In the first part of this book, we spoke about how to deliver a great induction for new staff. However, engagement and development of your team should not be something that only happens in their first week. It's important to keep staff engaged throughout their time at your organisation and especially if you are looking to evolve and improve the visitor experience.

The desire to keep training going throughout the employee journey is always up against the challenges of the museum environment. The main one is time, both in developing and delivering from a management point of view and often the sheer impossibility of getting frontline staff away from the floor long enough to be able to train them. Scarcity of time can also lead to lack of strategic planning, with training becoming sporadic or piecemeal as a result.

When thinking about what kind of training visitor-facing staff need, we are also grappling with the constant, ever-evolving conversation about what visitor engagement is, what the Visitor Experience role is expected to deliver and what skills need to be developed in order to meet our goals in this area.

Finally, as staff move from being new recruits to established employees, it can be hard to identify genuine and fruitful continuing development opportunities, especially when dealing with large, diverse teams, and therefore, a variety of learning styles and goals.

This chapter will touch on all of these challenges, and hopefully suggest some ways you can meet them.

Employee engagement

Before we talk about training and development, it's important to say that these are not the only tools of employee engagement. When something goes wrong in the Visitor Experience teams, its common to blame lack of training, but just as important as formal development is the culture of engagement in the organisation.