Meeting the needs of information professionals for lifelong learning : The employer's challenge or opportunity

Abstract

At the University of Melbourne (Australia), a strong culture of staff development and the desire of staff to learn have been built over a number of years. The rapid pace of change, process reengineering, emerging technologies and their application to teaching and learning and converged library, multimedia and information technology services are among the many factors that have prompted the necessity of continuously developing and re-skilling information professionals. This paper addresses each of the above factors, paying particular attention to how learning needs are determined in each instance, the types of learning experiences provided, issues of resourcing, evaluation of how effective learning has been, and whether or not we can measure a return on our investment in training and development.