With the National Library Week celebration April 3-9, Johnson County Library’s commitment to staff and patrons has never been more important. The Learning and Development Department is continuing that commitment for 2022, as in-person conference attendance resumes, and professional development programs enable staffers to re-energize.
After two long pandemic years, the Library is focusing on having staff “get their brains excited again,” said Training Specialist Julie Timmins, an L&D team member.
The Learning and Development Department’s mission is important. “We are the place where staff learns,” Timmins explained. “We are a support service. Our end goal is still the patrons. Our motivation is still the patrons, but our responsibility is to help the staff to serve the patrons better, to teach staff what they need to know to do their jobs excellently.”
While conference travel was restricted, the L&D Department still had a big impact, offering 126 programs both live and virtually in 2021. Programs had a combined attendance of 842. Virtual conferences were attended by 101 staffers. Orientation events served 48 new or newly promoted employees.
Timmins is excited that the Library granted permission to include traveling again in 2022.
Johnson County Library plans to send 59 people to 26 different in-person conferences this year. That’s up from 40 people who attended 24 conferences in 2019. These conferences are great for expanding staffers’ skills and knowledge, but they also allow Librarians and others to share their expertise.
For example, Timmins said, Johnson County Library assistant branch managers have developed a highly effective process for large-scale organizational restructuring.
“They have become one of the most effective sub-teams within the Library because of all this work they put in building their own organizational structure,” Timmins said.
A group of assistant branch managers put together a proposal to present at this year’s American Library Association conference in Washington D.C. and it was accepted. The proposal is focused on systemwide strategies that increase coordination, collaboration and optimized decision making and communication processes throughout the organization. Three people will present. Nine additional Library employees will also attend that ALA conference in June.
Librarians will also gain new insights from conferences sponsored by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the American Association of State and Local History, and the Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services.
Prior to 2020, all conference attendance was in person, but the pandemic showed how online conferences can also provide beneficial training. This year, Timmins said, the Library had 18 requests from staff to attend 14 digital conferences and was able to grant them all. They include the International Public Library Fundraising Conference and the Rocky Mountain Early Childhood conference.
In May 2021, the L&D Department also got a new manager, Laura Blair, who has decades of corporate training, learning and development expertise.
“Her insight and foresight and her experience are really very cool,” Timmins said.
The department is creating online training classes that staffers can take at their convenience, at their own speed. Soft skills training is also expanding, with the CliftonStrengths talent assessments being offered beyond managers to other staffers.
“It’s another rejuvenation or joyful thing to give people at work,” Timmins said.
While the pandemic has been stressful, it also compelled the L&D Department to adapt and grow.
“There’s definitely some stuff that we learned and experienced in the pandemic that we’re going to carry on, like the e-learning,” Timmins said. “There are some classes where you need the interaction between people to build the skills, but there is so much where that interaction is not essential. We’re going to try and take what we learned during the pandemic and some of the new ways of working that we have built.”