Scheduling student employees doesn't have to make you crazy

Scheduling student employees is a challenge for most of us. At the University of Wyoming, we started out doing this by hand. As our pool of student employees grew, we used Excel and PageMaker to make the process cleaner, but it still required about 75 hours of labor each semester. An Access database and ASP web pages were used to handle shift swaps throughout the semester, but it relied on students emailing back and forth and tracking shifts for which they were responsible.We researched software programs that did scheduling, but they were cost prohibitive. We were in the preliminary stages of developing our own all-in-one solution for scheduling and swaps when a colleague introduced us to an affordable web-based solution at the SIGUCCS conference in Portland. Since then, we've helped the vendor develop an integrated time and attendance tracking system. The time saved on scheduling pays for the program, and we no longer have problems with students being confused about their schedules. The added bonus of being able to download the clock entries into our payroll system is just icing on the cake.In this session, we'll look at some of the functionality we were planning to develop ourselves, where we stumbled, and what our successes have been. We've talked about our system informally at several SIGUCCS conferences in the email room and BOFs, and many have asked us to do a formal presentation. Here it is! Anyone who schedules or supervises student employees should attend, whether you supervise seven or 200 students.