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Meet the FOLIO Flock: Trainers
The primary focus of our US-based team of Customer Training Specialists, as you would guess, is providing training through both live and asynchronous training opportunities to customers, mostly in the English speaking Americas, covering EBSCO’s products and services. For libraries in this region that subscribe to full EBSCO FOLIO services, they have a dedicated FOLIO training specialist who collaborates with the library Implementation team and participates in their implementation meetings that are usually led by their implementation consultant. And along the way, the FOLIO Training Specialist provides various training and learning opportunities and helpful resources that are all meant to ensure that the library staff all have the information that they need to be successful using FOLIO upon going live. As of right now, we currently have three FOLIO-focused training specialists on our US-based team. They're all professional librarians with library systems experience and of course they’re experienced and excellent trainers. They're part of our global customer services team, which currently has just over 45 team members around the world, all designed to provide high quality training on EBSCO’s products and services in all their regions. Well, the FOLIO Training Specialists are involved throughout the whole implementation process for libraries that are implementing full FOLIO. So usually that starts with an initial kickoff meeting, and there the FOLIO Training Specialists will be present. It might not be the one that winds up being their main dedicated FOLIO Training Specialist, because we usually work to make sure that everyone's schedules match up really well, but they'll attend those regular implementation meetings throughout the process led by the implementation consultant. And then the training specialists share relevant training or learning resources at appropriate milestones throughout the implementation. So they're really embedded throughout. We actually provide quite a few materials that the customers will work with as part of their implementation with FOLIO. For instance, we have these app overview videos. They’re excellent introductions to the various FOLIO apps and start to build a really good foundation. It works through the main components of the app, its settings and related workflows. I’ll also mention the interactive learning guides. These are some of my favorite resources for kind of hands-on practice. They come into play throughout the learning plan but even at the end, after that formal go live training, they’re really great resource to kind of build and really grow that muscle memory with FOLIO, the system, and within the settings because you actually click through the process as it's providing the guidance. So I really like those interactive learning guides. We also record all of those pre-live training sessions. So the library has access to those even after they go live. And we also have some other materials to help them with a successful transition. Our EBSCO FOLIO training is customized for each library, also in part because each library's implementation, what they expect to use and how they use it will differ. And so we want to make sure that we provide that kind of customized learning opportunity as well. We collaborate with the library's implementation team to develop the training plan that addresses really their unique workflows and requirements. Customers can actually upskill themselves in a lot of different ways for using FOLIO. So if we're talking about during the implementation process, we of course have those app overview videos and the interactive learning guides that can help you through the key workflows. Beyond FOLIO, we also have in EBSCO Academy on demand e-learning paths and other resources that you can use to build skills progressively covering just what you really want to focus on. And that kind of helps, you know, ensure continuous learning and development in the areas that are most important for a given staff members role. Also, as an open source platform, FOLIO has a lot of opportunities within that community. There's a robust FOLIO community that has professional development activities and opportunities. And we really like to encourage that because it is open source and we want community engagement. They can participate in special interest groups, or SIGs, and there are other volunteer opportunities. Like if you like writing documentation, that's always a great way to contribute. I think there are a lot of reasons why libraries choose EBSCO, but I would say the main reason is because of EBSCO’s FOLIO teams. Whether it's implementation or training or hosting or support, each group really strives to provide quality services and support to all of our FOLIO libraries.