College of Direct Support :: Curriculum :: College of Frontline Supervision & Management

College of Frontline Supervision and Management

The quality and stability of Direct Support Professionals (DSPs) is more often than not related to the quality and stability of their supervisor. In many instances good DSPs are promoted to supervisory positions without receiving the focused training they need to be effective leaders and managers in their new roles.

To respond to this, we created the College of Frontline Supervision and Management (CFSM).

Its instructional capabilities and administrative functions are identical to those of the College of Direct Support. Its target audience is Frontline Supervisors, lead workers, and DSPs who want to move into supervisory roles. The courses are detailed below and new CFSM courses are in the development stage.

TRAINING AND ORIENTATION

This course gives a comprehensive overview into considerations for revising training and orientation practices. There is an emphasis on improving the retention of high potential staff through improving these areas. Information includes: how to select appropriate training topics; the best methods for helping people learn; and how and why to assess employee skills. A special lesson on orientation as a separate aspect to retention that is often confused with training is included -

Lesson 1: Understanding Training
Lesson 2: Choosing Training Tropics
Lesson 3: Choosing Training Methods
Lesson 4: Understanding Employee Assessment
Lesson 5: Orientation Practices

FUELING HIGH PERFORMANCE

This course is an overview of interventions that help reduce turnover, but also increase employee satisfaction, productivity, and competence. Management, training, and organizational practices can have a large impact on the quality of an employee's work. This course is a review of methods and practices that ensure that high potential employees are also high performers -

Lesson 1: Competency-Based Training
Lesson 2: Employee Development
Lesson 3: Teamwork
Lesson 4: Performance Coaching
Lesson 5: Employee Participation, Motivation, and Recognition

DEVELOPING AN INTERVENTION PLAN

This course summarized the steps of developing an effective plan for reducing turnover and vacancy. Learners will be given an overview of the planning process. Learners will be taken through the steps of gathering, organizing and summarizing their retention trends. Based on these initial numbers, learners will be taught how to obtain additional information to track down the root causes of these numbers. Finally they will be taken step by step through developing their own plan -

Lesson 1: Understanding the Intervention Plan
Lesson 2: Organizational Assessment-Part 1
Lesson 3: Organizational Assessment-Part 2
Lesson 4: Developing Your Intervention Plan

RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION

Selection and hiring practices can have a big impact on turnover and vacancy rates. Finding high quality Direct Support Professionals (DSPs) who want to stick around starts the minute you start looking to fill a position. This course gives a comprehensive overview into considerations for revising selection and hiring practices. Starting with recruitment and marketing strategies, the lessons help you know how to ensure potential employees are actually interested in the work, and that they have the attitudes and abilities to do the work -

Lesson 1: Recruitment and Marketing
Lesson 2: Realistic Job Previews
Lesson 3: Selection and Hiring

FUTURE CDS/CFSM COURSES TO BE DEVELOPED

The CDS provides a steadily growing set of courses and lessons to meet the complex demands of direct support work. As the CDS course list is expanded, courses will continue to be based on the real needs of real workers in real settings. At the same time CDS will continue to meet the needs of others for high quality information about supporting people with developmental and other disabilities (e. g., parents and other family members, service coordinators, government agency staff). Much work has already been done to identify the important topics of future courses. As in the past, updates and new development will all be guided by the needs of those who purchase and use the CDS.