Academic support offices are often lean by design: small teams, broad portfolios, and a high volume of student-facing work. While this can be a strength because it promotes flexibility, it can also create vulnerability. Often, insights and knowledge live primarily in people’s heads due to the fast-paced nature of ASP work. Then, when a member of the ASP team takes a different role or goes on extended leave, years of insight into students, programs, faculty relationships, and institutional rhythms can vanish with them. Thus, to build a sustainable ASP, we should also be thinking about how to build institutional memory.

Institutional memory promotes efficiency, continuity, and equity for both students and staff. It allows offices to avoid reinventing programs each year; maintain consistency in student support; understand historical context behind policies and practices; onboard new staff efficiently; and preserve lessons learned from past successes and failures. Without institutional memory, offices risk reactive programming, duplicated effort, and, ultimately, burnout.

ASP offices often face unique challenges when it comes to institutional memory. Primarily, academic support professionals are short on time. How often have we put off an administrative task to meet with one more student about improving on midterm exams? Because our programs are student-facing, we often have less time to document processes, relying on assumptions that “we’ll remember that next time” and moving on. Additionally, because ASP offices are often small, knowledge becomes siloed with one or two people.

It’s not hopeless for building institutional memory! Here are some things to try to build institutional memory within your existing workflow:

1. Create “Living” Program Files

For each recurring initiative, such as orientation sessions, exam workshops, and bar prep programs, maintain a simple shared file that includes:

• Program purpose
• Target audience
• Timing and rationale
• What has changed over time
• Common student questions
• Lessons learned

Every time you re-do the program, take a few minutes after to debrief within this document, and make a few notes about what worked and what didn’t within each category. By creating a live document that can be shared with others, you have created memory of how the program has updated over time to address different needs. Then, when you go back next year to update your program, you can see what worked and what didn’t in the past so you can better plan next steps.

2. Standardize What Can Be Standardized

We all know that academic and bar support is an ever-changing landscape, but identifying areas for consistency can help reduce your cognitive load. You might consider standardizing workshop naming conventions, email templates (how many times have you written a different version of the same email?), intake or referral processes, and common advising frameworks. Not only does standardization help relieve your own workload, but it also allows future academic support professionals in your office to benefit.

3. Protect Against Single Points of Failure

If only one person knows how something works, institutional memory is at risk. I am incredibly lucky that the Assistant Director of ASP has been at our institution and in our program for almost 20 years. She knows everything there is to know and picks up the cognitive load of identifying when different things need to happen each academic year. This also means that if she suddenly decided not to show up anymore, I would be in trouble.

My Assistant Director also happens to be incredibly diligent about documenting different processes, so I would eventually figure it out, but identifying and bolstering potential areas of “failure” if one person left would create a more resilient program. Thus, implementing mitigation strategies like shared calendars and task lists, cross-training on key programs, co-ownership of major initiatives, and centralized digital storage becomes incredibly important for institutional memory.

Ultimately, ASP offices do extraordinary work with limited resources. Building institutional memory is one way to honor that work and ensure it endures. When knowledge is shared and documented, offices become more stable and adaptable for both students and staff. Institutional memory isn’t just about preserving the past. It is about giving future educators a stronger foundation to build upon.

(Dayna Smith)