Promote Yourself: Get The Word Out About Staff Development!

Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.

You need to think about these actions all of the time.

Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.

These actions help you reach your audience.

Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.

These actions will help you make decision makers aware of the inherent value of training.

Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.

These actions are integral to your library’s success.

Quality staff development and training are essential to the success of any library organization. A library that does not have a staff willing to learn and a management supportive of that learning will fade into irrelevance. However, when the many libraries face hard budget choices, staff development is one area that libraries consider expendable or easy to downsize. These heartfelt decisions to eliminate a “luxury” can come back to haunt libraries in the long run with unsatisfied (and mandated) training needs of the remaining staff. To those left standing after difficult cuts are dealing with doing much more more with ever shrinking staff and resources. In these situations the expertise of a staff development professional is vital to helping staff use their resources with the utmost efficiency.

Making staff development visible by promoting training, marketing your services and providing real recognition to the value of training will go a long way to acknowledging the value of staff development/training and help ensure a training’s place in an library’s essential operations support plan.

How do you promote yourself?

The short answer: Talk about yourself, the work you do, and the things you know to people inside and outside of your library.

How do I do it?

Your staff from the top of your staff structure to the bottom of your staff structure should have some knowledge of the training and staff development opportunities you coordinate or provide for the organization. If they do not know anything about what you and your staff can do, they cannot start to recognize the value of what you do for the library.

Get out from behind your desk and teach/lead learning opportunities. These can take the form of may different types of learning/training situations including: formal face to face and virtual classes, prerecorded screencasts, “just-in-time” training, informal one-on-one projects, and open house Q and A sessions. I cannot stress enough how much also need to “be out on the floor” to be an effective trainer. Your visibility both inside and outside of a learning opportunity broadens the respect of your peers and will help you establish yourself as a vital and visible part of the library.

Do not limit yourself to promoting yourself and your library to your internal peers. Seek out engagements outside of your library to talk about what you do, how you do what you do and to ask and offer assistance to other staff development/training professionals.

Network with other library staff development folks either at the local/county/city level, regional level, statewide or national level. If there is no active group, start one. Maryland’s Staff Development group has been invaluable in developing new partnerships, new statewide learning opportunities and sharing each system’s staff development strengths and resources.

Seek out local/regional speaking and training opportunities do broaden your reach and knowledge. Find a great conference and go participate. Put yourself out there and meet your peers and learn from them. These conferences can be local unconference gatherings, local and statewide conferences and national conferences. If nothing meets your needs, create a local/state unconference which gives everyone a chance to be both presenter and attender and can be held for minimal financial outlay.

How do I market my workshops?

The short answer: Communicate what you have to offer both formally and informally to your supervisors/constituents. Develop word of mouth by delivering great and timely content. Seek feedback and incorporate as needed to serve your constituents.

How do I do it?

The task of letting your staff know about what you offer and how that benefits them is the hardest thing to do when marketing your workshops. However your library communicates (email, text, social networking, paper memo) should have a way to let your coworkers know what services you provide as a staff development professional. To connect staff development opportunities, you should get to know what workshops your staff want to attend and what they need to attend. You can use focus groups, surveys or regular meetings to get feedback from your staff on what they would like to know and use those opportunities to let staff know what staff development opportunities are already offered at your library.

You can also market yourself by delivering great, timely and fun workshops. Use those workshop attendees as a captive audience to bounce ideas and provide live feedback and a sense of your staff and how they view your workshops. You can bring in outside folks to share what they know to your library. Your connection to a different voice shows that you work is informed by the latest trends in librarianship and technology.

Perhaps the easiest way of marketing you and your staff development opportunities is to get out among the staff that you serve. Ask if they need help at their desks/work areas. Encourage an open door policy for staff tap your knowledge and skills. Your assistance builds trust and markets your skills via positive word of mouth.

Creating new staff development opportunities from staff suggestions accomplishes two things. First, you are responding to the direct needs of your staff which builds trust and good word of mouth. In addition, developing new staff development opportunities keeps you as a trainer refreshed and helps prevent workshop repetition and burnout.

How do I create recognition for my work?

The short answer: Ask for recognition to create recognition. Evaluate short and long term and change when needed. Seek outside engagements to boost recognition. Generate measurements and metrics to boost recognition of the value of your staff development opportunities.

How do I do it?

Don’t be shy about asking someone who appreciates the content in the workshop you offered or the assistance you provided to write a note to your supervisor. It can be difficult for a supervisor to keep track of all of the different learning sessions you provide both inside and outside of formal training. Direct feedback from the people you serve is a powerful card to hold in an evaluation cycle.

As a training and staff development professional, you should look at your workshops with immediate evaluations (using plus/delta aka keep and toss, and smile sheets) and over the long term (focus groups, anecdotes and surveys) to gauge and measure the change created by your work. Use these surveys to create data about your classes and to serve as a basis for reports if needed.

Another great metric is to measure the actual dollar value saved by your organization by providing training. Ask yourself some questions to begin capturing this data: How much staff time was saved because of proper training? How much staff time and travel money was saved by bringing training to your staff? How much money was saved by you sharing what you learned at a conference with your staff providing them the information from a conference without every staff member paying to attend? This is just getting “return on investment” data which is a powerful advocacy tool when discussing staff development’s value to a library.

Why should you become your best cheerleader?

You are the best person to advocate for the role of staff development in your library. Don’t expect or assume anyone else will advocate for you.

Just because you provide some nebulous value to an organization, that value is diminished without some serious promotion of what you do, marketing of your staff development encounters and recognition for the role they play withing any library.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Mohandas Gandhi

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