 Thank you so much, Matt, and thanks again to RLUK for welcoming me to the digital shift forum. There is a lot of information to share today and so I hope to just dive right in. For those who didn't have an opportunity to see last week's talk it does provide some context for why we're here today, but I'll just sort of give a summary that the digital shift that we're all experiencing and discussing places the information profession at a crossroads. The traditional roles and expectations of libraries and library professionals are being reimagined every single day and every week. And navigating this change requires each constituent in the ecosystem to upgrade and rethink the way that we manage our personal talent and our organizational talent. We sort of make the case for why that is the situation in the webinar from last week and so I would encourage you to check that out if you're just tuning into this conversation. This shift has different constituents in the ecosystem asking different things. For example, if I'm a library worker. I am often time asking myself how do I find the right training and the right career development at the right time. And this is a question that you have whether you are very senior and established in the profession, but especially if you're newer to the profession, and you're not familiar with all of the acronyms in the library space. And so how do I make sure I get the right training or mentorship at the right time is a very prescient question for individuals. We also have libraries and organizations asking how do I find the right people and expertise for the right situation or at the right time. This is a very real question that oftentimes goes unanswered we launched job searches that run the risk of being a failed search. We hire executive search firms for roles and we are oftentimes pleased with the end product or result of the of the cost. And there's job postings we can launch and we don't get the right applicants. There are a lot of questions here as well for organizations. Then we have training providers, the folks who produce webinars are always wondering how do we reach the right people and provide the right resources for our audience. This today involves a lot of guesswork, having to survey users and get an understanding of needs assessments. But a lot of it is work that is redundant because all training providers are asking the same questions, because we are in this digital shift, we can't make a lot of the same assumptions on the skills needed that we used to 10 or maybe 20 years ago. And lastly we have library consortia which are a wonderful feature and part of this community it's one of the things that I love about libraries and makes libraries unique is that we have these very collaborative groups and many other industries don't have such collaborative vehicles. But these library consortia like RL UK and others are also asking how do we provide our members with the right services at the right time and I think the digital shift forum is a wonderful example of responding to the feedback from libraries during the pandemic on a new type of service that we can provide but this is a question that library consortia are asking. And so around 2018 year and a half or two years before the pandemic came. A community of these constituents came together organized by myself and a small group of people, but we got libraries together we had about nine of them training providers from around the world. And a few library consortia and we began to rethink the way that we manage expertise. We met publicly on zoom for now over two years and you can watch any of those monthly meetings on Vimeo today. And what we concluded from that community sort of gathering was a few things one that when you look at the library talent ecosystem, and you're able to see these three different sort of constituents. There's one that sort of drives the rest of the conversation and that is libraries. And the reason we decided to focus on the needs of the library is because the needs of the library impact everything else. In other words, number one, libraries are the source of the demand. And so you're the ones who are on campus, getting feedback from various departments and faculty on the research needs. You're the ones who are in your municipality of your public library, who are sort of hearing what are the services that your community wants you to provide for them moving forward. And you're the first hand information, whereas training providers and consortia receive this information second hand or perhaps third hand. And so the source of the demand for this expertise comes from the library. That's one reason that we believe this entire conversation should flow through the library. Number two, libraries are the source of funding. Now we understand that libraries are a cost center in the broader economic model, but in this ecosystem, the funding flows through the library. So as a result, we believe that the library should have the final say on the products and services that are that are produced for them in this regard because the money comes through that library cost center and flows outward to the training provider or to the consortium. And lastly, the source of assessment happens in the library. So the library supervisors are the ones actually evaluating the expertise in question. You're the ones providing performance reviews at the end of the year. You're the ones providing one on one meetings with employees to understand their goals. And the assessment of the expertise happens, not at the training provider level nor at the consortium level but again on the ground Monday through Friday, nine to five p.m. The assessment is taking place back in the library. So for those three reasons we feel that this entire conversation should be flowing through the library's perspective. And there were a few requirements that we settled on, if we were building a new solution to manage talent from the ground up. The first is that this has to be technological. There are no shortage of examples of people gathering together for a conference or a workshop, whether in person or online. And there are a lot of sort of analog efforts to collaborate, pair people with mentors provide training. Something new from the ground up must leverage the power of automation and a lot of these really interesting tools like artificial intelligence and more that allow us to do a lot more with a lot less. And so we didn't want to reinvent another conference or community because there's no shortage of those today. Number two, this had to be affordable and we believe this before the pandemic and austerity measures. But the costs of this have to be predictable and they have to scale up or down, whether you're a tiny institution or a larger one. The cost should not prohibit any library from participating in this new modern way of managing talent. This has to be sustainable. We've seen many efforts funded by foundations and others to spark a new way of thinking around talent. But the cost winded up outweighing the initial funding that was delivered and these really interesting projects that have taken place winded up phasing out two years or three years and because they weren't able to figure out a business model that was sustainable, or a labor model that was distributed where you don't have too much of a burden on any particular part of the ecosystem. So both the labor has to be properly distributed and also the cost has to be distributed. Fourthly, but not least importantly, any solution from scratch today has to be equitable. There are rich conversations happening around the playing field not being level. People are not receiving the same opportunities for growth and development based on circumstances outside of their control, whether it be race or gender. And as a result, if we're designing something new from scratch, it has to push the conversation forward on creating opportunities for all people who are interested in growing and developing their careers. And lastly, it has to be collaborative because what I learned through my career and also through this process was, no matter which country we're in, no matter which region or library type we are. There are common denominators when it comes to managing information professionals and managing talent that surpassed the type of library we are. In order to reduce redundancy and increase those economies of scale. This must be a collaborative endeavor, which has its own implications on security and openness and privacy and things of that nature. So, these are the five requirements for this conversation. And so, I want to shift for a moment over to demonstration for the sake of time to show you what skill type is. I just logged in and this is my personal profile. Each person in the ecosystem should have their own profile and so anyone, whether your institutions using skill type or not is able to sign up for a free skill type account right now. And based on the information that you're interested in learning skill type will start curating resources for you from around the world. Based on your interests, but I won't focus on that individual experience today there are many presentations you can watch on our website about that. I want to continue down this path of going through the library. And I want to begin actually with what the experience is like for an organization like a library that manages talent. And so, the first step for a library in this sort of new way of thinking is to do what we call a needs assessment. And a needs assessment is a collaborative process that the library undergoes with leadership in the library to determine what are the things that we need at our local institution, what skills and expertise make us unique and that we need moving forward. And so, as a library I'm able to do a few things. I'm able to select strategic directions that make my library unique. Each library has a strategic plan that is very well deliberated on. And so we analyzed over 300 academic library strategic plans and created a controlled vocabulary of strategic directions. And so this is now being standardized, and each library can select the ones that make them unique and you can update these as those strategic directions change. Underneath strategic directions, each organization is able to select key skills. And these are the skills that the management and supervisors across your organization believe are necessary today to accomplish those strategic directions. And so this is pulling from a controlled vocabulary of library skills. We worked with about 14 different core competency frameworks, including ones from the American Library Association, IFLA, EDUCAUSE, NACIG, and others, and produced a controlled vocabulary of library skills. And today there are over 500 skills that are unique to libraries that we've identified. And as an institution, this needs assessment allows you to select what are the skills that we need as a library. And these can, again, be updated as your needs evolve. And so with these skills, you're also able to select the products and services that are required and necessary for you to do your work. So if your library uses the Adobe suite, for example, which pretty sure every library does. But even things like Ex Libris or Epscoe are library specific products that are required for you to do your work. So if you have expertise in that product, this is a way for you to capture that. And what the library is doing through this needs assessment is creating a single source of truth. And so we're removing any ambiguity for ourselves, but also for our employees, but also potential employees to understand what are the skills and expertise that this library needs today. So this is the needs assessment. We typically recommend taking about 30 days or a one month to have this conversation with your leadership and to come up with this initial snapshot. Step two, moving on from the needs assessment is when we go into what we call a talent audit, the talent audit. And the talent audit is when we invite our community. And so these are the employees who work for our library. These could also be potential employees who have applied for jobs in the past. Our libraries have hundreds of people that are interested in working for us, but we may not have an opportunity today. They're a part of your talent pool as well. And so the talent audit begins by either doing a bulk invite of a group of people or doing a one-on-one invite of a group of people. And once you send this invitation out, each person goes through a personal onboarding process where as an individual, I can select my role in the organization. And these roles come from the ARL annual reporting structure. And so these are standardized roles across research libraries. And after I select my role, as an individual, I select some skills that I'm interested, I mean that I use every day. And I can search from that same vocabulary of skills to find the skills that I use on a personal level. Then I select the products and services that I have experience using. So again, each person in your organization has different experience using different products. And lastly, we ask each person what they're interested in learning. We don't assume just because they know how to do something that they are interested in continuing to learn about that. And so your interests could overlap with your skills, but not necessarily. Once you're done as an individual, you receive a nice little congratulations banner, but each individual employee now has a personalized learning journey based on what they're interested in learning and the needs of your organization. And so this list right here of 1235 items is comprised of videos, articles, podcasts that come from training providers around the library community. Let's talk about the conferences that we know and love the professional associations that produce content. Even vendors that are producing trainings for their products, new version updates. For example, RL UK, we've brought in those publicly available trainings that RL UK has and there's an RL UK training feed here. But not just for RL UK, you have these four hundreds of conferences, there's now over 8000 of these trainings inside of skill type. And so as I'm working on my individual profile, you'll see that these are links to things. And so for example, if I click on two ex Libras Alma, I'm going to a topical feed for ex Libras Alma. And so as an individual worker, I'm now a part of this this global ecosystem whereby I can access trainings based on various interests, all in one place. And I can begin watching these trainings right here within skill type, I can save them for later and do a number of different things. Allow me to go back for a moment to this library experience because again, all of this is driven from that perspective. So now that we've invited people, both our employees, but also potential employees, which we're calling just your talent pool. We've brought your talent pool into your community. You're able to see some insights. And this is where things get really interesting because each supervisor right now lacks full and complete information on whether or not the skills exist for the things that we need. And so as a part of this talent audit skill type does overlap analysis of the skills you said you needed according to your profile. And the skills and interest people have who are coming into your community. And so this talent audits breaks the skills into three categories. The first are skills that you said you needed according to your profile in the needs assessment and good news you actually have those skills. And so you can click into this and see that who are the people that actually have those skills. And if I need to leverage those skills I can go and do that right now. And that's one category. And then there are skills you said you needed and more good news. There are people within your talent pool who are interested in learning those skills. If our organization's needs, those people will appear here. So if I click on to one of these, I'm going to see the people who are interested in learning about accessibility. So I'm going to connect the dots on during our needs assessment, I said that accessibility was a key skill that we needed, right. And as a result skill type is analyzing whether we have people who are interested in that skill accessibility so I can see we have in my small company, we have three people who are able to take on tasks regarding accessibility. We have two people who are interested in learning about accessibility. So I can come in and I can see who those people are. And since skill type has a database of trainings that are a part of the ecosystem that are provided by these training providers, I can actually see whether or not skill type has trainings available for this particular skill. So as a supervisor, I can say, okay, well I see that William is interested in accessibility, but let me see if he is able to start working on those things today. And so you can click and visit this right now. And you can also see whether or not this person has started down this pathway so if there are 57 trainings available on accessibility. In my case for Tony I've viewed 5% of these. And so as a supervisor I can start to see if someone's at 0% great, I can now make some recommendations for them to get started on this area that they're interested in. Or I can say hey great job I can see you've already watched half of these. It sounds like you're really getting into accessibility. So that's one area, or the second area which is skills we said we needed that we have that people are interested in learning. The last bucket are skills that the library needs but you don't have them. And no one's interested in learning about that, which lets us know that we have to go outside of our community outside of our organization to find these skills. And so if I click onto one of the missing skills. What skill type is doing here is two things. One, we're surfacing those followers which are people who don't work for your organization but they are interested in working there, therefore they're sharing their data with you. There may be a potential candidate to provide this expertise for you so we'll put them into this first box, and these are called followers. The second thing we're doing is that if you belong to a consortium, which skill type doesn't, but if you do. We can surface people across a consortium that works for other member libraries but has that expertise. So, for example, from your profile, you're able to say, we have these memberships right and so if I'm a librarian RL UK, I can select RL UK from this list, and that doing this will begin to share my organizational data up to the RL UK level. And I'm going to show you an example of a demo consortium because we don't belong to one and so I don't have access to that data. So bear with me one moment and I'll show you what this looks like and so give me one second. Let me log out of here. And I'll close the loop here on how this all comes together. And so as a result, you can share your data up to a consortium level. And what happens in that case is the consortium which has multiple members is able to do two things. So imagine this being RL UK as a consortium, and we can see the different members who are sharing data upward to RL UK. I can start to understand what the priorities are from each specific library, but I can also see who the people are who have these various skills. And so as a result of there being, let's see, 49 libraries that are sharing data with at that consortium level. I'll now go back to the example from before just to close the loop here. So in my insights, the talent audit tells me that we're missing some things. But if there is a member at another library, we're able to see who those people are and what consortium they belong to. I'm sorry, which member library they belong to here. And so this sort of sort of closes the loop on how the data sharing occurs between from an individual who can share their data upward with an organization of their choice from their own profile. The organization or a library, which can establish the skills that it needs view these skills according to the three categories. But you can also see the raw data as well. So for example, if I want to just get an understanding of what are the most popular interests in our community, I'm able to sort this by most popular. And I can see who's interested in receiving training in analytics. And one use case from that we're hearing from customers is now that I see there are people interested in learning analytics. Let's see if we have the experts in house who can actually perform that training. Good news, we do. Oftentimes, if your community is of a substantial scale. The training that you need can take place among people in your own community. It's just a matter of surfacing these needs and interests and making those connections. And same goes for product experience. Say for example, I'm looking for someone with some Microsoft Excel experience. I'm able to see who has that experience in my organization and get some help with this project that I have. So there's a lot more to show, but I do want to pause here and start working through questions because we can take this demonstration into any direction you'd like at this point. Thanks, Tony. We've got quite a few questions coming in via chat already and colleagues are if you. So if you want to quickly have a look at some of those colleagues as well if you'd like to raise your hand and ask a question verbally as well please just raise it for the participants. Participants tab and we can bring you straight in. There are a few questions, Tony, if you're seeing these within chat as to how this relates to geographical location, obviously there's quite a very strong US origins in terms of skill type but. And I asked the question about do resources get filtered by where you're based in terms of if you're based in the UK if you're based in the US is that is that filtering function possible. Has that been considered. Sure, great question so currently we don't filter information based on location it's solely filtered on your interests, and these resources are coming from around the world. And so for example, you won't just see RL UK, you also find things like UK SG, the Vala Conference in Australia, we've brought in, you know, 20 years of their conference videos and proceedings and presentations. And you can sort of dive right in and start watching those as well. Singapore and the Library Association of Singapore has has added resources from Singapore, everything for the most part is in English for now we will eventually get into other languages but right now the content is in English. Yeah, I see just here as well. So you can you can sort of browse. I'd say it's a good mixture, not just you, United States of content and the goal here is to understand what are the resources that provide the training we need from around the world. So this isn't a North American focus at all. You can also browse skill by skill, sort of on a to z list if there is a particular skill you're looking for. And you can sort of get right into it from the browse area. And search is another interesting tool. If there's a particular thing you're interested in you're able to search and sort of find things that way as well. But in terms of the recommendations that skill type provides, it's quite simplistic. For now, it's solely based on if I if you say you're interested in learning about a topic skill type will filter those resources out for you across all of these sources. As opposed to you having to go to, you know, hundreds of websites and scroll and browse through all of the options to find the ones you're interested in so at a base level. Creating your profile skill type will immediately begin surfacing the things you say you're interested in and if you find things aren't quite relevant. It could be a matter of just updating your your interest to focus on the area you want to focus on right now. That's really helpful, Tony and I think just building on that skills journey I know one of the things that you mentioned and there's been a great deal of interest in the UK's one control vocabulary. And Philo raised a question about what opportunities skill type offers to enter interest outside of the control vocabulary that you have listed there, and how this can be managed as you move through your personalized learning journey. And so, as we've tried to establish everything is in a controlled vocabulary. And that was an intentional decision to help with discoverability, and just to help with sort of the description of this database of resources. And if there's something missing. You do have the ability to make suggestions, and we're now at the phase of the process where we are crowd sourcing skills products that have not been brought up in our current conversation. So, you are able to suggest things that we're missing if there's a particular skill or product that is important to your work. And we review these suggestions every week, we convert the actual skills that are sort of net new but if it's a duplication, we will consolidate it into the record or the skill that it's duplicating. But you can make suggestions also, not just for skills but also for products as well. And so, as you're exploring the vocabulary please suggest things that are that are missing. We gladly welcome those. Really nice to answer another question actually that's come in which is around you say people be able to recommend products and things that are available. What is the selection process that skill type uses in terms of identifying available training. Is there a degree of quality assurance or assessment in in listing training opportunities within skill type. Sure. So, the conversation here is focused on the training providers that should be a part of the community. In other words, once we make a decision to either partner with a training provider or index their content, which is open access. We don't sort of filter or or omit anything underneath their offerings so in other words, take a la for example. Once we decide to start indexing a la training. We're not getting into the business of saying well this particular training from a la was not good quality. This one was good quality. This is the authority here. If anyone's the authority, it's you, the user and skill type will be evaluating the usage of particular content and we will use your activity on whether you watched, you know, this isn't an hour and three long present minute presentation. Our users watching the entire presentation. Are they leaving this video after three minutes because it was poor quality. And we need to hear from you and watch and understand whether this training provided value to you and your organization, because we're not the authority on determining whether a la provided a good training or not you are. And so once we make the decision to, we do curate in that which training providers are a part of the system so you won't find poor quality training providers. You'll only find sort of established, you know, trusted training providers that are part of the community. But if you do have feedback for suggestions, we're all of this is driven by feedback from the community. That community elements as well in terms of judging what is what is good and quality training you'd be able to see how that really important element. This is tested and driven by the community. One of the really exciting things about this and something that are okay we've been doing quite a lot of work is looking at how colleagues can connect with each other. And how can we share skills within the community and make those sometimes serendipitous connections between individuals who may be interested in a similar area but have different skills around it. And follow us to another great question about if you've identified someone within your organization and presumably also potentially outside your organization who has a skill that they're interested in developing. Whether and how skill type can enable that connection to happen. So the examples can you make that connection to stop planning a meeting and having ideas for ways of exchanging skills and knowledge. Sure, there's two ways that this happens today among the skill type community. The first is, if I'm a manager at an organization. I'm able to click on to the interest area here to see all of the interest across our community. Again, you can sort of sort by most popular or if there's a particular one that you're interested in, you're able to search and see whether people are interested in that skill to help determine should you provide a training on that. This obviously is much richer and larger set of data if you're a larger organization skill type only has 10 employees and so this data is pretty small. But imagine this for a larger group at the library level, you can understand what are the interests across that library level. You're also able to do this at the consortium level and so this example of imagining a consortium with 49 members. Those libraries are sharing their needs up to the consortium level. So, allowing you to see on a library by library basis, what are the unique needs of this library. So as a consortium I can begin to design services and offerings to meet these needs. So we're also able to see across the entire consortium. What are the most popular things employees across all of those libraries want to learn. Right. And so right now we're looking at this interest data across all of the members of the consortium. And so this is the simplest way to as a consortium see who is interested in what and whether we should be offering specific trainings or offerings for that that interest. You're also responsible for figuring out who will present or who will train on that topic. You can jump over to the skills tab to see who are the experts across the consortium to actually perform and conduct that training. Because in all likelihood, again, if you're of any substantial skill. The likelihood is that you won't have to look too far outside of that consortium to find those experts to perform that training on your behalf. And so it's, it's merely a matter of performing this matchmaking and seeing who the people are. And identifying them and contacting them to to reach out and say, would you be interested in providing a training on this. As a content provider, speaking on behalf of our UK that would be invaluable. I think finding those colleagues who have a certain expertise a certain skill in a different area and are willing to share that with other colleagues would be an incredible resource. So two questions we've got a few more minutes. So if colleagues do only further questions please do put them in via chat or raise your hand but two questions one. Thanks Jane has been posting in chat. And I think it's a questionnaire about engagements with sector bodies and sector leads and also you mentioned engagement with the ARL around some of the competency areas. So that sense of has skill type engaged with and and being working with colleagues like in in Sylip in the UK that the professional body here for librarians. Ifla and also Jane suggested library juice. I'll just stop there in terms of engagement and then there's a follow on question I'd like to ask after that. Sure. So those particular ones library juice. We have not Sylip we have not. Ifla however we have and the if the competency framework that has recently been updated. We've fortunately have been able to be a part of that conversation and incorporate that into the control vocabulary process. The way this works, since things are pretty early on and skill type is fairly new and not many people have even heard of us let alone are engaging with us and in the work just yet. There's still a lot of room for opportunity for for for partnerships. Our focus really has been on developing the technological infrastructure to allow these types of collaborations to take place. And it's taken about three years and probably about over a million dollars of investment to really build something that is keeping in mind security implications privacy implications scalability implications if I'm if I'm accessing this from Australia. I would have the same experience with speed and performance as I am in London or Virginia right and so our role in the ecosystem has really been around rethinking this infrastructure right of no matter where I am. No matter whether I'm a worker or a hiring manager or a training provider, we need new infrastructure to tackle this problem because we've been using tools that were designed in the 1970s. We've been using email lists serves. We've been using in person gatherings. And we've seen from COVID-19 that many of those things aren't as accessible as they as they used to be. And so now that we've we've sort of solved some of those larger technological design problems, we can now open up to some of the fun stuff, which is, you know, who are the who are the people who should be a part of this conversation and rather than just have pie in the sky conversations around what could be possible. We have a mechanism now to take action and to say, okay, let's get you set up if you're interested. Let's have you start to describe your needs. Let's have your community get involved. And let's start surfacing these insights so we can have richer engagements with our with our community. That perfectly leads on to my my final question, which is which you've already started alluding to and that is what is the future of skill type and how can colleagues on today's call be a part of that. If you're an individual. It's free for you to set up your own account. Your institution doesn't have to be using it. It is a superior way of surfacing training opportunities, as opposed to starting off on Google and having to sift and browse. And that's one way is to no matter which library you work for or where you are in your career. We believe everyone should have access to all training. And so the same philosophy of open access and openness we have on the publishing side. We believe the same for training and development resources as well and so I think that's one aspect I think if you're a library. You are having to navigate some challenging conversations on finding the right skills at the right time. We this is the business that skill type is in. We provide annual subscriptions to libraries to a software as a service platform that helps your managers and supervisors save an immense amount of time. We're deliberating on should we hire someone from outside of our organization. Are we able to train someone up from within. And that decision is one that we want you to have the best information possible prior to making that expensive choice one way or another. If you're a training provider on the audience we partner with training providers. And if you produce training you're able to get access to an interface and skill type where you can load videos. And then we have podcasts articles and describe them with these vocabularies to make sure that the right resources you're producing are going to the right workers. As opposed to relying on each employee having to. So I'm in bandwidth sift through, you know, thousands of websites. So those are the three I think opportunities for those who are interested.