Professional development
The final section focused on the current and anticipated future professional
development needs of the library workforce in Qatar.
Five distinct areas were examined – professional development courses currently
required in Qatar, satisfaction with current professional development provision,
professional development workshops, events and conferences needed in Qatar, the need
for a professional library body in Qatar and specific future skills or knowledge areas
that need to be developed within the Qatar library workforce.
This data helped to inform the wider picture for the library profession in Qatar by
examining the ways in which librarians were developing within the workplace and,
critically, where gaps existed that needed to be filled in terms of the acquisition of
professional skills and knowledge.
Current professional development course requirements in Qatar. Six courses were
nominated as being particularly important for the current professional development of
librarians in Qatar. These reflected a mixture of both hard and soft skills professional
development training.
As can be seen from Figure 4, information literacy is currently seen as the
most important area for librarians in Qatar in terms of their professional development
requirements, with 77 per cent of respondents selecting this option. This was reinforced
by a range of comments emphasizing the need for information literacy skills
development. This was followed by copyright training, which was selected by
66 per cent, and management and leadership development, which was selected by
61 per cent of respondents.
Specific technical skills also featured prominently in the list of professional
development courses currently being sought. RDA and Arabic cataloguing were the
highest scoring selections in this respect with 58 per cent of respondents selecting RDA
and 56 per cent selecting Arabic cataloguing.