Leadership and Management in Higher Education

Leadership and Management in Higher Education
Chheang Sangvath (Associate Dean, College of Education;
Director, Office for Student Academic Affairs)

Leadership and Management in Higher Education Chheang Sangvath (Associate Dean, College of Education; Director, Office for Student Academic Affairs)

In his keynote address, H.E. Pit Chamnan (Secretary of State, Ministry of Education Youth and Sport) noted that “there are three main key indicators which need to be covered … human resource, improvement, and context,” H.E. Pit Chamnan emphasized that the quality of prospective employees is the main issue that HEIs in Cambodia need to consider: their students develop both the hard and soft skills to serve the job market’s needs. “The main objective of the workshop is to turn the theory of training into practice”. This will be the aim of the next meeting between MoEYS and representatives from all HEIs to improve the quality of education in 2013 (see following article). He also thanked the World Bank for funds and their cooperation.


Thereafter, the first speaker, Prof. John Fielden, stated that this workshop aimed to strengthen the quality of management and leadership at HEIs so as to help them respond to the Royal Government of Cambodia’s desire for increased human resource development, especially with the upcoming ASEAN community in 2015. Thus it sought to identify the management challenges that HEIs face and to help them to plan what actions to take, to be followed up in six months’ time (see following article). To this end, there is the need to introduce HEIs to global best practices in selected areas of university management; and to encourage HEIs to discuss which of these are relevant to their situation and how they should be applied.


Next, Prof. Stephen Willis presented on Finance and Financial Management, in particular the rules, conduct and approaches for improving effective financial management.
This was followed by two presentations by Prof. David J. Lock. The first was on Leadership and the Need for Strategic Management in the Cambodian Higher Education program. He identified the key components as being planning, adopting, documenting, implementation and monitoring. A necessary first step in the process is to identify Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats.


His second presentation was on Human Resource Strategies: Policies and Procedures. He noted that the purpose of human resource management is to enable the objectives of the organization to be achieved most effectively through optimising recruitment; through training and development; through motivation;al leadership; by ensuring legal compliance; and by developing and maintaining an organizational culture. Some key performance indicators for human resources are: staff absences and turnover; staff engaged with PhDs; vacancies filled; local, age, ethnic, and gender profiles; staff satisfaction surveys; and training targets met. What is human resource development for academics? Enhancing the capability and motivation of the individuals in the delivery of their work, which may include development of: academic status; skills and attributes of pedagogy; and leadership/management skills.
The next speaker, Prof. Robert Gibson, presented on Leadership where he examined some important aspects of leadership and management so that institutions can think about best practices and how to develop the motivation and energy necessary to achieve their aims and objectives.


Finally, Prof. Peter Williams presented on Quality Assurance: Principles and Practice. Quality is about providing good learning opportunities to students. These should be designed to ensure that diligent students learn effectively at the required level, in accordance with predetermined intended learning outcomes. He noted that there is widespread confusion about what quality assurance is and what it can, and cannot, be expected to achieve. In particular, quality assurance is frequently expected to perform conflicting roles: internal quality assurance (self-management of quality and standards by the academic community) vs. external quality assurance (provision of a means of institutional and/or governmental regulation, monitoring and control of higher education).