The problem

Performance reviews are an important opportunity within the talent development lifecycle to acknowledge individual performance and teamwork and set the stage for effectiveness in the next year. When properly executed, reviews build a foundation for staff retention and shaping the library leaders of tomorrow. 

Yet, when the narrative of an employee’s year—achievements, growth, and aspirations—is scattered across various digital nooks, the true potential of performance reviews is often left untapped. Managers and staff may exit these reviews feeling overwhelmed or unclear about future directions for skill enhancement and contributions.

Library managers are adept at multitasking—balancing service delivery, branch operations, and patron engagement—while striving to steer their teams with finesse. However, not all have the toolkit to offer insightful, actionable feedback or to navigate their teams through the waters of upskilling for the library’s evolving demands.

Similarly, library staff may find it challenging to map out their year’s triumphs or pinpoint developmental milestones.

The solution

Skilltype’s Skills Ontology provides a standardized vocabulary of library-specific skills. Skilltype also provides skill profiles for each individual that identify their current skills, product experience, and future interests, helping make performance reviews more effortless and meaningful.

For supervisors, branch managers, or department heads, Skiltype makes it possible to view and search the skills, product experience, interests, and training activity of individuals and the Team to prepare for reviews and ongoing check-in meetings. Skilltype’s Skills Inventory provides at-a-glance views of team capabilities. This helps managers identify shared or individual goals to advance the team’s overall progress, aligned with the organization’s needs eliminating hours of searching across PDFs, spreadsheets, documents, or memories. This Skilltype data can help guide authentic performance conversations that deepen engagement, encourage learning, and cultivate future leaders.

Each staff member can access a history of their completed training on the Skilltype platform for an at-a-glance reminder of recent training activity. Each staff member’s training summary can be downloaded as a CSV file to incorporate into a self-review document or review conversation. 

Within a performance review, conversations between managers and staff can focus on specific skills to develop in the coming year. By adding new interests to a staff member’s Skilltype profile corresponding to any new goals for upskilling or reskilling, staff will automatically receive weekly recommendations to help them achieve their SMART goals. 

Managers can take recommendations one step further by creating a Skilltype training List for the team, which contains resources curated by the team manager related to the goals of the team and individuals so that staff can learn or cross-train together. Skilltype integrates skill development into reviews and ongoing performance conversations, helping each library become a learning organization.