NCLA Con 2025

How nimble is your library? If a staff member is gone for an extended period of time, can their major job duties be covered? Do your staff want to build new skills? Cross-training is a solution to all of these challenges! Cross-training is any form of employees learning job duties that are outside their normal focus from their colleagues within the same library system. Implementing a cross-training program not only helps your staff grow professionally, but it also benefits your library as a whole while keeping training costs low. By emphasizing cross-training at your library, you will have staff that can step in and fill gaps that may arise and develop well-rounded, skilled staff. Cross training can have a variety of appearances, from people within a single library learning each other's areas, to creating staff who are comfortable at more than one branch location, to back-ups for tasks crucial to the library's success. Cross-training is also beneficial to library staff by allowing them to build new skills and gain experience in different aspects of the library to support their own career goals and professional development. In this session, librarians will discuss the benefits of cross-training and ways to implement it at your library. Whether you work in a single library or multi-branch system, there are multiple ways to design a cross-training program to help your staff grow and enable your library to rapidly adapt to changing needs. Practical tips and ways to avoid common pitfalls will also be covered.