing the number into the box or clicking the arrows next to the number. Once you are finished, click update.
Sequence Approval
Sequence approval creates an approval process with up to 3 ordered steps. The submission will only move from submitted to approved if each step of the sequence approves it. Approvers are notified in order when it is their turn to review a professional development submission. Approvers can be a user’s direct supervisor and change based on the requester, a specific individual, or a group or pool of approvers.
When using a group or pool as the approver in a sequence approval process, any of the individuals in the pool can approve the professional development submission. A submission will have to receive the number of approvals required in order for the submission to move from submitted to approved.
For each step, search or click the name of the person to add them to the process. To change the order of approvers, click on the dots next to the step and drag to the appropriate order.
In cases where an employee has no direct supervisor assigned, you can set a default substitute approver to approve where a direct supervisor step applies.
Once your sequence is finalized, click update.