Posts tagged training showcase
Training, Planning, and Collaborating to Build the Future
Oct 11th
Trainer-teacher-learners are by nature forward-thinking and collaborative. There is no reason, after all, to invest time, money, energy, and other precious resources into helping others learn if we don’t believe there will be a payoff for everyone involved.
It’s no surprise, therefore, to see that local, regional, and national groups of trainers are providing replicable examples of how to produce magnificent results with a modicum of effort even during the challenging times we’re facing. Members of the American Library Association (ALA) Learning Round Table, for example produced two sell-out training workshops at the 2009 ALA Conference in Chicago this summer while other groups were struggling to attract minimal audiences; we also once again presented a first-rate “training showcase” open free of charge to our colleagues throughout ALA.
Training and other professional groups around the world, undaunted by the difficulty of attracting participants, are producing “future of library” conferences and panel discussions to inspire like-minded colleagues. ALA itself, this summer, had a standing-room-only panel discussion on the topic. The University of Arizona has sponsored conferences for several years. The Colorado Association of Libraries, Queensland (Australia) Department of Education and Training, and Southeast Florida Library Information Network have all recently been involved in future of library conference planning, and a “Future of Libraries within the Framework of Sustainable Development” was held on the island of Guadeloupe in June 2009.
An earlier article for this blog detailed the successes achieved by trainers in the Mt. Diablo Chapter of the American Society for Training & Development in attracting and retaining new members; at the heart of the success were the collaborative efforts of a few of us who improved the Chapter’s speaker series so it provided effective training for the trainers it is meant to serve.
Similar successes have come from another informal group of trainers meeting in the San Francisco Bay Area: the Pacific Library Partnership Staff Development Committee (formerly the Library Staff Development Committee of the Greater Bay Area). Seeing how this group operates suggests that we are far from living in a protracted dark age for training in spite of training-budget cutbacks.
The 10 to 12 core members of the group, in planning our fifth annual future of libraries conference this year, recognized early in our planning process that attracting attendees would be a challenge, so we made some key decisions. We would continue to rely on the individual skills of our planning group to use available resources—attracting an enthusiastic speaker whom we knew we could afford, enticing local presenters who were willing to volunteer their time to be part of what we were developing, relying on a combination of a first-rate publicist on our committee and additional well coordinated marketing efforts undertaken by other members of the committees to do much more than we have done before in reaching prospective paid attendees—without letting any part of the process become overwhelming for any individual member of the planning group.
A key to our continuing successes—and this year’s event was another profitable endeavor even though attendance was, as anticipated, considerably lower than it has been in better times: approximately 100 people compared to the sell-out audiences of 220 we have had in previous years—is that we employ a combination of well defined roles and a willingness to step in wherever needed as our time allows.
As is the case with every successful group I work with, I see an amazing ability for my colleagues in this training group to accomplish a lot in very little time (one face-to-face meeting every other month), combine skills to attain a well establish goal (producing conferences and other training events with real value to the people who attend them), and donate a very limited number of hours of work (five to 10) between each meeting so the projects stay on track. If we see that we need to increase our marketing and other promotional endeavors, we coordinate our efforts to combine personal contact, email messages, and the use of listservs to reach our audience. If we discover that we’re not attracting the presenters whom we need, we continue sharing resources by phone, email, or face to face until we have a winning package.
The result is that we continually produce events we’re proud of offering—events which inspire our audiences with useful and easily adapted ideas they can apply when they return to work. And we have fun—which, I believe, is the real future of libraries, training groups, and everyone we touch through all the work we do. For by showing others how easy it can be to achieve significant and long-last goals, we are offering the best we have to offer as trainer-teacher-learners.
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Promote Yourself: Get The Word Out About Staff Development!
Sep 22nd
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
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Thank You to Our Sponsors
Aug 21st
At ALA Annual in Chicago the Learning Round Table, formerly known as CLENE, held its 6th Annual Training Showcase.
We want to send out A HUGE THANK YOU to our training showcase sponsors! Their generous sponsorship helped offset the many costs of the showcase. Please check out what our sponsors have to offer in the way of library staff training and development resources and services.
6th Annual Training Showcase Donors
- WebJunction (WA) GOLD LEVEL SPONSOR
www.webjunction.org - Crisis Prevention Institute/Prepare Training Program SILVER LEVEL SPONSOR
crisisprevention.com / preparetraining.com - ASTD (VA)
astd.org - ASTD Chicago Chapter (IL)
ccastd.org - CRM Learning (CA)
crmlearning.com - Infopeople (CA)
infopeople.org - Library Video Network (MD)
lvn.org - Lyrasis (GA)
lyrasis.org - Neal-Schuman Publishers (NY)
neal-schuman.com - New Directions (OH)
selfbest.com - Pattern Research and LE@D Univ. of North Texas
pattern.com and leadonline.com - People~Connect Institute (NC)
peopleconnectinstitute.com - State Library of Wyoming (WY)
www-wsl.state.wy.us - Think and Do (MA)
thinkanddo.us
Sincerely,
Pat Carterette
President
ALA Learning Round Table
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...PRESENT AT ALA at the CLENE Training Showcase!
Mar 11th
PRESENT AT ALA at the CLENE Training Showcase!
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/rts/clenert/trainingshowcase
Does your library have a staff training or staff development program you’re proud of? Is someone from your library attending ALA this summer?
If so, you’re invited to participate in the CLENE Training Showcase where you can share information about your program AND learn about the best practices of other libraries and organizations. There is NO COST to participate! All you do is stand by your table and talk about your cool program with people who stop by. It’s really fun! Applications are due on April 1.
The CLENE Round Table Training Showcase will be Sunday, July 12 from 1:30-3:30 pm. The planning committee is on the lookout for libraries, library organizations, presenters, speakers and vendors to participate – anyone who has a great training or staff development program they’d like to share. CLENE is all about sharing ideas (and stealing ideas ?)so this Training Showcase is the perfect venue. If you have any questions, please give us a call!
The Showcase normally attracts between 200-300 attendees over a period of 2 hours – all of whom are interested in training and staff development. The number of participants (presenters) varies from 20-30. It’s a really fun event with refreshments and lots of door prizes. Each participant has a 6’ draped table on which to put a portable table-top display unit, handouts or other related materials.
Please see CLENE Round Table Training Showcase website for more information. There’s a link on the main page for the Training Showcase Page with even more info about the Showcase, along with two online application forms – one for those wishing to participate and one for those want to be a sponsor or a donor.
There are a few photos from last year’s Training Showcase in Anaheim in the Dec. 2008 CLENExchange Newsletter.
For more information, contact either Pat Carterette, pcarterette@georgialibraries.org or404-235-7124 OR Melissa Lattanzi at lattanzm@neo-rls.org or 330.847.7744, extension 12
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Community, Training-Teaching-Learning, and CLENE
Jul 10th
I’m not part of WebGen: I didn’t grow up wired, online, and connected to the world 24/7, and I do appreciate moments as well as hours of solitude. But, like most people who are honest about what is most important to them, I also value, crave, and am nurtured by community. So being in Anaheim for the annual American Library Association (ALA) conference earlier this month and spending every moment I could with colleagues in the library training-teaching-learning community provided lots of food for thought on the theme of what makes communities thrive when the Web 2.0 world and the face-to-face world of conferences with thousands of onsite participants converge.
The loosely knit community of trainer-teacher-learners who work in libraries throughout the United States—and who often feel incredibly isolated from each other, as evidenced by exchanges in the LibraryLearning Google Group started by Lori Reed less than a month ago—suddenly seems incredibly intimate and welcoming when you attend an American Library Association conference.
The central point of this convergence, for me, is my membership and increasing participation in CLENE—the Continuing Library Education and Networking Exchange (CLENE) training group. Right behind it are the overlapping connections resulting from the joint memberships and associations many of us seem to share through our affiliations with groups like Infopeople and the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), and the online community of bloggers who so frequently and effectively build a sense of community where none might otherwise be found.
Although there were more than 20,000 library staff members in Anaheim for the annual conference, those of us interested in training-teaching-learning kept running into each other everywhere we went, and a large part of it was due to the community we’ve created through CLENE and its series of workshops; meetings; discussions; and its training showcase.
The group, like Infopeople, is fluid rather than rigidly structured. It’s welcoming. And it’s like being part of a large family where somebody is always bringing someone else home for dinner without bothering to phone ahead, knowing that there somehow will be enough food for everyone so no one will go to bed hungry that night. It’s the kind of group where everyone around the table jumps into the conversation, and everybody goes away enriched. It’s the kind of group where you’ll find the same sort of arguments and hurt feelings that come up whenever people let their guards down and say what they’re thinking, but we know that we’re not going to let the arguments and hard feelings go unacknowledged or unresolved. The result is that we’re always ready to get together again as soon as we possibly can to eat and talk some more.
And when we part ways, there’s already that numbing twinge of implied loss as we realize we probably won’t see each other again for at least six months—until we reconvene for the next conference which brings us all together. But what remains is the strength of collegial exchanges and the warmth we manage to create through a community of learning which benefits all of us and all we touch.
For more information about CLENE and how to join the group, please follow this link.
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