Eight Weeks to Associateship - Week 6

Week 6: Showing off your skills

Management and planning responsibilities are the name of the game this week. Take out your notes from week 3, and remember as you're going through to think of management in a broad sense, since our job descriptions don't always use that word. This week's section is quite a chunky one, so get yourself a cuppa and a biscuit before you get going.

We're working through part B in much the same way as we did with part A. The tricky thing here I think, is to get down all the main points succinctly. Resist the temptation to exhaustively list every little thing you've done, but rather try to hit the high points. There are a couple of ways you could tackle this. You may want to start with a job where you demonstrated several of these skills and write briefly what your role and responsibilities were in the different areas. Or, you might choose one area and talk pick out a couple of significant examples from your working life. Or, if many of the examples are from the same project for example, you may want to talk about the project you worked on and describe the responsibilties you had within it.

Remember, they're looking for the following:
(i) Staff management
(ii) Financial management
(iii) Resource management
(iv) Implementing and managing of appropriate and/or innovative library and information services
(v) Initiating or contributing to projects or changes/improvements in existing services
(vi) Marketing services
(vii) Evaluating and implementing appropriate technologies
(viii) Planning own work and that of others, setting priorities and aligning with organisational goals and objectives

Don't worry if you don’t have experience of all of these, the application does state, "Some of the categories below may not be applicable to the applicant. This will depend upon the applicant's work."

While the emphasis is on seeing that you've had responsibility in some of these areas, if you can, pick out achievements you've had or show the impact that you've made as well. These show that you have moved into mastery of the area, rather than just competence.

Best of luck this week with your write-up. Next week we'll be looking at professional development and contribution - one of my favourite topics!

Finally - an apology for the lateness of this column. Despite my best intentions to get this out by Wednesday, events overtook me! I hope y'all have ploughed on ahead anyway!