The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition: A Career Development Framework for Succession Planning and Management in Academic Libraries

Abstract

Succession planning and management are critical parts of strategic planning for libraries in the twenty-first century. Making certain that the right people are in place with the prerequisite training and experience to assume leadership positions is a vital part of strategic planning and talent management in libraries that rely on teams of people working in flatter structures and greater accountability. The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition framework suggests that mentoring, coaching, and professional development empower staff for movement up organizational career ladders as part of succession planning and management. To maximize human capital, administrators need to determine skill development levels among staff so that they can identify skill “gaps” internally, create new career ladders, identify emerging stars, and enhance evidence of values for staff contributions.

Knowledge and Human Capital as Sustainable Competitive Advantage in Human Resource Management

“…It is a set of procedures aimed at identifying skilled employees, employees having a potential career path, or employees with high work performance in all job positions. Moreover, options and conditions of career progression including conditions of providing further education, training, and activities supporting the career path and responsibility development are clearly defined as well [56][57][58][59][60]. According to the analysis of Kazancoglu and Ozkan-Ozen [61], the transformation of traditional production systems to smart factories and the increase in the need of intelligence level from employees will foster the importance of ability of dealing with complexity and problem solving, thinking in overlapping process, and flexibility.…”

“…Innovative employees able to lead, motivate, manage, and develop people at any level in the enterprise at any time, as well as at uncertain time are leaders. They are employees with a more creative, flexible approach to work with less control [56][57][58][59][60][80][81][82][83]. Human potential is unique and must be utilized and developed in order to be maximized and to bring new values.…”

The journey of thesis supervisors from novice to expert: a grounded theory study

“…Supervisors are expected to train students to gain competence in areas such as specialist skills, generalist skills, self-reliance skills, and group/team skills [4]. Expertise is derived from the three essential elements of knowledge, experience, and the ability to solve problems in society [5–7]. .According to Dreyfus, acquisition of expertise or practical wisdom represents a higher level of “self-actualization.” At this point, one reaches a level in which they can flourish in their talents and abilities.…”

A Carpentries Approach to ACRL Framework Instruction

“…Information literacy instruction has been discussed in the context of the Dreyfus Model (Farrell 2012;Hall-Ellis and Grealy 2013). In a two-article piece applying the Dreyfus Model to formal Information Literacy learning, Robert Farrel describes teaching novice-level information literacy: "providing students with the kind of context-free rules they need to begin making decisions about information use and information seeking is one of the most common activities in librarians' instructional repertoire, particularly in the area of information evaluation.…”