Hey there. This week i attended my first Career Development Group Chartership Event, which was being held at the Mitchell Library. It really was very enlightening. I think the two key words that i came away with burnt into my consciousness were EVALUATE and REFLECT!!
There were a few different speakers at the event, a couple of which were recently chartered members of CILIP, who very kindly offered to stand up and give us an overview of how to get ourselves through the chartership process, and gave us ideas on what kinds of things could be included as part of our portfolios. There was also a woman there who was a board member of CILIP, which means that she is responsible for assessing people’s portfolios and deciding whether they are suitable to be passed. It was also really interesting to hear her talk about what things people usually do wrong, and what kinds of things she is looking for in a portfolio. I’m not going to go into too much detail here as I have agreed to do a write up of the event for the Career Development Group newsletter, Focus, so all will be included in there.
I also met up with a friend and couple of other people i knew from the library course i did last year which was really great. It was fun to exchange stories of what we are all getting up to since we have been released into the big wide world. It was also good to have the focus on chartership and the talks that we had been given too, and we could discuss different things that we had been planning together. It would seem that out of the six people from the course that were there, three are working in school libraries, so it was a little insight into that world as well! What different issues they have to face compared to what goes on in my work. It was also strange to think they all ended up in school libraries as i had never really thought much about it before. I think that the major difference with their work is that they pretty much work by themselves, and from what I could gather, this has both its advantages and its disadvantages. I personally could not decide whether this was something that I would like, or whether I would go insane with the isolation. Hmmm. It certainly would be interesting to spend a day or so in a library such as that to see how it all works. I can only vaguely remember my high school library and to be honest i don’t think that i used it all that much. What i do remember though is that they had a card catalogue and little cardboard things with your name on that they put the slips of each book inside to keep track of what you had out. How things must have changed!
Anyway, I came away from the meeting feeling very motivated towards my chartership, and with a head bursting with ideas for different kinds of ‘evidence’. I must try to write it all down before it leaves me forever. I am looking forward to doing the review of the event, as i have not really done much writing since i left university. I doubt, however, that the academic style will be appropriate for a newsletter, so i had better spend some time looking over past articles in order to get the tone right.
I am also planning to do the ECDL again - I have pretty much forgotten about it since i left uni last summer and started working, but i have found a college that does the tests only and I have ordered some course material from my local library so I will arrange another couple of tests as soon as possible. Again, I could review how this has helped me develop ICT skills and how this has helped me in my work as, yup, you guessed it, more ‘evidence’!!!
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