Eight Weeks to Associateship - Week 4

Week 4: Talking about professional development and contribution

Welcome to week 4! This week, we'll be looking at your professional development and contribution in part C.

Although it may not seem like it, we all undertake development activities in one form or another. While it may seem like a long time since you did your library qualification, once you start to write things down, you'll be amazed at how much training and skill gathering you've done since then.

Let's go through each section of the application:

Self-development of professional perspectives and objectives through professional reading, Internet discussion groups: Most of us are subscribed to at least a couple of list-servs (NZ-Libs, SLIS-NZ, and so on), and have a few blogs that we follow. When noting these down, also think about what contributions you've made to these, such as blog comments or participating to an online discussion. How about professional reading - books, articles, journals, and links through to news stories? Also consider what you read in support of your job that may fall outside LIS and what what you learnt from these that helped you to do your role better. Did you feed these results back to a group, or implement what you'd read about? Did you find out about something in a different sector of LIS, that changed or widened your perspective? Did these change the way you think about the profession, or help you to set goals or objectives as a result? Were you able to feed that perspective back into your organisation?

Continuing education through such activities as attendance at seminars and workshops: Continuing education covers a wide variety of activities. As well as seminars and workshops (internally or externally), you may have done Certificates of Proficiency, attended Conferences, taken training in general skills to support your role (customer service, management, SharePoint, etc.), gone to lectures, taken an online course, or attended a LIANZA CPD event. If you've led training events, make a note of this too.

An awareness of professional issues: How do you keep up-to-date with professional issues, particularly in your specialty areas? You might demonstrate your awareness of professional issues through helping your work group understand the context and implications of changes or issues in the profession or outside, such as copyright, fee levying in public libraries, and creative commons licensing. Or you may be involved in working groups, discussion panels, or internal or external taskforces. Perhaps you read library journals from other countries or library associations?

Knowledge of and/or participation in the work and activities of the Association, and other relevant organisations: Do you understand what LIANZA does and how it operates? Perhaps you've been on committees, attended local CPD events, presented at conferences or weekend schools? Have you been involved in other organisations, like ARANZ, Te Ropu Whakahau, IFLA or the NZ Knowledge Management Network?

When you're jotting down your notes, use your workmates to jog your memory, check your old Outlook calendar appointments, or dig out those paper diaries.

Keep up the good work! This is the last of the 'note-taking' weeks - next week we get into the more serious business of writing up. Good luck til then!