Next week, Kathryn Perkins, WebJunction’s director of Partner Services, will be presenting at Talentpalooza 2009, a live online webinar series that is held annually to discuss the latest trends in talent management.

Take a look at the lineup for this free July 15 event on the Talentpalooza website, and register if you are interested in attending any presentations.

You can read about what the guest speakers will be presenting on the site’s blog. Here is what Kathryn wrote:

Leveraging Customer Communities to Meet Top Talent Challenges

Are you fully engaging the social learning aspect of your customer communities as a critical talent management resource to build high-potential staff, improve productivity, and enhance recruiting and learning efforts more efficiently and at a lower cost?

At WebJunction, we provide online learning community services to a wide variety of library organizations. Our customers (whom we call our partners) range from state libraries that develop custom learning communities, to library organizations that use our competency index and online courses for staff training. As a central hub of the community’s activity, we see talent and learning trends in our industry and the important role communities play in communication, networking, referrals and skill development.

With a number of states’ legislature budgets delayed or sharply decreased, along with record numbers of people flocking to the libraries, library staff are reaching out to their colleagues across the library field to assist in mentoring and collaborating on talent management initiatives. Online social networks are fostering connections, helping staff share information quickly and effectively across geographically diverse libraries and helping to establish broad recruiting circles.

Why are recruiting circles so important at a time of diminishing budgets and staff reductions? Libraries have faced significant retirements this year and expect this to continue into 2014. Filling these roles with experienced staff has become difficult, especially in states that have been hit particularly hard by the decrease in housing values. The lack of mobility within these states has pushed libraries to recruit from outside of their traditional geographic regions. The use of customer communities provides a cost-effective means of reaching out as well as serving as a positive asset to attract young prospective recruits.

Libraries are also reporting training positions being reduced or training staff taking on additional organizational responsibilities. In response, communities are helping by aggregating content and resources so that individual libraries can make the best use of limited time and not “reinvent the wheel.” Another promising activity that we see developing is cohort learning on rapid elearning development tools. Guru groups are forming around building expertise with the tools by sharing members’ best practices and enlightened failures.

I would like to hear if you are seeing some of the same talent and training trends. How is your organization leveraging your customer communities?