Participating in this month’s theme, I’ve spent a little while reflecting on professional development at my place of work. The more time I spent thinking about it, the more I realized it’s nearly entirely community driven.
It’s an official role in the library. We have an entire committee focused on staff development. I’ve served on it almost all of my seven years here, and have chaired it twice. The membership tends to rotate and the committee will survey the staff every other year or so to find out what people are interested in, schedule the sessions and arrange speakers, and publicize upcoming events. About once every two years this committee organizes a field trip to another local library to find out what they’re doing, see other facilities, and share what we’re doing.
More recently, the librarians at my library have transitioned to faculty status. With this change came more structure and we formed a mentoring committee. This committee pairs up individuals for mentors, but also plans panels around issues people are interested in. Last year several folks were interested in writing. This year people wanted to know more about how to get on professional committees. The mentoring committee creates a panel from folks on staff (we’re a staff of 52, so there’s a good pool to choose from), and the panel talks about their experience and fields questions.
There are also a lot of smaller initiatives that sometimes become part of one of these official groups. For example, a few years ago several people on staff were interested in creating a structure to encourage reading literature in the field. They formed a journal reading group which has successful grown into a regular program scheduled and marketed by the staff development committee. Each month a participant volunteers to pick next month’s article, and it is pushed out to the entire staff in case new people want to attend the next session.
My Teaching Teaching program grew out of this as well. People were interested in learning more about how to teach, and as the Instructional Design Librarian I designed two semester long programs to meet that need.
Similarly, our Emerging Technology Talks series arose in a similar way. Some staff members said they didn’t have time to keep up with everything, so we started holding monthly sessions discussing the things that those of us who did keep up with everything had come across. This, again, became popular enough to become part of the official list of sessions through the staff development committee.
Finally, there are a lot of one-off sessions created by staff members and shared to the entire library. If someone is giving a conference presentation and wants to do a run-through, that often becomes an internal session. If someone finds a webinar (for example, from Blended Librarian) that looks useful and interesting, we’ll book a room to show it so that more people can attend. In fact, if anyone finds anything that might be useful to share, they’re welcome to put it on through the staff development committee.
The exciting thing about this is that people really do have a choice about coming and are really invested and interested if they’re in the room since they made the choice. People know if there’s something they want to learn, they can request it. People know if they have something interesting to share, they can share it. All of this creates a culture in which people are invested and interested and has created a strong professional development program. In fact, the most frequent complaint I hear about our professional development culture is that people don’t have time to attend everything they’d like to attend. And that… it’s an entire post unto itself.
How do you do professional development at your library?
Image Credits:
Krug and Pullman by Robert Scales
Lauren Pressley is the Instructional Design Librarian at Wake Forest University. She also blogs at Lauren’s Library Blog and spends a fair amount of time on Twitter, too.
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