Essential Skills for Library Employees in a Post-Pandemic Workplace

Marian  R. Eclevia,; Cynthia  L. Cordova,

Essential Skills for Library Employees in a Post-Pandemic Workplace

Abstract:

This paper aims to identify the most important foundation, behavioral, and professional skills and assess the confidence levels of librarians and support personnel in their ability to use these competencies in their current position. This study is a descriptive research strategy using the survey method. The online questionnaire was created using Google Forms and disseminated to all library employees. Respondents were asked to assess the importance of foundation, behavioral, and professional abilities in their current position and over the next three years. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics to describe the respondents’ critical skills and confidence levels. Nonparametric tests were used to ascertain differences in perceived importance and confidence across library sections, employee categories, and position types. Librarians and support staff believe that behavioral skills, such as adaptability, learnability, flexibility, collaboration and coordination, innovation, customer engagement, empathy, and emotional intelligence, are critical for their current positions. They also think that foundation skills, particularly global and social awareness, are extremely important. The most important professional competencies are professional ethics and professionalism, email management, web conferencing technologies, and searching skills. Respondents are moderately confident in applying various skills in their current positions. This study has several practical implications, including using it as the basis for developing a three-year library staff development plan; contributing to the current and future library workforce planning; showing the critical behavioral, foundation, and professional competencies driving individual staff development; and, demonstrating the benefits of mapping the current and future value of the skills in strategic goals for library staff development.