Continuing Professional Development: annual reviews and sector context
Category: Blog, Professional Development
Are you keen to make the most of professional registration but in need of a little inspiration? Interested in ways to strengthen the link between your annual review and CPD?
In the first of a two-part blog series to accompany the much-anticipated launch of the updated Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB), CILIPS member Xiaowei Jie shares how an email interview with a fellow member – inspired by our very own Meet our Members blog! – has enhanced her Chartership portfolio, as well as encouraging her to connect her professional registration goals with her annual review as a Project Cataloguer.
Xiaowei is currently a Project Cataloguer at the University of Edinburgh and designed this gorgeous graphic for CILIPS – ‘keep learning and enjoy’ everyone!
In spring 2021, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Jane Brebner, who is a Young People Services librarian at Live Life Aberdeenshire. Due to the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, our conversation took place in emails. I was interested to know more about what Jane and her colleagues had done during summer 2020 to engage young people and their parents in Aberdeenshire when lockdown restrictions were in place. I was also interested to know what they did for their continuing professional development.
I was excited to learn that Jane and her library colleagues undertake a lot of ‘on-the-job development’, thriving on being creative in terms of delivering teaching and educational activities to engage their users. However, for those who do not currently work in a librarian role, to develop on-the-job does not always feel so feasible. For example, I am a Project Cataloguer for East Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. If my aspiration is to be a librarian and a cataloguer, what can I do to achieve this as part of my continuing professional development (CPD)?
I have found that the annual review I have had for the past few years has helped me in this respect, because I have had my CPD integrated into the objectives set up in my annual review. My recent annual review for 2020 took place at the end of July 2021. That was also the time when the annual review for 2020 at the University was filed and completed.
In this annual review, three objectives set up for me to achieve in 2020 were summarised. The three objectives were:
- Familiarity with the functionality of the new Alma metadata editor and its use in metadata workflows – by end of December 2020
- Familiarity with creating and editing Wikipedia and/or Wikidata pages – by end of December 2020
- Work on CILIP’s Chartership programme
The first objective was directly related to my cataloguing work. Alma is the Library Management System used at the University and I do catalogue work using metadata editor in Alma. The second objective was to learn a new digital skill, while the third objective, my Chartership, showed the University’s strong support of my CPD. My interview with Jane also echoed the importance of this, with Jane describing her own Chartership as having been ‘a big goal to strive towards’ and one that ‘helped me in my career development’.
‘I would thoroughly recommend doing your Chartership,’ Jane advised me, ‘as it was a turning point in my career as a librarian’.
When my annual objectives were reviewed, I could see if I had done enough to achieve them, and my view is that annual review objectives should be treated as continuing goals. For example, Alma evolves so I should always keep up with its changes in order to do my cataloguing work. Again, there is no limit in relation to learning new digital skills. To be able to create a Wikipedia page is a good starting point as there are many Wikimedia projects that need to be learned, for example, to proofread and validate text in Wikisource, or to use Wikidata extensively as linked data for cataloguing. In relation to Chartership, the knowledge and skills recommended by CILIP evolve too, as will be evident shortly in the updated PKSB. We should keep abreast with the new trends of learning, guided by CILIP through resources like CILIPS Online Learning and the CILIP e-learning hub.
In summary, my aspirations of becoming a librarian and a cataloguer might not be realised soon, but the learning efforts I put into the process will help me to build the foundation to reach this goal in future. Integrating my CPD into my annual review has helped me to lay the foundation.
Xiaowei has found online conversations with colleagues in other areas of the sector to be invaluable as she compiles her Chartership portfolio.
Thank you Xiaowei and Jane for sharing these fantastic insights into the professional registration process – stay tuned for Xiaowei’s second CPD blog post coming soon!