Building a Strong Team One Skill at a Time

How would you describe your professional competencies? Perhaps you are confident in your instructional design skills, but you’d like to learn more about mentoring new staff members. Or you are experienced in budget planning and would like to be better at change management. When you think about it, you may find that it is not easy to pinpoint terms to label your skills and interests or to self-assess how proficient you are.

Being able to articulate our competencies is useful for individual librarians as well as the library as a whole. At an individual level, if you know your own competencies, you can pursue opportunities to contribute with your strengths and to develop where you fall short. Understanding the skills of team members can help library leaders assign roles and duties, assess whether the team lacks skills essential to achieve strategic goals, and plan for staff training and professional development.

In the summer of 2023, the library staff at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), where I serve as director of library services, collectively developed a new set of strategic priorities, which we used to plan our 2023/24 initiatives. By early 2024, we had formed or were planning to form new teams to work on these initiatives. I knew I needed to assign people with the appropriate skills and interests to these new teams. It was in this context that I came up with the idea of conducting an exercise to understand the competencies of our staff.

In June 2024 we completed the exercise, which we called “Talent Mapping.” Our goal was to build an inventory of our librarians’ competencies relevant to the library’s strategic goals by having each person describe their skills and interests. It may sound simple, but it turned out to be more challenging than I expected. The exercise yielded valuable insights for individual staff members and the team as a whole.

The Exercise

I began by asking the librarians to describe their skills, including areas of strength and areas where they wanted to develop professionally, and to reflect on how their competencies could contribute to the library’s strategic priorities.

To help colleagues get started, I made a template with sample entries (Figure 1).

After colleagues drafted their profiles, we held small-group discussions in which we asked each other questions to clarify the meaning of the competency labels we’d chosen and the basis of our self-assessed competence levels. We also negotiated better ways to name various skills.

For example, a few librarians mentioned data-related skills, such as data science, data visualization, data curation, and data analytics. Through discussion, we agreed that data science was too broad a term to describe the skills we need to drive our strategic initiatives; a librarian who used that term eventually adopted data analysis instead.

Self-evaluation is not easy. People can be uncomfortable claiming to be proficient in certain skills, or openly admitting their weaknesses. Sometimes there is a discrepancy between self-perception and what others observe. In one case, a librarian said she wanted to boost her skill in event planning, but other colleagues found that she was already very strong in the area.

But it was worth working through discomfort. The discussion not only clarified the terms we were using, but also helped the participating staff to be more self-aware and to further reflect on their skillsets.

In addition, we mapped our collective competencies against the library’s strategic priorities, drawing a simple chart on a big whiteboard to visualize our findings, with our skill level, ranging from “developing” to “strong,” measured on the X-axis, and the level of importance for achieving strategic priorities tracked on the Y-axis (Figure 2). For example, we had no doubt that “problem solving” was important for achieving strategic priorities, which meant it belonged in the upper section of the chart; but we needed some discussion to decide how good or poor we were (i.e., whether to put it on the right half or the left). In the end, we put the label at a spot near the top-right. “Data skills for bibliometrics and research impact,” on the other hand, we placed at the center of the left block, indicating that our skills in that area were of medium importance and somewhat underdeveloped.

The part of the discussion during which we collectively decided where to place the skill labels on the chart turned out to be lively, engaging, and stimulating. My colleagues seemed to enjoy exploring our collective strengths and seeing how their own competencies connected to the bigger picture. We ended up placing about a hundred skill labels on the whiteboard.

After we finished the exercise, I wrote a summary and shared it with all the participating staff. I also assigned some people to new teams based on what we’d learned and encouraged colleagues to use what they had learned about themselves to shape their development objectives in subsequent performance appraisals.

Our Competencies

We collectively identified a rich set of labels for a range of competencies. I organized them into broad-scope clusters, listed below with a few example competencies:

• AI: use of AI tools, prompt writing, workflow automation using GenAI, AI literacy
• Collections: collection planning to weeding, electronic resource management, knowledge of special collections, curation, conservation, preservation, stack management
• Communication and outreach: storytelling; academic writing; service assessment; user research; graphic design; UX/UI; diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Data: data wrangling, analytics, visualization, metadata, linked data
• Digital services: digital scholarship support, digital repositories, geographic information systems, digital preservation
• IT: using application programming interfaces, coding, database design, cybersecurity, system implementation, authentication, content management systems, internet of things, digital transformation
• Leadership: problem solving, decision making, project management, team building, conflict resolution
• Legal and policies compliance: IP knowledge, copyright in using and creating information, license negotiation, digital rights management
• Management: budgeting, facility management, human resources process, staff development, change management
• Research support: scholarly communication, publishing process and market, open access publishing, bibliometrics, systematic reviews, research data management
• Teaching support: instructional design, developing digital learning objects, learning analytics, gamification

Reflection

When I planned this exercise, my primary goal was to understand my team better, so that I could assign the right people to new initiatives. After the exercise, apart from achieving that goal, I also realized that describing and self-assessing competencies was more complicated than I’d thought.

Some competencies are complex constructs, such as project management, decision making, and problem solving. When my colleagues evaluated if they were competent project managers, or if their teams managed projects well, it was certainty subjective; it was likely that librarian A and librarian B had very different skillsets in mind when they used the same term.

The exercise was not meant to be a rigorous assessment, nor did I expect to have a structured competency framework that clearly defined every term; these inconsistencies and ambiguities were not a failure. But if I were to make similar effort in the future, I would discuss the meanings of competency labels with my team before they compiled their skill profiles rather than after. I would also limit the scope of the exercise, either by running it with a small group of librarians or focusing on a small set of competencies.

Professional competencies are a crucial aspect of a librarian’s career, especially with our operational environment always in flux. Despite the challenges and potential discomfort of discussing our skills, a talent audit can help develop the capacity of individual librarians as well as the agility of our libraries. We should find ways to continue to the dialogue.