Notes from our First Meeting

The members of the Council are:
Lydia, Bernice, Peggy, Altaful, Carole, Ashour, Lauren and Luann

At our first meeting today, Ruth shared her vision that staff and faculty have opportunities for growing professionally as well as gaining the skills that are essential to their positions. In light of the State's budget reductions, the library may not have as much money or Development and Training as we'd like, but Ruth will make every effort to preserve funding as much as possible. She shared that prof. dev. and training is inherent in our values and in our strategic plan and gave us our charge.

The Charge
The Council is charged with creating an annual proposal for professional development and staff training for University Library faculty and staff. This plan will serve as an addition to unit level training, student assistant training, and joint professional development and training coordinated by the Joint Training Advisory Group's (JTAG). The Council will plan, present to Dean for budget, implement and evaluate training and professional development programs.

Specifically the Council is charged to:

• Create and maintain a web-based presence so people know what's available
• Plan the annual welcome reception and program for new SJSU employees
• Coordinate the unit assessments of training and professional development learning needs
• Collaborate with JTAG to plan and implement joint personnel development activities
• Plan and implement a brown-bag program for library employees

Currently we are not recruiting for a staff position to lead this area as the PDWG report recommended, but may open recruitment in the future.

The process for requesting essential training or professional development will be the same this year as last year. Individuals will work with their supervisor and unit head to request training before the fiscal year and in January. Ideally each unit will have a target budget for training so that as staff are evaluated on their anniversary date and new goals are set, the unit head will know that there is funding available to support the training that is written into the development plan.

We spent the rest of the meeting planning a website on the staff intranet. We thought we'd start with a home page and then five sub-pages. We're hoping that this website can become a one-stop shop, listing all of the available resources, upcoming events, processes and forms, links, etc. that employees need to support their professional development and training.

We also decided to start this blog, and to establish a Lotus Notes email account where staff can send email to all of us.

Our next meeting is the end of February.