How we develop our Student Relationship Managers

Every year in the month of June, Medha welcomes its Student Relationship Managers (SRMs) to the Lucknow office for the SRM onboarding, prior to the start of the new academic year. The SRMs, new and returning, spend one month together to train for their roles before leaving for their assigned cities across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Haryana. This training covers the basics of Medha’s work, the role of an SRM, and intensive training on facilitating Medha’s three modules – CAB, LAB, and TAB.

In FY 17, the role of Learning and Development Manager was created to provide support to the SRMs and to standardize the program implementation across all regions. Since then, Medha has begun implementing efforts to track the professional growth of the SRMs. These efforts have helped build a culture of professional development for SRMs and have led to the retention of all SRMs from the 2017-18 academic year for the upcoming 2018-19 year, either as SRMs or as newly-promoted Area Managers (AMs).

This year, Medha will introduce two new concepts to the training and to the SRM role. First, a new concept of an SRM journey, the “Journey to Excellence”, will frame the year of work and development. The journey has three stages, “Embark”, “Enroute” and “Emerge” and each comes with its own goals and aims. In the first stage, SRMs will focus on understanding Medha’s values, completing the SRM role requirements, and setting their goals for the year. In the second, the SRMs will grow as professionals, communicate feedback, and solve issues in program implementation. In the last stage, they will be able to identify and recognize their successes and failures and prepare to set further goals.

Medha’s team has designed an Individual Development Plan (IDP) which will be used by the AMs and SRMs as a tool to measure growth, to set goals and achieve them. This will allow them to collectively measure growth throughout the year. This journey and the new processes that emerged with it, represent an institutional commitment to the personal and professional growth of the SRMs.

The SRMs will also have opportunities to grow through peer learning, peer demonstrations and “teach backs”. There will be opportunities, for SRMs to practice facilitating and give and receive feedback. Post-training, SRMs will be encouraged to stay in touch and share best practices both formally at the end of each month and informally throughout the year.

With the redesigned learning journey, increased opportunities for peer learning, AM-SRM feedback, and the addition of the IDPs, Medha will formalize and improve this process to develop effective SRMs and committed development professionals.