Eight Weeks to Associateship - Week 7

Week 7: Polishing and Professionalism

By now I hope you're all feeling like your application is beginning to take shape. We'll be completing the last piece and sprucing things up this week. So, let's get into it!

Part C looks at professional development and professional contribution. The requirements are:

(i) Self-development of professional perspectives and objectives through professional reading, Internet discussion groups

(ii) Continuing education through such activities as attendance at seminars and workshops

(iii) An awareness of professional issues

(iv) Knowledge of and/or participation in the work and activities of the Association, and other relevant organisations

You should have a good list of your activities from week 4. You might want to tie aspects together, for example, how has your self-development informed your awareness of the issues? Has this changed anything you've done or how you approach things? What are the professional issues that are most concerning to you, or that you're most involved with? What are your regular LIS must-reads or must-attends? How do you keep up-to-date? What about professional networks, either personal or association-based?

There are a range of thing that could be included under continuing education, so you may choose some highlights, or showcase a range of courses, workshops or seminars you’ve attended (some of these might fall outside of LIS, but be part of the sector you're in).

Once you've done that, take your whole application and give it a good thrice over!

1. Read it through for flow. Does it read well? Have you repeated anything?
2. Look at your formatting. Is there anything you could do to improve the presentation on the page, or make it easier for the credentials committee to identify how you fit the criteria, such as headings or new paragraphs to separate key points? Don't be afraid to use white space on the page and have an appropriate font size. Steer away from serif fonts or anything too flashy - they are more difficult on the eyes. Stick to a nice sans-serif!
3. Give it a good spell check and identify any sloppy punctuation. This can be very distracting to the reader.

Now is a good time to go over the checklist of things that you need to supply to the committee so that we can put everything together next week. Well done - you're nearly there!