SLA's Strategic Learning and Development Center
Helping Information Professionals become Indispensable through Learning
"In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists." --Eric Hoffer
For more than two decades, the Special Libraries Association has offered a variety of professional development opportunities for information professionals. During this twenty-year period, the context in which SLA members operate has changed dramatically. Rapid and discontinuous change, the shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy, the advent of breakthrough technologies, and the changing face of the global workforce are just some of the profound trends that are altering the modern organization forever.
Over the next decade and beyond, information professionals must confront the challenge of staying ahead of change and becoming distinctive and indispensable contributors to their organizations. To enable you to meet this challenge and to create a more remarkable future for yourself and the profession, SLA is pleased to announce the emergence of its new Strategic Learning and Development Center (SLDC). The SLDC looks forward to being your partner in learning and our goal is nothing less than to set the standard for learning and development throughout the global community of information professionals.
What is SLA's Strategic Learning and Development Center? It is a grand aspiration, an inspirational vision for the future of learning for information professionals, informed by extensive research on learning and guided by two fundamental and critical questions:
How can information/knowledge professionals affect positive
change and create their most desired futures through learning?
How can information/knowledge professionals
become indispensable in the 21st Century?
In the months ahead, SLA's learning and development offerings will begin to reflect our core principles of learning. We want to present learning experiences that will deliver greater depth, richness and impact to help SLA members become more capable learners, more capable professionals and more capable people.
SLA's Strategic Learning and Development Center will exist primarily in cyberspace, although we do plan to bring a new look and feel to SLDC's in-person learning experiences. We're already working to create an online learning and development gateway for information professionals worldwide (www.sla-learning.org), which will offer abundant and dynamic learning and development resources. Moreover, we are investigating a number of new learning initiatives for the year 2000 and beyond.
Our exploration of new and varied directions for the Strategic Learning and Development Center is just beginning, and we are excited to receive your input. Still, as we strive to discover the vast possibilities of learning before us in the months ahead, we want to challenge you, all SLA members and the broader global community of information professionals to adopt a new perspective on learning. We believe that learning is personal, social, and collaborative. We believe that learning is a holistic process, not a series of discrete activities. SLA's Strategic Learning and Development Center looks forward to being your partner in this process.
The future is, by definition, unknowable. The future is also bright, however, if each of us is willing to embrace the possibilities of the learning gift we are given. Each of us, then, must ask ourselves the same question: are we? We certainly hope you will, and we look forward to initiating a dialogue on learning with you. Please check out our website at www.sla-learning.org and give us your feedback. You can reach us by e-mail at learning@sla.org to share your ideas and suggestions for how SLA's Strategic Learning and Development Center can help you create your most desired future.
INSET BOX AT END OF COLUMN
Upcoming SLDC Learning and Development Experiences
April 27, 2000 SLA's Spring Video Conference (sponsored by Factiva)
Topic: Information Portals with Howard McQueen and Jean DeMatteo of McQueen Consulting
June 10, 11 & 15, 2000 SLA's 2000 Annual Conference CE Courses (Philadelphia)
Management Competencies Institute (Philadelphia)
Late June 2000 SLDC/Information Outlook Real Time Desktop Seminar
Topic: Competitive Intelligence
Jeff De Cagna, Ed.M., SLA's managing director, strategic learning and development, can be reached at jeff@sla.org.
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