How Career Schools Make Operational Changes Stick

A new process doesn't become real because the leadership team agrees to it. The harder work starts when an operational change has to move through people, departments, habits, and records that still have to function while the change is happening.

Three operators who have lived that middle stretch described the same pattern from different institutions. The details of the change mattered, whether the work involved software, process design, or both, but coordination, morale, ownership, and follow-through determined whether the change held.

Operational change stalls when one person holds the process

David Shelpman, Group Campus President and COO at HCI College, describes his role as "the glue." It's an honest description of what operations leaders do, and an early warning about the structural risk a change effort can expose. When one person holds institutional knowledge, the process depends on that person staying present, informed, and available.

"When things went awry, it's when we had single points of failure and people working in silos," David said.

Stephanie Goodwin, Co-Director of FA Operations at Spa Tech Institute, recognized the same pattern. In her case, she had become the single point of failure. Data lived in collaborative spreadsheets distributed across the company. When someone took PTO, work stopped or got duplicated. When she was out, the question wasn't who would do the work so much as whether anyone knew what the work was.

The real danger is a process that quietly depends on one person being fine, then leaves the school guessing when that person isn't available.

Teams carry the change while the school keeps running

Each leader expected a different hard part. None of them predicted how much energy the people side would take.

Stephanie prepared for the data import to be difficult, but it wasn't the part that stayed with her. The harder work was keeping morale steady while people processed uncertainty, frustration, fear, and fatigue. A change project may look procedural on a timeline. Inside the institution, it's emotional labor layered on top of daily work.

David's challenge was operational. HCI College kept running while the change work was underway, which meant the team was doing two full-time jobs at once. His answer was to identify the people willing to carry more of that work while the broader team stayed focused on students.

Ryan Barnhart, Academic Implementation Manager at Education Affiliates, faced the scale version of the same problem. Education Affiliates operates 36 campuses. Every challenge that exists at one location exists 36 times, and a solution that works at one campus doesn't automatically transfer to the others. His role, which didn't exist when implementation began, became the work of building champions at each campus.

"A lot of my role now is being the company cheerleader and building culture and adoption across all 36 of our campuses," Ryan said. "It's important to build those champions, and I get to do that all the time."

Unassigned work can be mistaken for progress

David described the early state with a phrase every operator knows, saying, "It was as clear as mud." When ownership is assumed rather than assigned, the task belongs to no one. At HCI College, the team could treat silence as progress until silence itself became the problem.

"We got to trust but verify," David said, "and we've got to have backup support. When one person's out of the office, the extra work isn't just putting someone else here to do a plug and play. Now I have to train you on what you are doing."

Verbal information gets missed, emails pile up, and handoffs slip between people who each assumed someone else was handling it. A structured task log doesn't solve every coordination problem, but it gives the team a place to make ownership visible before the work starts drifting.

"Being able to clearly assign and direct folks on what they need to be working on was something we had to shift on when we first started our implementations," Stephanie said, "because that task log will build up so quickly."

At Education Affiliates, early coordination ran by committee. No one person owned the function, so the shared services team absorbed it collectively. The approach fit a culture already built for flexibility, but it became more durable once Ryan's role was created to carry the work forward.

Training and reporting carry you beyond rollout

Every institution starts a major change with assumptions about what the new process or system will eliminate. Some prove right, and many don't.

Ryan's team assumed attendance would resolve itself once the system was live. What they didn't account for was the continuing training required to keep 36 campuses aligned. "We thought attendance would be fixed forever," he said. "Somehow we wouldn't have to train and retrain everyone over and over and over again. Obviously we don't exist in a vacuum."

David expected out-of-the-box reporting to cover what HCI College needed. HCI still had its own reporting and integration requirements, so the work became identifying which custom reports mattered, building APIs where needed, and treating the vendor relationship as an ongoing partnership rather than a handoff.

"We thought it was all going to be perfect," David said. "The partnership with Portico has taught us that even if it's not perfect, we'll get it as close to perfect as we can."

Data cleanup and department input need to happen first

Each leader came away with different advice. None of it was about the software alone.

Ryan wished the organization had invested earlier in digital fluency among faculty. Assuming end users would figure it out on their own turned out to be wrong for a meaningful portion of staff. Implementation training was strong. Internal preparation before rollout wasn't deep enough.

Stephanie's advice was practical. Take on one major change at a time, review your data before a deadline forces the issue, and put a stakeholder from every affected department in the room for decisions. Systems that look separate often touch the same record, report, or student workflow.

"Find the joy in the little wins," Stephanie said, "because you're going to encounter so many hiccups along the way that you need the little pieces that are going to keep you motivated to keep going towards the big goals."

David's advice was to build a plan and expect to revise it. The plan gives the team a destination and a baseline to return to after the inevitable detours. His image was a GPS. You set the destination, but you may get a flat tire, run out of gas, or get rerouted. The destination may stay the same even when the route changes.

"Be comfortable being uncomfortable," he said, "because that is your reality."

Community helps teams stay steady when change gets hard

What kept coming up, unprompted, was the relief of finding out that other institutions were working through the same problems. When Stephanie described a hiccup with their Verity video integration, she learned that another school had flagged the same issue and that a fix had already rolled out.

"We're not alone," she said. "That's for sure."

Career education operators solve similar problems independently, often without a reliable way to find the person who solved the same issue six months earlier at a school two states over. For institutions navigating operational change, policy change, and uncertainty at the same time, peer connection is one of the few practical ways to shorten the distance between stuck and solved.

You don't go into career education for the paycheck. You go because the students at the other end of the work need someone willing to figure it out. The work gets easier when the people doing it can find each other.