Skip to main content

Coming of age - Thing 21


Key
Image credit
Whatever happened to 21 being a big deal? You don't get anything exciting when you turn 21, other than, for some reason, a lot of cards with a key on them. It's a bit of a cheat, really - all the good stuff happened at 16, or 18. Hopefully, Thing 21 won't be like that.

Oh. It's about promoting myself. I hate that. I think I'd rather have a card with a key on it, to be honest...

Anyhoo, I'm meant to be compiling a list of my interests, my strengths, and examples of when I've done things demonstrating a skill that stemmed from an interest. And then update my CV database with those. And share interview tips or experience I've had in my career.

Well, it's been a long time since I was last interviewed and (fingers crossed), I'm not planning to need to be interviewed in the near future, so any tips or experiences are in the distant past. Although the HR manager who kept accidentally playing footsie with me under the table whenever he stretched to relieve the boredom for him of sitting in an interview for a position in a department he obviously had no understanding of, or interest in, that was a...highlight...of when I was last doing the rounds of interviews. All he could tell me about the role was how much my next of kin would receive if I died while employed by the organisation. Cheery!

So, my interview top tip - make sure you're being interviewed by someone who knows why you're there, and what the job would entail!

And it's been over 6 years since I applied for any position, so my CV has become somewhat dated...but this is where the Revalidation process has been very handy. Lovely Beth has been working with me via our wiki, to give me impartial feedback on updating my tired old CV, and incorporating some of my professional achievements into. Being traditionally British, I'm not very good at this, but when I got going, I found I had enough to make it tricky to stick to the 2 page, self-imposed limit! The wiki also helped, as I've been using it to dump lots of info on things I've done over the last few years onto, and this allowed me to easily see exactly what I'd been up to, and meant I wasn't forgetting any relevant activities. So I now have a swishy CV that makes me look awesome. Which is, obviously, cos I am ;)

So, although I have no recent interviewing or job application experiences, the Revalidation process has actually prompted me overhaul my CV and professional achievements, so if needed, I can now demonstrate exactly how busy I've been on the professional front, and exactly what I have experience and skills in.
Which was nice.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A ladyfellowing

Well, in January this year, I submitted my Fellowship portfolio, and heard in April that it had been successful, making me now officially a Ladyfellow and able to add FCLIP after my name, yay!

Me registration fees were paid in September 2015, so technically it took less than 18 months from registration to submission. However, that doesn’t include the good few months before that, preparing my thoughts, talking to my mentor, and plotting out just how I would Get This Damn Thing Done, so realistically, it was more like a 2 year process.

So, how big a task was it? In a “dear god, what have I done” moment, I totalled up the word count of all items in the portfolio, and it came to approximately 30,000 words. That’s easily the largest piece of work I’ve ever produced (I’m a rubbish student, so I’ve never had to produce an academic dissertation). So yes, it turns out that reviewing your career and achievements to date, and reflecting on what you’ve learned from all of your experiences is quite …
Post a Comment
Read more

Relaunching a library service

What do you do when you decide to do what is verging on library-based insanity, and basically scrap your current library service, and relaunch everything - physical layout, LMS, and classification system? In my case, spend a year, planning, developing, preparing….and then a frantic few weeks hauling stock!
The background to this apparent madness is this: when I took on this role I inherited a library using a layout that didn’t seem to make sense, a classification system I wasn’t familiar with, and an LMS that had been in place for 20 years but didn’t seem suited to our needs. As I was new to the library, a major part of the time I had available while settling in during my initial few months was dedicated to exploring how well these things were working, both for users, and library staff. I had the benefit of my colleague also being new to the library, only a few months after me, so together we looked at these issues with fresh eyes.We came to the following conclusions: The physical layou…
Post a Comment
Read more