Looking back and moving forward: resolutions for 2012

I’m not usually one for resolutions but as I’m about a third of the way through Chartership I thought some work-related goals for 2012 might be in order. Also I should take the opportunity to reflect on 2011 if only to get more into the habit of reflective writing…

This year I’ve achieved a few things career-wise, both in work and in my own time:

• Registered, and started collecting evidence, for CILIP Chartership
• Been involved in various projects at work which have given me the opportunity to gain more professional-level experience
• Completed the City & Guilds qualification in Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector – I did this mainly as one of my Chartership goals. However, it was really useful for getting an introduction to teaching generally so I would recommend something like this to those who have no experience in this area.

Next year I hope to achieve:

• Complete CPD23 – this should have been included in achievements for 2011 but I got so behind that I’ve still got a few things left!
• Manage my time and commitments better – see CPD23 above!
• Get a professional post – easier said than done but I’m hoping that this will be the year that something turns up!
• Submit Chartership application – hopefully by the end of the summer
• Attend more LIS events –applying for sponsored places where possible

 

Hopefully 2012 will be a good year.

CPD23: Things 10 & 11: Masters, Charterers and Mentors

I’ve blogged about my, somewhat roundabout, route into librarianship before. I’ve recently started on the next step of my career, again doing things in possibly the ‘wrong’ order; I’m working towards CILIP Chartership whilst still in a para-professional role. However, I’ve come to realise that there is no right or wrong way to go about it. I’ve worked with and met librarians who have entered the profession through a variety of routes. I can’t say what’s ‘best’, only what I’ve gained from my experience so far.

I’ve always said that I wished I’d had some experience of library work before diving in and starting the Masters and I stand by this to a certain extent. However, I don’t think that I got less value from doing the course because of this lack of experience. I was pretty much single-mindedly focused on working in academic libraries and through looking at the person specifications for more senior roles, where a postgraduate library qualification seemed to almost always be an essential requirement, I realised that, for me, the Masters was the way to go. The course was a great introduction to the profession I was about to enter. It gave me a broad understanding of the profession as well as some useful practical skills such as cataloguing and classification.

So, why Chartership? And why now? My current job has given me the opportunity to get quite a varied experience and get involved in plenty of projects, so although not a professional post it has prepared me to progress in my career. I always wanted to Charter at some point and hesitated for quite a while over whether to do it while still in a para-professional role. Although not a requirement for many posts, Chartership often appears among the desirable criteria for a lot of positions I see advertised in academic libraries so I knew it was something I would have to do at some point. And, let’s face it, as jobs become scarcer and competition for posts becomes greater, there’s no harm in having something to give you an edge. That said I’m not just doing it because it’s a hoop to jump through, or to help me to get a job. That would probably be just a little bit too cynical. The main reason I’m doing Chartership is to give me a focus for my CPD activity. For a while after finishing my Masters I lost my way professionally as it took me some time to get a permanent, full time post. I didn’t have much opportunity for professional development through work, and admittedly lost some of my motivation to seek this out for myself. I’m now back on track with my professional development and believe that Chartership will enable me to get the best out of this through the necessary formal reflection. As a professional it is important to me to continually develop my knowledge and it is this commitment to professional development that makes us more employable; Chartership is just one of the ways of demonstrating it.

My experience of Chartership so far is that, well, it’s hard! I found writing the PPDP particularly difficult as I struggled to focus the areas where I wanted to develop into achievable actions. I really recommend looking at the example portfolios to help with this. Speaking with my mentor about this was also a huge help, which brings me neatly onto the subject of mentors. Chartership has been the first experience I’ve had of formal mentoring. We’ve only had two meetings so far so I’m hardly writing from vast experience but I think for Chartership it will be important to have a mentor to seek guidance from through the process. It did feel quite formal at first, especially as I’m fairly shy and hadn’t met my mentor before, but I’m sure this will get easier as it goes along. I’m finding it’s also valuable to have senior colleagues to seek out for advice along the way; sort of like having a few informal mentors.

CPD23 – Thing 3: Consider your personal brand

I’ve been struggling a little with Thing 3. I must admit that I’m entirely not comfortable with thinking of myself as having a brand. It’s only in the last year or so that I’ve developed much of an online presence so until recently I’ve only ever really had to consider my professional reputation offline; in a work environment or face to face capacity. My online presence, I hope, reflects how I am in person in my professional life. However, I’ve never attempted to establish a recognisable ‘brand’ across my online presence.

What’s in a name?

When I initially set up my Twitter account I was mainly doing so out of a curiosity to see how it all worked and was unsure about having my real name as my account name so chose a random moniker instead (devised from my love of bargains and my University nickname – I’m from the North East and apparently say “champion” a lot!). As I now use this mainly for professional reasons I kind of wish I’d chosen something simpler like my real name or at least something to do with libraries! I’m still not sure about my blog name either. I pondered it for some time before setting up the blog last year but in the end settled on something I was undecided on purely because I just wanted to get going with posting. Although there’s no consistency across these two platforms with the names I’ve chosen, I do try to link my online presence up by having my blog URL on Twitter and my Twitter stream on my blog so hopefully this is not such a big issue. I also have a flavors.me page, using the halfpricechamp username from my Twitter account, which shows both my blog and tweets.

Visual brand

I haven’t attempted to develop a visual brand online at all really. Both my blog and my Twitter page have fairly simple, unfussy themes but that’s where the similarity starts and ends. This is something I haven’t considered before as figured most people see my tweets in their feed rather than going to my page so didn’t think how the page looked was all that important. I think I’ll be having another look at this though to get some sense of cohesion across platforms – this definitely appeals to my sense of order!  Ultimately I hope the content is more important than the look of my blog (substance over style I suppose), though can see that the appearance is important to convey the right message and needs to be consistent with the professional nature of the content.

Professional / Personal Identity

The limited online presence I have developed is mainly for my professional life; though I don’t try to keep the professional and personal completely separate as it’s nice to see a bit of personality outside of the library and information world. I’d like to think that I take a ‘profersonal’ approach on Twitter, whilst my blog is focussed on reflecting on professional issues and CPD experiences, so is consequently more professional in tone.

Time for a reality vanity check

So I Googled myself…which was…strange. First, I searched for just my name and two of the results on the first page were me – my Twitter page and a Lanyrd entry. My LinkedIn profile was on the second page of results. This is largely neglected (I’m hoping to rectify this during Thing 6) so I should make more of an effort to keep it updated as it ranks quite high. Adding the word librarian to my search returned more results relevant to me, including my flavors.me page and some LISNPN results. I was surprised that my blog didn’t seem to show up in any search results but realised that I hadn’t set my display name as my full name (!). I updated this and a couple of days later it now appears in the top four.

Time for a revamp

Although I’m still not comfortable with the term brand – like Emma I prefer to think of it as my ‘online identity’ – it was really useful to scrutinise my online presence in this way. It’s definitely got me thinking about how I want to represent myself online in the future. I’ve already started tweaking the appearance of my pages on Twitter and flavors.me and have been considering the impact of the inconsistency in the names I use on Twitter and my blog. It may be time for a change!

A brief hiatus

Well August is the time of holidays I suppose and I’ve been doing plenty of that, though not without fitting in the obligatory library trip whilst I was away - this time to the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris…

As a result I’ve taken a bit if a break from blogging and even thinking all that much about work and libraries in general. So now it’s time to get back on track and, if I can write quickly enough, there may be a flurry of activity here…or perhaps a couple of posts in quick succession anyhow. Here’s hoping…

A confession…

I have a confession…I’m not very good with social media. I try to keep up with Twitter and think I may finally be getting the hang of it (after over 6 months!), I tried to set up an account on LinkedIn recently but still can’t quite get my head around how that works, and I’m particularly (and possibly intentionally) bad at Facebook. And as for all the other stuff that’s out there…well, I don’t even know where to start! This possibly makes me a bad librarian by today’s standards, but I’m determined to learn. So in an attempt to get online more often and make myself learn about this web 2.0 malarkey, I’ve started this blog and am finally taking my first few tentative steps into the 21^st century (better late than never!). I’ll be blogging about library-related stuff (of course!), whatever takes my interest really, with the initial idea being that this will be a good place to stick down any reflections as I eventually start on the path to Chartership, but I’ll just see how it goes after that…