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What if you don't get back what you put in?


I am, as you may know, a member of CILIP, the professional body for information professionals. There are two main reasons I'm a member.

  1. I am a Chartered librarian, and I take my commitment to maintaining this visible badge of my professionalism seriously. I have revalidated my Chartership within the previous assessment system, and I have submitted my Revalidation within the new system. To continue being a Chartered librarian, I must be a member of CILIP (although currently the commitment to continue to revalidate my Chartership is voluntary, and has been so for the length of my membership since approximately 2001). So I continue to be a member.
  2. I am a registered CILIP Mentor, and I help to guide those information professionals who are keen to be professionally qualified through the Chartership/professional qualifications process. I could not abandon midway through that process the people who are looking to me for guidance in their professional development. So I continue to be a member.
In fact - those two reasons I’ve outlined above are the only reasons I'm a CILIP member. As I demonstrated last year, I am perfectly capable of finding or creating my own CPD opportunities, whether I am supported in this by an employer or not, so I do not need to be a member of CILIP in order to develop my professional skills. As I am not a public or academic librarian, and as I am not based in London, any potential benefits CILIP may offer are pretty much non-existent for me, as I am based in Scotland, and a special librarian.*

I volunteer a lot of my own time to support the Chartership process through mentoring candidates - I give up evenings and weekends to read the portfolio materials of my mentees, I give feedback on their materials, I meet them in person if possible, and recently, in order to get to grips with the new professional qualifications structure, I have attended events (during the working day, which my employers generously allowed me to attend without taking annual leave), and I have spent time reading about and discussing with others the new professional qualifications structure. Last year, I estimate I spent between 30-40 hours on these types of mentoring activities alone. Others are likely to be giving a similar amount of time to the same type of activities, and others are involved in other areas, such as working on committees and acting as Candidate Support officers.

I pay £200 per year to be a member of CILIP, and in return...I work for them for free.

I am not trying to claim that I am alone in giving my own time to CILIP at all - I know there are a lot of people involved at Group level: running events and giving training to members, and sacrificing their own free time to do so. I can only speak from my own experiences of “working” for CILIP, but I really don’t know how the Branches or Groups or the Qualifications Board would work without this donation of their time by CILIPs members.

For the whole time that I've been a member of CILIP, whenever I have seen or engaged in discussions about what benefits it offers to members, the popular response to any complaint that CILIP doesn't give enough back to its members is “you get back what you put in”, i.e. you have to give more to CILIP in order to get more back. But what happens if what you put in isn’t getting a comparable benefit value back? Is 30-40 hours of an annual time donation (or effectively a full working week) to my professional body worth me giving them £200 a year for? Why am I paying my professional body a substantial sum annually, for the privilege of them allowing me to work on their behalf? There also doesn't seem to be a centralised policy on reimbursing the costs of volunteers on Committees and Groups (e.g travel expenses), so in effect some people could actually be paying over £200 a year, to volunteer for the benefit of their fellow professionals!

Therefore, this is my thought - if you are a membership body, and your members work to support you in the aims of your body by giving up their own free time, surely there must be some way of recognising and rewarding that? And isn’t the simplest way of doing this to offer a discount to those members working on your behalf?

So, my question now is - why doesn’t CILIP offer such a discount as standard to those members who work on its behalf? They know centrally from their systems who is a registered mentor, who is a Committee member etc - why can discounts not be offered to these members automatically?

Now, this isn't (altogether) about money, although money is obviously a big factor, especially when CILIPs membership fees are so high (of the 4 professional bodies I'm a member of, CILIP is almost £100 more than the next most expensive annual fee), it is about recognising what your members are doing for you, and rewarding it. Could the Chartership system run if mentors, Candidate Support Officers and the Professional Qualifications assessors didn't give up their time to do it, voluntarily? And what about the professional events that are run by the Groups - if those Committees didn’t organise events, what would CILIP be able to say were its benefits?

I do wonder too do other professional bodies rely on members volunteering to do some of their core functions, while charging high membership fees and not recognising those volunteers in any way? Do architects, accountants, pharmacists and surveyors rely on their members to give up their time for free in order for those bodies to run?



*Disclaimer - last year I won an award from CILIP, which came with a cash prize. This award was related to my mentoring activities, and was based on a written nomination from my mentee, judged by a panel. I did not expect this award, nor has it affected how I view my engagement with CILIP.

Comments

Anonymous said…
You've hit the nail on the head.

A few years ago I was using around 10 days of my annual leave, plus some evenings, on committee work for a CILIP group, there was no recognition from CILIP and nothing but moans from members of the group that we weren't doing enough for them. This negative experience made me give up CILIP committee work. I did get a lot out of it but 10 years with no thanks was too much for me.
Anonymous said…
A further thought - I submitted my chartership revalidation a few weeks ago, it took a fortnight for me to get an email to tell me it will take up to 6 months for me to hear whether the application is successful or not. It appears to me the volunteer run qualifications process is already unable to cope. What happens when revalidation becomes annual and mandatory? How on earth can that be run by volunteers?
Jo Alcock said…
Really interesting post. I'd certainly welcome further investigation into this idea of rewarding those who are actively volunteering their time to support their professional organisation. I can see it would be difficult to administer (e.g. Does sitting on a committee mean you're actively involved? How much time would you need to dedicate to get a discount? What if you're a mentor but currently without any menthes? ...) but I think it warrants further investigation - to both help member retention and to thank members who are actively involved in supporting CILIP's core activities. As I pointed out in the conversation on Twitter, it's a similar analogy to receiving a bonus in your pay packet for being a first aid contact or fire marshall.

Also a point of clarification for lmrlib (as I was involved in the Future Skills project supporting the new Professional Registration). If it is approved by members that revalidation will be obligatory, it's likely there would be a move to a model similar to that of other professional organisations that have obligatory revalidation whereby a sample each year are chosen to be assessed, rather than every submission being assessed.
Anonymous said…
Thanks for responding Jo, I am relieved to hear that. I wholeheartedly support obligatory revalidation and want CILIP to adopt it and make it work for the profession.
Anonymous said…
I agree that members should be rewarded, I share Jo's reservation that activity is hard to measure/quantify but think it is something worth investigating. There are many committees with a lot of standing members but only a few active ones (that problem is by no means unique to CILIP).

To put it into perspective I have already spent 13 hours this year on committee activities, this is before I have been to the remaining 4 meetings this year, delivered any of the 3 x 2 hour quals workshops I am doing, or done the organisation for 2 of the 3 workshops. This is well over half of the required CPD for the entire year. At this rate I will contribute nearly 80 hours of mine and my employer's time to CILIP by the end of the year. This is frankly bonkers.
Anonymous said…
It's interesting to hear your thoughts on this. I've always been fairly ambivalent towards CILIP membership as I always felt that the organisation was somehow aimed at OTHER librarians. I don't know who I thought that they were, but just not me. If my employer offered to pay for membership I took them up on the offer, but I never felt the need to pursue Chartership, nor was I encouraged to by any employer.

I always assumed that for those people that did get involved the reward was professional recognition and perhaps career progression - although that only works with in a buoyant market where skills are in demand.

Oddly, despite not having worked in a library for the last 4 years or so I rejoined CILIP a couple of years ago as I wanted to keep a link to my profession alive. I'm interested in Libraries even if I'm not employed as a Librarian.

I think you are right though, that as a professional body more recognition should be given to those like you who actively support their endeavours. If I had been encouraged to gain Chartership earlier in my career I'm sure my relationship with CILIP would have been very different. If each person who is successfully mentored through their Chartership continues to be long-term members of CILIP that must generate a significant amount of income.

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