| QUESTION: Who needs to take the Penn Profiler survey? |
| Completing the Penn Profiler survey
is expected for all full- and part-time University faculty
and staff including student workers, adjuncts, CHOP affiliates,
graduate students on stipends, and temporary employees.
It must be completed at least annually (more often if an
individual’s job responsibilities change.)
Penn Profiler is not required of UPHS affiliates unless
they also have a position on the University payroll.
|
|
| QUESTION: When and why was the survey instituted at the University? |
 |
Penn Profiler was rolled out to the University
community in stages, beginning in April, 2008. The annual
survey is part of the University’s overall education
initiative regarding safety, research compliance, and
other trainings
required
by Federal, State, and University policies and regulations
as well as training related to administrative job skills
or responsibilities. The benefits of Penn Profiler include
the following
• Strengthens knowledge of appropriate best practices
that will prepare individuals to do their jobs safely
and effectively.
•
Provides a user-friendly, web-based, self-service application
to identify and assign in a timely manner task-appropriate
training.
•
Provides the research and administrative communities with
easily accessible tools to assign, manage, maintain and
report training information (in conjunction with Knowledge
Link).
•
Strengthens the University’s ability to meet ever-changing
federal and regulatory compliance requirements and demands
for accountability.
Institutions that conduct research are subject to federal,
state and local regulatory requirements, including, but
not limited to:
• Financial Management of Grants and Contracts
•
Human Subjects Protection / Animal Care and Use
•
Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act
of 1996 (HIPAA)
•
Financial Conflict of Interest
•
Research Misconduct
•
Public Policy Obligations
•
Billing for Clinical Services
•
Intellectual Property - Invention and Patent Reporting
•
Occupational Safety and Environmental Protection
Coinciding with this regulatory
environment, research institutions have come under increasing
scrutiny
by federal and other agencies funding research, and
the public. The risks of noncompliance are numerous, and
range
from heightened federal oversight and reporting responsibilities,
to paybacks, fines and funding cuts, suspension / exclusion
from participation in federal programs, and civil and
criminal actions. Educational programs are mandated
by many research sponsors, and remain a critical component
of Penn’s efforts to insure compliance within
the changing regulatory framework that governs research.
For more information, please see The Almanac |
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| QUESTION: Who should I list as my supervisor? |
|
As part of the survey, employees
are asked to enter the email address of their job supervisor.
Supervisors are notified once their supervisee(s) have completed the survey, and are able to access the Learning
Management System Reports on an ongoing basis if they choose
to monitor the status of employee training.
If your paid employment with the University is primarily
academic in nature (example, faculty member, graduate student),
then the head of your program or department is
usually
the
best person to identify as your supervisor for the purposes
of Penn Profiler.
If you are a staff member in an administrative or support
position, or a student worker, the person who hired you or
oversees your work is usually
the
best person to identify as your supervisor for the purposes
of Penn Profiler.
|
|
| QUESTION: I think the wrong courses have been assigned to me. What should I do? |
|
| If Profiler has assigned courses to
you that are not relevant to your work, please send an email
to the course owner explaining
why the course is not needed. The course owner can remove
the assignment from your list in Knowledge Link, if appropriate. If you are unclear which training department
on the list owns your course, please send an email to pennprofiler@lists.upenn.edu. |
|
| QUESTION: When I log into Knowledge Link, I don't see my courses. What should I do? |
|
| Courses assigned as required by Penn
Profiler usually appear on your "Required" screen in Knowledge
Link within 20 minutes of completing the survey. You should
also receive a list of your required courses in an email
from Penn Profiler. If you do not see your Profiler-assigned
courses on your Knowledge Link page, please send an email
to pennprofiler@lists.upenn.edu. |
|
| QUESTION: I got an email saying I need to retake the survey. Why? |
|
| Penn Profiler must be completed at
least annually, and more often if an individual’s
job responsibilities change. Annual reminders are sent automatically
about one month prior to the anniversary date of the last
completion. Penn Profiler also detects changes to an employees
home organization or job code, and will notify employees
that have changed positions that they should retake the
survey to identify any new training that may be needed. |
|
| QUESTION: I'm a supervisor. I got an email about running a Training Report. What does this mean? |
|
| As part of the survey, employees are
asked to enter the email address of their job supervisor.
Supervisors are notified after their supervisee(s) have completed the
Penn Profiler survey, and may choose to access
the Learning
Management System Reports on an ongoing basis
to monitor employee training. Note that an access form must
be on file with ISC before the report will show any results.
Please be sure to follow the instructions to complete the
access if you wish to run training reports on your supervisees. |
|
| QUESTION: I'm a supervisor. How do I correct an error on my list of supervisees? |
|
| When you run a supervisor's report,
one of the Learning
Management System Reports, you will see the training
records for all individuals who listed your email address
as the supervisor contact when they completed Penn Profiler.
If the list is incorrect, please send an email to pennprofiler@lists.upenn.edu
explaining the situation. A Penn Profiler administrator
can correct the supervisor contact information for your
supervisees. |
|
| QUESTION: What do I do if I don ’t know the answer to a question? |
|
| If you are uncertain of the best response
to a question in a branch of Penn
Profiler, click the Help button, and you will be provided with
the support email contact for that particular branch.Click "Save
and Exit" in order to save the work you've done in the
survey so far, and then send
your question to the support address and wait for a reply.
After you receive the advice you need, return to Penn Profiler and resume the survey. |
|
| QUESTION: I completed
the CITI training at CHOP. Do I get credit for that? How? |
|
| If you are a Penn faculty member based
at CHOP and have completed CITI training through CHOP, you do not need to repeat the University's Human Subjects training. Contact the Office of Regulatory Affairs (burgess4@upenn.edu) regarding reciprocity for CITI. |
|
| QUESTION:When I click on the link to take the Profiler, I get the message that I’m unauthorized. What should I do? |
|
| If you see a message saying you are
not authorized for Penn Profiler, most likely your status
with the University has not resulted in an account being
automatically created. If you are actively working at the
University and need to take Penn Profiler, please send an
email to pennprofiler@lists.upenn.edu and
your account can be activated. |
|
| QUESTION: How is this information used? |
|
| The responses to the Penn Profiler survey
questions are used to make course assignments for required
training in Penn's administrative Learning Management System
(LMS) called
Knowledge Link. Once you complete the Profiler survey, the
courses that have been identified based on your answers
regarding your work at the University will appear on your
"Required" training screen. You can enroll in the classroom
or web based training classes from Knowledge
Link to complete
your training. |
|
| QUESTION: Are my responses to the survey questions private? |
|
| The responses to the Penn Profiler questions
are connected programmatically to certain course assignments.
For instance, if you indicate that you work with certain
types of radiation in a laboratory setting, you will be
assigned the relevant radiation safety training. Your answers
are stored in a database and can be viewed by system administrators,
and by your supervisor at their request. The status of your required
courses that are assigned by Penn Profiler, and your other training in Knowledge
Link,
can be viewed by your supervisor and other authorized staff
through the LMS Reports. |
|
| QUESTION: The font size
of my survey is too small or too large. How can I fix
this? |
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| To make the text of the survey more
visible, please adjust the font size on your browser.
In Internet Explorer menus, go to the Page > Text
Size setting (choose Medium or Larger.) In Firefox, you
can temporarily increase/decrease the font size by holding
down the control key and clicking the + or - keys.
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