Let's now turn our attention to our new topic "Positive Incentives for Continuing Education" led by Ling Hwey Jeng. Ling Hwey received her Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin in 1987, and has been an educator in library and information science since then. She was on the faculty at UCLA from 1991 to 1993 and is currently Associate Professor in the School of Library and Information Science, University of Kentucky in Lexington. Her areas of research interest include knowledge representation in cataloging and organization of information. She has also been actively involved in the design and teaching of organization of information area since 1991. Professor Jeng is currently the Chair of the American Library Association's Committee on Education.
Please join our discussion on "Positive Incentives for Continuing Education."
The general agreement is that continuing education is essential for our professionals. As Sue Martin observes, "[L]ibrarianship is one of the only professions without a mechanism that conveys to its members what they are accountable for, and also communicates to the public what they can expect from a member of the profession." Diane Nahl puts the need for continuing education in a technological perspective when she remarked earlier this year: "Continual changes and advances in information retrieval technology demand that librarians, information specialists, and end users continuously learn new systems, new functions, new interfaces, and new procedures." ("Training," 3/31/96). Mary Lynn Rice-Lively further points out, in her discussion on certification last year, that information professionals need to be current in their professional competency: "With the remarkable convergence of communication, information, and media technologies I wonder about the current 'half-life' for professional competency among today's information professionals? Perhaps we also should consider professional competency from the user's perspective instead of our own. Don't our users of information services expect information service providers to be 'current' in their skills and knowledge of providing information access?"
Continuing education is not just a concern among individuals and educators in this field. At ALA Education Assembly meetings, representatives and liaisons from division committees, round tables who are involved in education and training for the LIS profession repeatedly identify continuing education as the most pressing need for LIS professionals.
Continuing education can be done in many different ways. Getting a secondary degree or taking academic courses is a formal channel of continuing education. Attending workshops sponsored by educational programs or professional associations is another, less formal, channel. Other informal channels of continuing education include learning new technological skills on one's own, reading professional literature, attending national or regional conferences, and participating in discussions related to some aspect of one's job.
Although most in the LIS profession consider continuing education essential, the general sentiment among LIS professionals usually points to one of the greatest obstacles to continuing education in the LIS profession: the lack of institutional support. Only a few areas of specialty in LIS provide certification. Among them are school/media specialists, medical librarians, and public librarians in some states. No licensing is required for LIS professionals. Some libraries and information centers provide financial support for only professionals at managerial level to attend meetings. Some institutions provide only in-house training workshops when new tasks are added to current jobs. It is not uncommon for an LIS employer to expect his/her newly hires to perform at a competent level without initial training and orientation. It is also not uncommon to hear LIS employees complain that their individual effort in continuing education not only is not recognized or rewarded, but is directly or indirectly penalized for the reason that it costs too much and interferes with regular work schedule and productivity.
Given the generally low salary, the institutional budget constraint, and particularly the lack of positive incentive and reward for continuing education, it is no wonder that continuing education remains a major concern among individuals and professional groups in LIS.
Instead of continuing the focus on individual inspiration as the reward for continuing education as is the case in many discussions, for the next two weeks, I would like to ask you, the CRISTAL-ED participants, to turn the focus of the issue onto the role of employers in continuing education. I ask:
I am a certified industrial hygienist. One of our major professional concerns is workplace exposure to toxic materials. Some of you may have talked with us about indoor air quality problems.
Our certification requires review of education and experience by the American Board of Industrial Hygienists, at least five years of professional practice and 14 hours of examination.
We maintain our certification by points for association membership, professional practice, attendance at professional meetings and certified training courses. Although many of us receive employer support for meeting attendance, many do not. It is possible, although difficult, to maintain certification at relatively low cost by using local events. Many of my colleagues drive over 100 miles each way to attend evening meetings.
My Point of View as a Manager
I cannot imagine professional life without continuing education (CE) although I know some professional groups do not require it. Admittedly, CE alone is not life-long learning (...you can lead a horse to water, etc.). Nonetheless, most of my colleagues and I find the courses very stimulating.
A lot of networking -- a contributor to learning -- also happens while attending CE. This is where we share problems and solutions and get acquainted so that we are comfortable calling or E-mailing one another.
As a manager, I strongly encourage continuing education. We do not pay certification costs (unless it is a work requirement) because that benefit stays with the employee. Nonetheless, we make sure every certified employee gets support to attend their major conference each year. The fact that at least one major meeting is so important to certification maintenance makes this policy easier to sell at budget time. (See L.J.'s Q 6)
We also make sure that anyone who writes a paper that is accepted has the travel support to present it. We support attendance at local and regional meetings for other staff. We provide auto transportation to evening meetings although we don't pay (taxable) meal costs.
Some managers expect meeting reports from staff who attend. I prefer that the attendee and supervisor talk to help synthesize the information into new ideas. We also encourage talk between managers and staff to select meetings and courses. We look for relevance both to present work and career growth.
Most of my department is union-represented. There are no monetary rewards for CE.
Hope this starts some discussion.
In addition to being a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information, I am a co-chair of the Society of American Archivists' (SAA) Committee on Education and Professional Development (CEPD). It is the latter "hat" that I am wearing at the moment.
Continuing Education is a big topic for my committee at the moment. SAA has just issued a draft of new Post-Appointment and Continuing Education Guidelines. The document is in the comment stage and we are encouraging all archivists and members of allied professions to respond to the draft. The document is long, so I am not posting it here. It can be found at the following URL:
http://volvo.gslis.utexas.edu/~us-saa/continedu.html
In the archival community, continuing education has been uncoordinated. Increasingly, resources have become strained. There has been considerable tension within the archival community itself concerning continuing education offerings. Particularly among those who want either very basic or very advanced workshops (of which there are few). One of the aims of the Post-Appointment and Continuing Education Guidelines is for the finalized document (which we hope will be a consensus piece) to be a white paper which will spur different groups (organizations, universities, private firms) providing continuing archival education to sit down and begin to coordinate offerings and thus stop reinventing the wheel. This will hopefully result in a broader range of continuing education offerings.
Continuing education is an important issue. I look forward to responses to the guidelines.
I have two suggestions: one for employers and employees, the other for the library schools.
Getting this concern transformed into a budget priority is not so easy. My long standing concern has been the lack of a built in expectation between the employer and the employee that continuing education is a given in the job relationship. Do you have a work plan that includes career advancement objectives, and objectives relating to changes in job requirement from year-to-year? Continuing education without a rationale for each employee's expected participation is not being accountable.
Visionary managers should be making every effort to include a staff development budget as part of their regular operating budgets.
The good news is that some state legislatures are ready to consider this budgetary need.
An employer who is supportive of an employee's continuing education needs should expect to gain a more valuable employee whose long-term commitment to the institution is solidified by working in such a positive and continually growing environment. I would consider it a reward to be asked by the employer to share the knowledge I had gained with other staff in formal or informal presentations.
An employer can support continuing education by allowing employees flex time to take classes during the day or evenings and providing monetary compensation or comp time for the employee's investment. An employer can actively promote (posting on a bulletin board or email) classes or organizations available for educational opportunities. An employer could also provide in-house training by experts in particular fields, thereby saving both staff time and perhaps money.
Employees can persuade employers to support continuing education by presenting well-thought out ideas of ways in which the knowledge can enhance a current or future project at the library.
I think it all begins with the employer. If the employer is not willing to look at new ways of growth and change, no amount of convincing by employees will do any good. It makes for a very stifling environment.
Continuing education is problematic in the public library field because, I think, there is a dissonance between what is sought, what is offered, and what can be reimbursed as "library related."
There is no difficulty, unless one lives away from a metropolitan area, of collecting CEUs in the technical areas of librarianship. These can be seen as responses to simple "how do I do something" problems. Where I live (metro Chicago) there is no shortage of workshops in these areas, generally under the sponsorship of one of the 6 more-or-less local library systems or an umbrella group such as LACONI or METS.
However, I've yet to see workshops which address issues of professional growth (excepting management), to be distinguished from greater technical expertise. This is hardly surprising since, even when the U. of Chicago library school existed (in its later years) there was little sense that librarianship was a "profession" (containing a body of abstract knowledge and a research program for extending said knowledge) rather than merely a rather complicated, perhaps even arcane, technique.
I think that, by and large, the technical services personnel are well served by the existing continuing education programming. There is certainly room for theory, but whether or not this is important to local practitioners is debatable, although I suspect that some do care. But I hear no rumblings from this group for change, only for larger budgets to allow attendance at more workshops since the technology is changing at a dizzying rate.
The various people who provide services, however, are generally poorly served by workshops, though I think the readers' services types and the children's librarians do a fairly good job of staying current with the new literature. The problem, however, that these groups face -- and especially the children's and adult reference librarians -- does not lay with the collection as much as with the demands put upon them by the public.
If a member of the public is looking for a particular title our technical training serve us quite well. If a person wants to know what a particular book is about our training serves us well. However, if the person is asking for a specific bit of information or a better understanding of a particular topic, then we can only fall back on the hope that whatever we lead he or she to is actually worthwhile. We can, of course, ask them if their need is met, but our training gives us, the gatekeepers, no way of knowing whether or not the need is actually met. We must rely on their all-too-frequently uninformed opinion.
There are, of course, CE programs which meet rather limited objectives such as frequent business questions, or frequent legal questions. This is generally done by addressing the types of frequently asked questions, thus creating a framework (a theory, if you will) which allows the student to internalize the general subject matter. This done, the student can refer to the appropriate resources. These course are not taught, as they so frequently are in library school, by first exposing the student to the books and then hoping that he has enough general knowledge to translate the library patron's question into an answerable inquiry.
I thus suggest that reference librarians need introductions (basic "cultural literacies") in the various subjects they will encounter when working at the reference desk.
Further, I suggest that this type of non-traditional training needs to be recognized as important to library function and budgeted for as a routine expense.
"Has continuing education become a dead topic already? Is it one of those topics that everyone thinks is a good idea, but no one is willing to invest in it?"
My commentary on this is short; I'm pretty "new to the field" (fourth semester master's candidate at GSLIS, U-Texas at Austin).
In my opinion, now that the resource is here, one of the greatest possible first lines of continuing education will have to be participation in library/info sci related electronic fora, such as this one or the web4lib forum. That sort of day-to-day contact with and knowledge of peers and colleagues is one of the only ways to remain in the loop as conditions change so rapidly.
Extremely inexpensive to implement, a campaign to re-connect out of school specialists with their colleagues would begin to put a dent, however small, in the scattering of the flock.
I completed a public administration masters degree program while working for my library system and I feel it was very helpful to me to get promotion into managerial ranks.
Elizabeth Yakel's SAA "Post Appointment and Continuing Education Guidelines" is a good start. Particularly, I think it is very helpful to spell out in the guideline possible venues for continuing education: workshops, seminars, institutes, in-house training programs, local study groups, professional association meetings, consulting, mentoring (one-on-one, LISTSERV), professional literature, distance education (teleconferencing, home study courses, Internet courses). The list does not have to be exhaustive, but it does give CE sponsoring groups ideas of what they can do to offer CE activities, especially innovative ones.
Guidelines like this, however, are only the start. My concern here is how can employers and CE sponsors make use of it, and how does SAA as an organization plan to do to help implement the guideline. Without concrete action plans, the guideline will be quickly archived after it is approved, and only taken out when someone wants to use it to defend the association's "commitment to continuing education."
Ideas for action plans and concrete strategies to promote CE activities among employers, CE sponsors, and professional associations are what I am searching for here.
Organizations such as SAA can distribute the guideline to employers and CE sponsors. But, what can an employer do next (or what is he/she expected to do) with the guideline in hand? Are there effective strategies we can suggest to employers so that they can use some of the ideas in the guideline to support their staff's CE?
We know that professional development SHOULD be written into every job description as an integral part of the employer/employee relationship, as Ann Abate and Ben Speller point out. But, do employers and employees (and potential job applicants) know what they are looking for in the phrase "professional development?" Simply inserting the words "professional development" into the job description will not be sufficient. What objectives and expectations are important in a work plan? What other components should be in this work plan for professional development?
Furthermore, how do we reach the employers to promote the needs for "professional development" in every job? What activities can an organization unit, such as the ALA Committee on Education, do to promote the awareness among employers and encourage them to take concrete actions?
I've mentioned previously in this forum that the U.S. Dept. of Defense Dependents Schools requires something like 6 sem. hrs. of grad credit every 6 years for license renewal. It does impact on increased salary through steps including master's + 30 hrs up to a doctoral degree. I certainly NEED continuing education what with the burgeoning technological elements continually being added to the library environment and do appreciate and accept financial assistance from DoDDS to take additional course work in the form of on-site classes during the SY as well as short courses during the summer session. But I for one feel NO need for OTHER recognition. In my opinion, learning, like virtue, is STILL its own reward.
I may also have mentioned that I have more earned degrees than Richard Nixon, but am no longer interested in additional course work ONLY if it adds to the credit list. The most inspirational learning I've ever experienced was a stint as a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar at Emory U, Atlanta in the summer of '94 when I took part in a seminar titled "Swift & Twain: Comparative Satire" for which I rec'd NO credit and frankly don't care. Last year during our annual Educators' Day, I offered a session here at Kubasaki HS on the NEH's Summer Seminars for School Teachers which pay up to around a $3,000 stipend depending upon the length of the seminar and only ONE teacher was interested enough to attend. I'd previously offered to help any of my colleagues @ Kadena Ele. apply. Two inquired, but neither applied. I guess no matter how much monetary incentive is offered, without additional credits, virtually nobody is interested. What a sad state of affairs.
Dr. Jeng also asked: How does SAA as an organization plan to do to help implement the guideline? This is a bit of a touchy question at the moment, but I will answer. By opening the guidelines up for discussion and possible revision before acceptance, SAA hopes to engage the entire archival community (not just SAA members), thus making them truly profession-wide guidelines and not just SAA guidelines. This is essential since archival post appointment and continuing education providers comprise a broad range of individuals and institutions (SAA, regional archival organizations -- that are not connected to SAA, universities, as well as private organization.) In terms of implementation of the guidelines, and here I step out on a limb, one idea (which is still unapproved and in the developmental stages) is to bring together providers of archival continuing education and discuss profession-wide educational needs, current offerings, and how to better coordinate the rich and diverse patchwork of offerings now available. So, the first step at implementation will not be to address employers, but to try to get a better handle on the internal professional continuing educational programs. The lack of coordination is currently a major obstacle for planning. Personally, I hope that this initiative does happen. Employees who are able to approach employers with more a coordinated continuing education plan or employers able to locate coordinated continuing education offerings will be more amenable to supporting professional development. The hit and miss process now available is a hard sell for employers, I think.
SAA is also fortunate at this point to have just hired a new Education Director, Joan Sander. Although she has just been in that position for several months, she is about to begin the development of an educational needs assessment survey. This initiative is essential to develop continuing education venues which fit the needs of archivists today. And I see this effort as a necessary step in implementing the Post-Appointment and Continuing Education Guidelines.
This line of reasoning leads easily into a discussion of mandated vs. voluntary CE, certification and licensure requirements, and who shall pay?
(As the CE column editor of JELIS, I have invited several of the respondents on this topic to write guest columns expanding upon their ideas. I encourage other interested colleagues to also contact me.)
Lastly, anyone interested in the importance and issues surrounding continuing professional education is invited to become a member of ALA's Continuing Library Education Network and Exchange (CLENE) Round Table and the IFLA Continuing Professional Education Round Table (CPERT).
Next year, prior to the IFLA meeting, there will occur the third international continuing education conference (and IFLA satellite conference) in Copenhagen. Everyone is welcome to participate. For registration information, contact nop@db.dk.
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