University of New South Wales - - Competencies Project

Competencies Project

Report and recommendations

Deborah Encel,

Acting Staff Development Librarian,

April to August, 1997

Introduction

Arts Training Australia (1995) has prepared a set of Library Industry Competency Standards. This project is concerned with applying these standards to the University of New South Wales Library. The task had already had a considerable amount of work done on it when I took over, however, this did not make it any the easier. Some of the work I did was a revisitation of that recently done by Anne d'Rozario who had done a lot of the groundwork and prepared a not insubstantial report. However, she had not been able to conclude and it was thought that the scrutiny of a Library professional was needed to complete the project. It was necessary to follow the same steps as she had done to become familiar with the concepts involved. The given time limit of three months extended to four was artificially defined by my time in the Staff Development position, as the nature of the project demanded that it proceed through a number of steps including meeting with other groups, processing and digesting information and material and formulating recommendations. The meetings were held as soon as was possible for the parties involved, the information processed and digested, and recommendations formulated in due time. The project is now complete and my report and recommendations follow.

Understanding and Planning the project

An outline of the concepts involved and how they may be used follows.

What are Competency Standards?

Competency standards are statements that set out the knowledge, skills and their application required for effective performance in employment. Such Standards provide clear benchmarks for the training system in developing and delivering courses relevant to workplace requirements.
Competency standards are also the means by which industry expresses its education and training requirements.
Arts Training Australia has developed the country's first Library Competency Standards. These standards aim to enhance the quality and effectiveness of vocational education and training for library workers.
The standards do not replace qualifications gained from educational institutions - they reflect performance requirements within a workplace.
The standards will be reviewed and refined regularly to reflect ongoing change in the industry.
The standards are national and their application is designed to facilitate a nationwide consistency of approach to training and skills recognition.

(White and Williamson 1996, p. 3)

If, as the outcome of this project, the UNSW Library decides to adopt the Competency standards, it is envisaged that this system will be used as a basis for providing more structure for the Staff Development program particularly in regard to training needs identification. Standard descriptions would be used to effectively link data via the Staff Development System by:

identifying competencies required for specific positions;
identifying competencies acquired or required by staff;
identifying competencies developed by staff training and development programs.

How do they work?

Library work has been divided into a hierarchical classification of Streams, Fields and Units.

The streams represent the three broad areas:

Working with Clients
Working with Information
Working with Others.

The streams divide into seven subsets called Fields, and within these are the Units. There are 71 Units in the Library Competency Standards at present. Each element of a job description should be characterised by a Unit. The Units are set out with a general description of what they refer to, followed by a list of key elements of the task e.g. deliver training, and a set of performance indicators for each key element under the heading "How do we know if the key element is being performed to the required standard?" e.g. A systematic approach is taken to training using a variety of processes to facilitate learning. For anyone who wants to fully understand the system it is necessary to spend some time studying and becoming familiar with the manual and relating Units to job descriptions and tasks.

There were disadvantages for me of coming into this project without prior knowledge or experience of Competency Standards. I discovered that work had been being done in the Library in this area for a number of years and no conclusion had been reached, and it became increasingly clear why. In the three months originally assigned to me I was only beginning to gain more than a superficial understanding of the concepts and application of a system like the Competencies and their implications. I needed to gain a deeper understanding and grasp of the issues before I could confidently and with any credibility make recommendations as to how the Library should proceed in this matter. I therefore continued with the work until I felt I had sufficiently grappled with the fundamental issues and implications.

It was also essential at a certain stage to meet with groups of Library staff to discuss and get feedback on the work so far. This part proved to be the greatest stumbling block. Trying to schedule a meeting with reference librarians was the hardest. Added to the difficulty of getting enough people at a time was the reluctance of the people to come and talk about something they knew little about and which required more than a five minute preparation to gain a basic understanding of the concepts involved. The first meeting therefore had to be used as a briefing. The next meeting did not take place until significantly later and then not all the same people could attend. These meetings are reported on below. Although I felt that this step was necessary, it indicated the amount of time that would inevitably be spent on briefing and rebriefing in an ongoing use of the Competencies. Such a tool may be best applied similarly to Quality, when everyone in the organisation where it is being used has some grasp of it, and an ability to use the language involved.

ii) Applying the Units

The assigning of Competency Units to all positions in the Library is a very large task. Once I had described a representative majority, I determined not to go on with the process. The sample I had completed was enough to use as a basis for decision making about the future of the project, and further work will depend on these decisions.

Positions in the Library described in terms of Competency Units:

most Level 6;
most Level 3;
most Level 7;
all of Circulation from 3 to 8;
some Level 4;
1 Level 5.

Level 6 positions included a basic description for all reference librarians, with some differing responsibilities such as map collection, supervision of shelvers, Garvan Institute. Unique positions such as Librarian, Circulation and Head Unicopy were also described.

iii) Feedback sought

Some meetings have been held with selected sections of staff.

Two meetings were held with a cross-section of reference librarians and their department heads. At the first meeting the application and usefulness of competencies was comprehensively discussed. No final judgement was reached on the applicability and usefulness to UNSW Library. The meeting was adjourned to a later date so that participants could look at the allocation of the Units to their job descriptions, and to think about the training needs implied by this. A second meeting was held some weeks later during which time nobody had looked at the documentation again. This in itself is an indicator of the difficulties to be encountered in trying to apply such a system. It takes commitment as well as time to involve oneself in this, and it is not the kind of thing people will voluntarily commit themselves to because of its labour intensive requirement and the obscure nature of the end product. The end result of this meeting was that the reference librarians agreed that the ends would not be worth the means, particularly in view of a number of the arguments laid out in this report.

One meeting was held with Circulation staff from Levels 3 to 8. I gave some explanation of the project, but little discussion was entered into about its applicability for UNSW Library. I had assigned the Units to duties on the basis of current job descriptions. The meeting highlighted a number of issues:
- most felt their job descriptions were not adequate descriptions of what they do. We went through the job descriptions and noted tasks which could not be said to be included in the descriptions, or even if they were, were not fully enough described to identify required training;
- necessary computer skills have not been systematically addressed in training terms. In the day to day work of GLAs and LTs the use of computers has crept in, and most of the staff have learnt computer skills in a very unsystematic manner, often in a very haphazard order. Many of the staff began from a base of complete computer illiteracy, and without learning basic PC or Windows skills, now operate Howard, have done html training, basic Internet training and learned to operate email. They still feel very uncertain about computer usage, and feel they need the basic training;
- a majority of tasks done by circulation staff fit into the umbrella unit of 1.1.2 "assist with circulation activities", however, this unit does not include or imply many of the activities required e.g. van driving, intercampus loan tasks, using the computer for office tasks. Circulation staff are also now required to do switchboard work in addition to all their other duties. The Competency Unit then is not a good identification of skills, abilities or training needs to match the jobs.

The main outcome of this meeting was to highlight the issue that jobs are changing so fast that, Competencies aside, job descriptions should be regularly evaluated and updated, and training needs more systematically assessed.

I feel that as a University we may be sufficiently different from other kinds of Libraries, particularly the kinds of libraries that the Competencies would be quite useful for (such as TAFE and public libraries), for the Competencies to be inappropriate or inadequate for our purposes. At best, we would need to do substantial rewriting or addition of Units, to make them fit our requirements. A significant difference between Universities and other libraries in the 1990s is the convergence of libraries with the University's computing division to form a large Information Services Division. In addition, rather than fitting into a neat pattern demanded by the use of a tool such as the Competency standards, University Libraries will be finding many different methods of managing this integration and diversity.

iv) What they did at Curtin

An examination of the Curtin University process of integrating Competency standards into their human resource and staff development operations as described by Williamson and White, 1996, lent a lot to the process of my understanding of the concepts and larger framework of the Competency picture. They have used the Competency standards as one element in their procedure for recruitment, assessment and development of staff skills, performance and training. It may need further work to assess if the same kind of process would be useful or appropriate for UNSW Library.

The Curtin project was undertaken at the same time as a number of other related developments were going on i.e. enterprise bargaining, award restructuring, development of Curtin Core Competencies for general staff (not just Library). From August 1994, the Staff Development Unit at Curtin worked with general staff to identify the 12 core competencies. These are aligned with the Curtin University HEGS (our HEW) levels.

The uses to which the competencies will be put at Curtin are identified as:

to specify essential and desirable selection criteria for positions;
to link performance planning, coaching and review to the University's strategic objectives;
to reward performance that exceeds expectations;
to revise training and development programs; and
as a basis for career development. (Williamson and White, 1996, p. 36)

The process of integrating the Library Industry Competency Standards into the Curtin Core Competencies took a period of around five months with a large number of staff involved. Most staff participated by providing input about their own jobs. In a thorough reading of the description of their project, I have not been able to identify in the goals of the project a substantial reason for doing the work of linking the Curtin competencies and the Library Industry Competency Standards. If the Curtin Core Competencies may be used as outlined above, the Industry Competency Standards would not appear to add much to them.

The closest they come is to justify the existence of a national competency standard per se, rather than to justify its application to their own organisation:

The benefits for Australian Workplaces of Competency Standards and CBT involve:

being clear about what people need to be able to do;
basing training on those identified outcomes;
certifying that people can actually do what has been identified as needed.

Enterprises and particular industries can achieve a wide range of specific benefits from competency standards, in most cases without the existence of a national framework. However, to achieve the additional benefits to be gained from directly influencing the formal education and training system, a structured framework for national competency standards is needed. (Williamson and White, 1996, p. 9)

The Curtin project emphasises that "Competency standards can be used to improve organisational and industry efficiency by ensuring that vocational and educational training are directly linked to the expressed needs of industry."(Williamson and White, 1996,. p. 9) They describe uses as:

helping to define positions/jobs
helping in the recruitment process
assisting performance reviews
setting and reviewing performance objectives. (Williamson and White, 1996,. p. 10)

They also refer to the work of Paris that "Competency standards lend themselves to a range of applications in the hands of creative individuals or organisations, and in conjunction with the right organisational culture, can provide a sound basis for organisational and individual effectiveness and continual improvement." (Williamson and White, 1996,. p. 10)

v) Analysis, thoughts and comments

As a result of the work I have done, and partly as a result of the meetings held so far, my overwhelming feeling about the Competencies is that to adopt them would be to add a large unnecessary layer of work into our staff development process. My assessment of the situation is:

that the Competencies described in the Library Industry Competency standards manual are too generalised, or sometimes not sufficiently complex to describe the tasks of UNSW Library staff.;
in terms of a recognisable national standard for staff training, adequate staff training for this library should automatically be as good or better than would be required in any other type of library. If one of the outcomes of applying the competencies is the benefit of giving staff a basis for transferability to another organisation, then the above argument would make the Competencies unnecessary or redundant;
for the purposes of this library, the standards may always be slightly out of date as our jobs are changing so fast, as new elements of technology creep in, and we would constantly be putting ourselves through unnecessary contortions to make our job descriptions fit the competency units;
for the purpose of identifying training needs, the need to write our own descriptions for Competencies would involve much extra work for which there exists no real need, as long as we have adequate written job descriptions;
there are also some elements of jobs for which there are no identifiable Units in the current Competencies to describe them. This is because they are either out of date, or the competencies simply do not describe some of the positions in a University Library of our magnitude. If the purpose is to fit into a nationally recognised standard, then writing our own units for tasks which may not be nationally applicable is also excessively time-consuming. A set of Competency standards written specifically for a University Library may change the situation, but this has not been mooted and may never be for reasons stated above.

Useful outcomes

The process of systematically going through job descriptions was useful, and perhaps a more detailed description of some jobs would be valuable as was evident in the meeting with circulation staff. Although most of the activities undertaken by circulation staff could be classed under one Unit 1.1.2 "assist with circulation activities", this classification was not useful in its ability to indicate requirements for the positions or training needs.
I feel we should be concentrating on a systematic update of all job descriptions, and thence a systematic analysis of training needs for all staff. This would be a more fruitful expenditure of time and energy than an artificial exercise of trying to fit our job descriptions into a pattern which is not altogether appropriate to our needs.

Summary of Benefits and Disadvantages

Benefits	Disadvantages
Units are detailed and may be used as a basis for writing and keeping consistent our own job descriptions	Intensive of staff time and commitment
Keep Library jobs well-defined	Library jobs are becoming broader in nature, existing Units inadequate for all staff
Transferability of training/skills	Jobs changing too fast for Standards to keep up
	Units not detailed enough to include many of our tasks
Writing Units may keep us focused on keeping job descriptions current	We would need to write many of our own Units which would defeat the purpose

vi) Recommendations and future

Options

In deciding whether or not to adopt the competencies as a method of systematising our staff development and training programs, we should consider a number of issues:

benefit to UNSW Library
benefit to the Library profession.

It is important to bear in mind that we are not just talking about professional positions. The Competencies are intended to refer to the whole range of staff who work in Libraries - from non-Library-qualified to paraprofessionals, base grade professionals and senior managers. In the University Libraries of today such distinctions are becoming increasingly blurry. We no longer call ourselves Senior Librarian Grades 1 or 2 etc. but Senior Librarian HEW Level 7 or 8 etc. These levels refer to a University-wide classification which take into account a different set of specifications than the Library-limited classification would do. Some managers are not Librarians at all, and increasingly at other levels we have technical and other specialists whose work is only Library-related because they are doing it in the Library. The convergence of the Library and Computing Services into one division has increased the blurriness of these outlines. If the Division is contemplating broadening the umbrella of the staff development role which has been in place in the Library for Library staff for some years, the Library Competency standards will be inadequate for a large number of the staff involved. We would have to consider the possibility that non Library or non Library trained staff may actually be disadvantaged by this system, unless they had their own set of competencies. To my mind, preparing a current and appropriate set of job descriptions linked to training requirements would be a better expenditure of time for the Library and for the Division.

On the other hand, these arguments may be used as reasons for keeping Library descriptions well-defined, so they do not become confused, and diminish their transferable nature.

a) Embracing the competencies

If it were decided to go forward with the competencies project and to use it as a baseline standard for describing jobs and identifying training needs, there are a number of options we could try or choose between. Library work is constantly changing and we would need to keep the descriptions current. I would suggest this would be best done by a group of selected people from different areas and at different levels, who meet occasionally, probably under the supervision of the Staff Development person. The role of this group would be to ensure that each element of a job description had a matching Competency Unit. However, in order to achieve this, it is necessary to keep job descriptions up-to-date. This would have the desired benefit of pointing to new required training needs, and possibly to indicate where skills and knowledge need to be updated.

However, if that is what we wish to achieve, then I have demonstrated that the Competency issue is a red herring, and the real issue is the need to keep job descriptions current, to identify new elements of jobs as they occur, and to relate these to the optimal training and instruction programs to keep all staff capable of performing their jobs to the best possible level.

b) Using elements of the competencies

I would recommend the use of the Library Industry Competency Standards manual as a reference to provide minimum standards for our own job descriptions. So much work has been done on detailing the elements of particular tasks, that they may provide guidelines to ensure that we include all key elements and performance measures. Without adopting the whole concept of becoming an industry competency-based organisation, which I believe is not appropriate for this library and would create an unnecessary layer of extra work for every position, we can still take advantage of the work that has been done to ease the task of updating job descriptions and applying appropriate performance measures and identification of training.

Conclusion

The Library already has, in its Staff Development System, the ability to match people to specific job requirements and appropriate training to people and positions. The requirements in this library go beyond the minimum standards set out in the Library Industry Competency Standards manual. What we do need is to establish a continuous system of updating job descriptions and to use these to maintain our training programs abreast of current and predictable future requirements. This should not entail the extra layer of work required to fit in with the Competency Standards. It should nevertheless take advantage of the work done by Arts Training Australia, by using their standards as a reference for our own process of updating appropriate job descriptions. We need to bear in mind the benefits of transferable skills, and keep training abreast of current and predictable future requirements, for staff at all levels and for libraries and the library profession in general.

References

Arts Training Australia (1995) Library Industry Competency Standards, Sydney, ATA.
Williamson, Vicki and Sue White (1996) Competency standards in the Library workplace. Adelaide, Auslib Press.