‘On The Move’ — Natalia Fibrich, General Manager of Library Training Services Australia
Natalia Fibrich is the General Manager of Library Training Services Australia (LTSA), a registered training organisation that she operates with her now husband, College Director Maciek Fibrich. LTSA specialise in providing specialised library qualifications, including Cert II Cert III, and Cert IV qualifications, and a Diploma of Library and Information Services.
Of working with her husband, Natalia confesses that it was never something she had planned. “If anyone asked me in the past whether I would ever work with my husband, I would have said: “absolutely not!” But fate had other ideas. Natalia, originally working in the field of organisational psychology, ended up moving from Sydney to Brisbane for love and the RTO industry, and the rest is, as they say, history. Nowadays Natalia and Maciek operate LTSA out of their own home, replete with their own offices.
For those of you thinking that running a business with your spouse might be a recipe for disaster, Natalia has some sage advice. “It can work really well as long as there are strong boundaries in place. I have a really clear idea of what my responsibilities are, and of what Maciek’s responsibilities are. As long as we respect each other’s boundaries, we work really well together. The one thing I would say is get your own office!”
Maintaining student engagement has been one of Natalia’s driving passions throughout her time with LTSA, and she cites it as the single most important issue facing RTOs in 2017. A big challenge is that course requirements — such as eLearning and practical work experience components — will often compete with everything else in the students’ lives, making it hard to maintain the students’ attention for a significant period of time.
In responding to this dilemma, there have been some surprising revelations. “We had a massive contingent of students floating, not progressing. We realised we were doing the students no favours by being lenient, so we had to look at other options. Looking at our own lives and careers, we realised that if we don’t have structures and deadlines, we tend to fall by the wayside. So we started putting in place more rigid terms and conditions that they must sign up to — limited time to complete assessments, limited number of extensions, a limited time for deferments. We feared the students were going to hate us for these changes, but interestingly, we saw the opposite effect. The response was really positive.”
Tightening up the requirements for students can’t be done without special care. Natalia explains that LTSA took steps to call each student, explaining why the changes have been implemented and emphasising that it was, ultimately, for the students’ benefit. LTSA exploited the functionality of advanced student management systems, such as CloudAssess, Hubspot, Zoom and aXcelerate, to streamline marking and assessment processes, and other administrative duties. Additionally, LTSA set up a student online forum, and is in the process of developing automated, sequenced emails designed to accompany specific students throughout their course; reminding them of due dates, or providing them with meaningful content at different times of the course.
For Natalia, this approach reflects one of LTSA’s core principles; that human beings need to be treated like human beings. “Humanness is throughout everything we do. Even in our automated emails, everything is personalised as much as possible. It’s very one-on-one, so it feels like we’re talking to them in human speak. Not RTO, VET-sector speak, because that doesn’t work; it disconnects RTOs from their students. Focusing on making our communications as human as possible increases their engagement, and our passion for what we do.”
Corporate values and organisational culture, Natalia insists, are absolutely critical to business success. Natalia explains: “At LTSA, one of the first things was getting clarity around our vision, values and organisation culture. Who do we want to be? What’s our personality as an organisation, and how do we want that to filter through to our students? In our literature, our marketing, our sales, our learner guides and materials — it needed to be in every communication. It’s everything.”
What does the future hold for LTSA? Natalia is characteristically driven. “There’s nothing ‘softly softly’ about what we’re doing. We are absolutely transforming ourselves from the inside out. We are implementing changes on a massive scale. LTSA has the advantage of having very few competitors, apart from some TAFEs. And internationally, there are practically no providers who really cater for the library system, at the Library Technician and Library Assistant level, which is really where our target market is. So we have enormous scope about where we are can go with the business in a really niche market. That’s our goal moving forward. 2017 is all about consolidating our systems and processes. Automating as much as we can. Integrating our systems so they can talk to each other. But equally, it’s about getting our student engagement maximised — setting up platforms and systems that keep our students engaged and inspired. That’s a really big job, and one we’ll be doing forever.”
