Your experience as a higher education professional managing, supervising, and supporting high-performing teams is very transferable to project management. Let's recap and then dive right in!
First things first... you know by now that I'm going to open by encouraging you to map your efforts to the value they create.
I think talking teams is a really good opportunity to clarify that this does not mean that the work you do supporting teams does not have inherent value. It does! On some level, we should be doing the work to motivate and support high-performing teams because everyone who works with us deserves to feel valued and supported as employees and human beings.
That said, it is helpful (though not always necessary) to articulate this value directly and explicitly to hiring managers, who may not have this inherent value at the tops of their heads.
Which is to say, circling back, as we always do... you are selling yourself short if you stop at describing development for development's sake
So - what can you do here?
Well, first things first, let's clarify - when I say "defining value", I don't always mean that we need to land on a specific number, or that the value needs to be financial.
It's certainly sometimes possible to assign a dollar amount to the work that you did -- for example, economic value added is a valuation quant metric that basically says that project should return financial value above what we spent to achieve them.
But (and you can imagine how fun I was as a classmate in my MBA, right?) economic value added is not always straightforward. For one thing, not all rates of return can be measured financially. No one would argue against providing professional development for employees rotating in and out of their project teams (see process #5, above), for example. We've all benefited from professional development. We know when greenlighting professional development for others, based on our own lived experience, that our teams will benefit from this professional development. Yet most of us would be at a complete loss to quantify, in dollars, the return on investment.
It doesn't matter -- even though anecdote is not data, we still greenlight the professional development. Because there are some things we know, even if we can't quantify them: it makes financial sense to provide benefits that make employees happy and increase retention, because attrition is expensive. It makes financial sense to provide benefits that increase skills, because efficient employees complete projects quickly and with higher accuracy.
Notice what we're doing and what we're not doing here, when we're building our case for professional development:
So, while we can't always answer the question "how much", it's very often enough to answer the question of "how".
Now that we've talked a little about defining value, let's operationalize teamwork - that might be all you need by itself! The PMBOK defines five core processes that make teams "work":