Written by guest blogger Frank Vitale IV.
Emerging professionals sometimes enter their first jobs unsure of the exact skills and competencies they need to succeed in the long term. On-the-job training programs, whether in the form of internships, fellowships, rotations, or intensives, can help bridge the gap between new professionals’ existing and needed skills through structured curricula and experiential learning. Samantha Wilairat (Stanford University) and I participated in and assessed one such program, the Associate Fellowship Program at the National Library of Medicine in the United States. That work, shared in a newly published study, reveals some ways in which career readiness programs can best prepare emerging professionals for success.
From the side of the professional training programs, our study highlights the importance of aligning curriculum and instruction using commonly shared goals and objectives. Especially in large organizations, the goals and objectives of training programs can vary between upper-level administrators, managers, and program participants. Our study models a mixed-methods approach to understanding this potential dissonance, using interview and survey data to explore the expectations and needs of different stakeholder groups. Being able to point to a common set of objectives ensures that everyone is on the same page about the ultimate goals and measures of success for the program. In our case study, we recommended a two-pronged approach to harmonizing stakeholder expectations, both involving the adoption of standard competencies. For the first prong, we developed an internal set of institutional competencies that encouraged curricular elements that imparted understanding of the organization and its mission, values, history, and future directions. For the second prong, leveraging the work of others in the health sciences librarianship field, we recommended adoption of the competencies established by the Medical Library Association as the best guide for necessary professional skills. By recommending these two competency sets, our study posited that iterative improvements and refinements to instruction would establish a clearly articulated and widely understood mission for professional development activities. This, in turn, would ensure that all training program stakeholders – from administrators to managers to trainees – are reflected by, and acceptive of, the program’s purposes.
From the perspective of emerging professionals, our study included a review of participants’ anonymous debriefs, which we analyzed to find common themes. Associate Fellows especially noted that they appreciated elements of the training program that were contextualized within their workplace, candid, and considered future directions. Our case study suggests that emerging professionals participate in on-the-job training programs to help them better understand their chosen career path and the options within it. It also suggests that emerging professionals value the ability to practice newly acquired skills in interactive ways. Keeping these elements in mind can help inform curriculum development within training programs, as well as guide recruitment and retention efforts.
As emerging professionals in the Associate Fellowship Program when our analysis began, this study has been fascinating from the dual perspective of both past participant and assessor. Our findings can help professional training programs both within and outside of the library science profession better meet the skill needs of their participants.
FRANK VITALE IV is an archivist and historian, and is Assistant Professor, University Archivist, and Special Collections Librarian at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. He was an Associate Fellow with the National Library of Medicine in the United States in 2021-2022. His research focuses on library instruction and outreach, experiential learning design, the history of medicine, and the Native American boarding school era (late–19th to early–20th centuries).
“Evaluating Post-Graduate Curricula for Emerging Professionals: A Case Study of the National Library of Medicine’s Associate Fellowship Program” was published in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 65.2 and is Free to Read from October 7 – 14, 2024.
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