[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Costs/Staff training/testing

[Jonathan Rochkind]

If any of you all wanted to 'open source' your training curriculums, I  
bet that would be incredibly valuable. (It's not code, so it wouldnt'  
be 'open source', it would be more like "creative commons", but you  
know what i mean).


On Jun 15, 2010, at 12:14 PM, Dan Scott wrote:

> On Tue, 2010-06-15 at 11:50 -0400, Cynthia Williamson wrote:
>> Couldn't agree more re staff testing - our one "do-over" would be
>> changes to the way we did staff testing/training.  In a past  
>> migration
>> project at another library, when our vendor did the training months
>> before we went live (we had no choice about timing), I knew staff
>> wouldn't retain what they'd learned.  I created exercises for them to
>> do on a weekly basis, they had to work together in pairs and they had
>> to hand in their "homework".  In going a more casual, open source,
>> learn-yourself way, my big under-estimation was staff engagement.
>> They just weren't as excited about EG as Robert and I were.  We're
>> lucky to be an academic library with a slower summer time so it all
>> worked out for us.  And our circ desk is not crazy busy as some  
>> public
>> libraries circ desks can be so that made the "learn while live"
>> situation doable.  It all really means that, in spite of some
>> universal truths, you have to make your plan according to your own
>> situation. Its not a one size fits all situation, many things can be
>> done differently depending on how much time & money you have and
>> depending on the skill levels and engagement of your staff.
>> Cynthia
>
> To add one more voice to the mix; during the months leading up to our
> go-live date, our cataloguers had weekly training / exercise sessions
> where each week we went over the previous week's tasks and then
> introduced some new tasks with practice exercises. When we went live,
> they were in a relatively happy state. Kudos to Ron Slater, who put
> together the training schedule, and the cataloguers for tackling it  
> with
> good spirits and humour.
>
> In contrast, our circulation desk is very short-staffed, so the staff
> had very little time to commit to formal training sessions of this
> nature. It was also a little bit harder coming up with good
> representative samples of problems they would encounter; setting up  
> the
> system with dummy data was a lot of work (this would be a good part  
> of a
> test & training package, if someone wants to develop that!). When we
> went live, they were very unhappy because they were trying to learn  
> how
> to solve problems on the fly - and that is not a fun thing to do in
> front of users. I think we would all like a do-over on that one.
>