Benefits of Internal Professional Development for Academic Librarians

Abstract

While often overlooked, there are many benefits of in-house professional development programs for academic librarians. This is especially true as the roles of academic librarians continue to evolve and change. This chapter argues that internal professional development not only helps academic librarians share their varied skills, tools, and practices with institutional colleagues, but also improves employee morale, collegiality, and organizational culture. Additionally, by structuring an internal professional development program using a peer-learning model, librarians gain a sense of community while seeing value in each librarian’s individual knowledge. Also, peer learning can be a mechanism for institutional knowledge management and the transfer of institutional memory through intergenerational and cross job function learning. In addition to exploring the evolving nature of the academic librarian and the importance of professional development as peer learning in the context of the local institution, this chapter will describe in detail one university library’s internal professional development program for librarians.