WebJunction’s Town Halls

We had a great discussion at Staff Training in Economic Tough Times this Wednesday.  This is obviously a hot topic as there was a huge crowd and the chat comments were flying by so fast, it was impossible to read them all while trying to listen to the audio remarks.  I heard so many great ideas – crosstraining to spice things up and help promote teamwork, mandatory time for education, annual staff development days, cool incentives for staff (chocolate and vendor swag), ways to get supervisors to give you time to learn, pairing reluctant learners with enthusiastic ones, training in 15 minute increments (or as one person wrote – Random Acts of Continuing Ed)…

We also heard of resources for free online classes which can be sandwiched into overloaded schedules.  WebJunction and TechSoup have a variety of offerings, and lots of state libraries post links to free resources.  BCR offers Free Friday Forum webinars, which are great to do live, but are also archived for when you have a time conflict, or just a few minutes free. I almost prefer learning in small increments – a half day class can give you such information overload that you put off thinking about all the great ideas you’ve picked up.  But briefly dipping into these resources lets you pick up one or two things to try, which is a lot more manageable. 

So tell me, how do you keep up with new ideas and concepts?  How do you convince your supervisor that learning is a part of the job?  How does your organization manage to carve out time for training when they are already short staffed?

 

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