The Future of Personnel Development in Libraries: An Innovation- and Competence-Oriented Approach

Employees in libraries today have a wide range of opportunities to further their education, but numerous further training courses being booked and attended according to individual interests and less according to the strategic objectives of the library. This is confirmed by a survey commissioned in 2016 by the ZBIW – Center of Further Education and Training in Library and Information Science of TH Koeln. The result was clear: In more than 90% of the cases the initiative for further education came from the participants themselves. Superiors, personnel departments, etc. were rarely involved. Further training primarily serves the employees to expand their own competences and to be prepared for future challenges, i.e. there is also a certain concern about the future. In addition, one wants to learn new things so that one's own work remains interesting in the future. Above all, however, continuing education must help libraries to remain competitive in the future. Innovation-oriented personnel development therefore considers both sides, the individual employee and, above all, the entire institution. This approach places the strategic goals of the institution in the foreground, and the necessary future core competencies of the employees must be oriented to these goals. This requires, however, that libraries have strategic management and, ideally, systematic innovation management, both of which are geared to the library's objectives and to the medium- and long-term (technological) trends that shape the innovations. Personnel development includes all planned and targeted measures of training and further education as well as career management for the promotion and professional development of employees. What will be needed in the future will be above all people who, on the basis of their individual attitudes and abilities, show lasting innovative behavior. Constantly new innovations and ever shorter innovation cycles presuppose that employees master the correct handling of the unpredictable and have the ability to adapt existing knowledge to new situations. To this end, libraries must create a personnel and structural framework so that they can adapt permanently to changing requirements.