This document discusses strategies for developing faculty at Indian higher education institutions. It identifies major challenges as industry focus, research/innovation, and faculty availability/productivity. Faculty are described as an institution's "timbre" or essence that takes long-term nurturing to develop. The document outlines factors in faculty recruitment, development, and retention. It then provides specific strategies for faculty development including training, mentoring, feedback, and exposure. It recommends best practices like dedicated faculty development offices and funds for international travel. Overall strategies aim to address shortages and grow institutions' own faculty resources over time.

1. Let Us Grow Our Own Timbre:
Strategies for Faculty
Development
Anup K Singh, PhD

2. Three Major Challenges before Indian Higher
Education Institutions
• Industry focus
• Research and innovation
• Faculty availability and productivity

3. Growing Timbre
• Timbre is a scarce resource
• It take a long time to grow timbre
• It requires a lot of nurturance and care
• It also requires skills and resources to grow timbre
• All plants may not survive
• Final outcomes pay rich dividends

4. Faculty are Academic Timbre
• On an average, the IITs have 35% shortfall of faculty; NITs have 40%
shortfall, while IIMs have 25% shortfall
• Universities have done equally bad; they suffer from major shortage of
faculty
• Hardly there is an academic institution that does not have faculty shortfall
• There is short supply of trained faculty
• Therefore, each institution finds it so difficult to fill new positions
• Poaching and new hiring have their limitations
• An institution has to develop its own faculty to meet future requirements
• For this, it has to commit manpower, time and financial resources

5. Factors in Faculty Recruitment, Development,
and Retention
• Vision and mission (Explicit and implicit)
• Organisational strategy
• Financial resources
• Faculty manpower planning
• Orientation and strategy of HR division
• Institutional leadership
• Faculty labour market
• Organisational culture and systems

6. Structural Issues in Faculty Availability
• No HR function in the institutions
• The traditional function of ‘Establishment’ is unable to meet the
challenges
• Manpower planning is missing in institutions
• Deans are not empowered to fulfil faculty deficiency; the board has
to directly address the issue by creating appropriate roles and
earmarking appropriate budget
• The institutions should also be given more flexibility in filling faculty
positions by regulators

7. Financial Issues & Developmental Norms
• Staff salary is anywhere from 50% to 70% of total budget in an institution
• Senior faculty are almost twice more expensive than junior faculty
• Expenditure on faculty development is negligible in most institutions
• Unfortunately, numerous institutions cut cost by employing less faculty
members; they also employ junior faculty to save money
• An institution should earmark two week (12 days) for faculty development
for each instructor
• On an average, an institution should spend one month salary on the
faculty
• Every third year, an instructor should get some international exposure
• Faculty should be equally trained in pedagogical excellence and
assessment

8. Faculty Development Strategies
• Training and Education
• Mentoring
• Feedback
• Exposure to Developmental Exposure

9. Training and Education
• Educational upgradation
• Induction training
• Early career training
• Advanced training
• Short-term courses
• Professional development programmes
• Assessment during training

10. Feedback
• Feedback from students
• Quantitative feedback
• Qualitative feedback
• Feedback from peers and experts
• Classroom observation
• Video-based feedback
• Video based feedback
• Self-feedback
• General reflection
• Reflection vis-à-vis lesson plan

11. Mentoring
• First year mentoring
• Choice of a mentor
• Number of mentoring meetings
• Closure of mentoring relationship
• Evaluation of mentoring scheme

12. Exposure to Developmental Avenues
• Participation in seminars and conferences
• Industry internship
• Research internship
• Exposure to special interventions
• Provisions of leadership positions
• Special assignments
• International exposure

13. Best Practices in Faculty Development
• Office of Faculty Development, headed by a senior professional
• Training and develop for a period of two week every year
• Earmarking one month salary for training, development and research
• Giving one to two days free for the conduct of research
• Providing an opportunity with full funding for international exposure
once in three years
• Sabbatical after a period of six years to do research, write books, etc.

14. Strategies for Retention
• Develop and implement a career graph for faculty
• Develop an effective work culture
• Develop effective grievance mechanism system
• Pay competitive salary
• Communicate organisational expectations and measure them
• Provide incentives for stay
• Manage conflicts and reduce stress at the workplace

15. HR Strategies
• Use faculty satisfaction survey
• Use exit survey rigorously
• Develop Individual Career Development Plan
• Implement PMS effectively
• Give performance feedback regularly
• Mentoring for new faculty
• Measure and monitoring attrition rate
• Earmark appropriate budget for faculty development
• Create a position of Dean (Faculty Development)