Dumpling in a Hanky

Last year, I accumulated almost 230 hours of Continuing Professional Development, or CPD, hours. This total includes: The time spent attending professional events The time spent managing the development of the Informed website The time spent creating content for Informed, my blog, and other locations The time spent providing professional training to others Time spent mentoring Chartership candidates While I was doing this stuff, I also: Lost one job suddenly Started two new jobs Applied for 100 jobs Prepared for and attended multiple interviews Completed the time consuming renovations of my house Read 67 books This isn’t a humblebrag, it’s just an example of what’s actually achievable in terms of professional activity and involvement, with a bit of motivation and organisation. My total is well in excess of the average professional body CPD requirement of 20 hours annually (prospectively, 20 hours annual CPD will be a requirement for Chartered CILIP members, to R...

So, only three short months after submission*, and yet still many weeks before the next scheduled Board meeting on 12th September (CILIP moves in arcane ways), I got an Exciting Email on the 24th August - my Chartership Revalidation portfolio had been accepted, yaaaaaaaaaay! So, I believe this makes me a Very Valid librarian. You may worship at my feet, and shower me with gifts and adoration now... And it also possibly shows me to be reasonably masochistic, to have effectively put myself through the whole Chartership process all over again, four years** after I did it for the first time. Not to mention that fact that I'm going to be doing it again in another three years***. So why did I do it? Well, to quote George Mallory, "because it's there". Also, because it works well within my workplace's appraisal system. This system focusses on enabling staff to identify and address any deficiencies in either their own skills, or in the services that they provide to ...

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 whe...

I try and pretend I'm not, and keep it well hidden, but actually, I can be quite Grown Up and Professional. So much so that I'm going to be Revalidating my Chartership this year - ohhh, get me, eh? But...I am not-so-good at saying why I'm fabulous, or keeping up with collating my evidence of professional activity nice and accessible in a voluntary way, so I've got two things that are going to help me with Revalidation. The first is my employers internal appraisal system - as our Library service's work is entirely internally focussed, it's important to be able to demonstrate that we're still maintaining a high standard of professionalism and awareness of activities and developments both in and outside our specialist fields. The appraisal system allows my boss and I to set realistic targets and activities, keep track of them, and update them as progress is achieved. All of which works nicely with the Revalidation process! And second is teaming up with some...

For Thing 5 , we've to reflect: on what we did, what we learned, and what we can take forward from it. So...what have I learned so far? To be honest...not a huge amount, yet. As an active blogger, Tweeter, and user of RSS feeds, the only thing new to me that the programme has thrown up so far is Pushnote, which I decided not to trial for the reasons I stated before . Is this a bad thing though? No - every new activity needs to build up its participants from basics, and I knew when I signed up that the early stages were unlikely to provide anything new for me. It's the later Things that I expect will be more relevant to me, so this will still develop into an interesting activity to be a part of. Although I have noticed that I've already slipped back into "minimal commenting" mode again - after the second cdps23 post, which encouraged comments on posts, I've not really been posting many comments. This is probably because I don't really have time to ...