Developing a skilled workforce
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The document discusses developing a skilled workforce from an institutional perspective. It outlines the structure of the research support team at The University of Manchester Library, including different roles and managers. It also discusses recruitment analysis of research support officer positions, in-house training on policies, systems and culture. Finally, it mentions systems used like Pure, Monitor Local and Slack and topics like gold open access, publisher deals, and fostering an internal culture of support.
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Developing a skilled workforce
- 1. 1 Feb 2019 DEVELOPING A SKILLED WORKFORCE: AN INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE HELEN DOBSON Scholarly Communications Manager The University of Manchester Library @h_j_dobson
- 3. RECRUITMENT ANALYSIS @h_j_dobson Post #Applications #Criteria Met RS Officer 45 0 RS Officer 46 0 RS Officer 28 0 RS Officer 46 3
- 4. @h_j_dobson
- 5. IN-HOUSE TRAINING • Policies • Systems • Workflows • Culture @h_j_dobson
- 6. @h_j_dobson
- 7. SYSTEMS @h_j_dobson • Pure • Monitor Local • Library OA Compliance Platform • Slack • Typeform
- 12. GOLD OA PUBLISHER DEALS @h_j_dobson
- 13. @h_j_dobson
- 17. @h_j_dobson
- 18. @h_j_dobson
Editor's Notes
- Team has grown since 2012 Skills and knowledge developed in-house initially Recruiting to new posts is challenging at RSO level especially RS Assistant is a clerical level role, RSO is a paraprofessional level
- Experience over past 18 months. Experience of working in an OA support service was an essential criteria on each occasion. The starting pay spine for this role is ~£24k, similar to librarian-level salaries in some institutions We appointed in the first two cases on basis of potential – candidates had related experience, eg, as a researcher, in research admin, in a University Press We didn’t appoint in the third case – no-one with essential or directly relevant criteria – and advert was when Library courses were ending. Why weren’t attracting new library school graduates? Not necessarily looking for candidates to have a library qualification but were the essential criteria in the job advert putting them off even though it didn’t seem to put off lots of other candidates who didn’t meet them? Re-advertise later in the year and 3 candidates had relevant experience. In practice this means that I’ve poached someone who’s been trained in another institution. The Officer layer is a paraprofessional role that I see as the right entry point for someone who’s completed a library qualification or who has some related experience. The consequence is that we see turnover in these posts. Succession planning is always on my mind.
- Recruiting staff without experience has slowed down the progress of the team – training internally requires input from the librarians – they train staff and get involved in service delivery until new staff are up to speed. So, they’re not working on their own objectives or on tasks appropriate to their grade https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Snakes_and_Ladders_-_Board_Game.svg
- What we cover in our training programme The Jisc OA Good Practice project I worked on a few years ago created a guide for new OA staff which covered the general elements. But most of our training is on Manchester specific systems and processes.
- New staff have a probation plan outlining what their training will cover and what we expect of them Understanding context is the starting point, then reading policies and guides, watching demonstrations of systems and being observed by librarians, learning how to handle enquiries, and feeding back to us any ideas to improve our processes
- We use a combination of freely available tools, proprietary tools and tools developed in-house in our processes Library schools could raise awareness of most tools in their courses but in-house training in how tools are used will always be necessary
- New staff have an introduction to Pure from the service lead Experienced staff show new staff how to validate records - we are still developing a guide for this in our new starter toolkit
- This is our newest system which we developed to record the papers we deal with for REF OA compliance We have a fully-mediated deposit service and the metadata we capture when processing papers currently allows richer reporting than the Pure REF module does Our Research Services Officers don’t create records in this system but need to know how it works to help them deal with enquiries – they are our frontline enquiry service – the service lead and experienced staff show new staff how it works
- Monitor Local was built to be intuitive to anyone creating records but there are a lot of fields in the system that we don’t need to complete for our purposes. One of our librarians created a guide to how we use Monitor Local - this is for training new staff and is also used by our finance colleagues who handle payments.
- This is another guide in the Gold OA part of the toolkit. Introducing someone new to handling APCs is tricky – the number of funds we manage and the number of publisher deals we have signed up to add to the complexity. Can’t teach someone one process for all APCs - we start by giving responsibility for a handful of publishers so that new staff can learn how to complete systems and use email templates with the most simple scenarios. Our service lead creates detailed documents with links to further guidance materials. This document is 22 pages long.
- Example of guidance relating to handling APCs for one publisher
- We used Typeform to make interactive workflows The questions we built in provide data for reporting and the appropriate email template to send to an author if the deposit to our OA Gateway isn’t straightforward By doing this we were able to assign the task of assessing deposits to the assistants in the team – in practice we used it for a while, like stabilisers on a bike, and then after a while they were able to make assessments independently
- Although it takes a lot of investment to train up new staff in systems and processes, culture is even trickier. Beneath our library-level 5 Ways of Working we are introducing divisional expectations to outline behaviours expected from our staff We’re rolling these out now, discussing them in 1-1s and in groups, and setting personal targets The team are finding development resources in the University’s Staff Learning and Development toolkit – including Lynda.com – and watching their colleagues who model good behaviours
- As well as training new staff in our area we provide introductions to our services to our library colleagues – these were initially developed with our Academic Engagement team in mind particularly but are available to all staff to read and get a better understanding of what we do, why and how.
- Our colleagues also have an opportunity to learn about what we do through our library wide exchange of experience programme, Trading Places. My hope is that the resources we share and this opportunity piques interest in scholarly communication from staff working in other parts of the library
- Another way of supporting development of the next generation of schol comms staff is by offering placements Last year this was an MA student from MMU No-one took up the offer this year – is it the case that MA students aren’t interested in working in schol comms?
- Development is ongoing for our staff Some examples of development activities over the past year