I am working in IT department of a university library. Professional Development (PD) is a very important issue in our library. Several Professional Development plans are taking place in my organization.
1. We have a team which dedicates to manage all staff PD progress within our library. They will organize our staffs to take seminar, conference and training course, etc which are related to library business. Also they will generate statistic report to us therefore we can see what kind of program that our staff has joined.
2. We have a regular sharing program which named "Staff Awareness Program". Our professional grade librarian and supervisor level colleague will attain this program. Sometimes colleague will share what they have learnt or experience from the professional development program they joined.
3. In our university, many departments regularly provide knowledge sharing program which are free to join for university staff.
I would like to use Newhouse's model to describe the detail of our PD.
Vision: Our University Librarian has a clear vision: "Learning Hub". We make our library to be more services oriented and I personally think we are really do a good job on that.
Skills: Those PD programs covers different areas like leadership training program, library related seminar and basic skill set training course like IT related and foreign languages course.
Incentives: There is not enough incentive for staff to take PD programs especially when it is involve extra effort from those staffs for example when the hours of PD program is not held within office hours.
Resources: Library is willing to train our colleagues even providing financial support to cover training cost. We can see there are significant effects on those courses that have improved our colleagues’ skills.
Action plan: So far the only action that we will take is to share the knowledge that learns from PD programs among us. But I think a good idea will finally accept by others and consider by library senior management to implement.
Collegiality: The sharing programs make our working atmosphere better because we can know more about each other during sharing process.
For the incentives, I totally agree with you that the PD programs are held within the non-office hours, the incentives for staff to join will reduce. In my organization, all the training courses and workshops are held within the office hours, most of us are willing to join. In addition, our managers are welcome us to take the courses by sending email to ask us to attend since managers know by acquiring the related skills can improve our performance.
ReplyDeleteThanks Martin! Learning Hub is a interesting concept for library. With the development of the society, library is no longer a warehouse of knowledge. It is going to transform another role which is a learning common. It can be regarded as a organizational change of library. Therefore, as a librarian, we should learn more about this new concept in order to embrace this new challenge of our workplace in the future.
ReplyDelete