June mentoring meeting

Karen and I met up for what is due to be one of our last meetings. We looked at:

1. Strategies for making the most of my evidence for the portfolio and the best way to present it (e.g. attended Thesaurus course last week, attending K&CUK and Umbrella conferences next week)
2. Strategies for making the most of planned activities (in PPDP) that aren’t going to happen before I plan to submit (marketing course, writing a website strategy – though there’s still a chance for this one, conducting e-newsletter subscriber survey)
3. Strategies for effective/efficient use of the evaluative statement
4. Update to dates on the project plan in light of holidays in May, July, and September

It was, as usual, a good meeting and we managed to cover each of these items. Better still, Karen had some good suggestions!

1. Strategies for making the most of my evidence

This was a relatively quick one. We agreed that the best way to capture the learning and present it as evidence was to write about it in the blog. As a result, our conversation focussed mainly on what aspects to emphasise when writing things up. For example, I attended the CILIP thesaurus course a couple of weeks ago and found it really interesting and very useful but probably not for the reasons that were intended. I still need to write this one up, and will put a link here to it when I do, but basically, I think that what we need in the short term are a series of subject headings and that only in the long-term would we want to look at creating a thesaurus.

Action D: Write about decision to go with subject headings instead of a thesaurus

2. Strategies for making the most of planned activites (in the PPDP) that aren’t going to happen

This was a more meaty one. There are a few things that I planned to do in my PPDP that I submitted but it’s now looking like I won’t do them before September when I want to submit my application. Oops.

For example, I had planned to conduct a survey of our e-newsletter subscribers. Nothing too fancy, just something to help me evaluate the value that is being delivered to our subscribers, gather feedback on some of the changes that I have introduced since I took it over last October, and a mechanism to generate some ideas for improving it. I need to write this situation up as a separate entry (see below) so for now, it will suffice to say that I’m looking at doing the survey a month or so after I hope to submit.

Karen’s suggestion for managing this ‘forced omission’ is to write it up in the blog (as mentioned) and then submit this entry along with a project plan for the delivery of the survey as evidence. We have agreed that it isn’t as good as having done the survey but I will also include an invitation to contact me regarding the project if that would help my application. Form what I understand, the evaluation process can take some time and I may have actually carried out the survey and analysed the returns by the time they are looking through my application.

Action D: Write about survey delay
Action D: create project plan for survey delivery

3. Strategies for effective/efficient use of the evaluative statement

1000 words isn’t very long. As you can see from my entries, I tend to exceed word limits. This part of the submission is going to cause me some real problems. Karen’s first suggestion was to try to make as much use of the detailed CV as possible (given the assessors are expecting something pretty comprehensive and probably a lot longer than the evaluative statement). She provided me with a copy of hers from her Fellowship application back when we were first setting up the mentoring relationship and has suggested that I look at it for guidance. Her second suggestion was to produce a covering page for each item of evidence and to use that space to describe things like the context, the execution and the outcome associated with the piece of evidence. Doing so will free up some valuable space in the evaluative statement and enable me to use a couple of sentences of introduction and reference.

Action D: schedule creation of evidence cover pages

4. Update dates on the project plan

This last item was a reasonably quick one. I went over the changes that I had made to the project plan and talked a bit about why I had moved them around. The main point coming out of this agenda item was that I was no longer looking at submitting on 6 September as I’m going to be on leave that week. As I can’t submit it any earlier (because a year won’t have elapsed since I started) and because I had planned on using that week (i.e. it won’t be ready any earlier), it looks like my new target submission date is going to be 18 September.

That’s pretty much it. It was also encouraging that Karen commented on the fact that it looked like I had everything that I needed and really it was just a matter of finishing a few things off and then getting it all organised and pulled together. I suspect that I will find that bit just as much work, if not more!

May mentoring meeting

Due to holidays on both of our parts and the fact that we had met up at the beginning of May for lunch after one of library visits near where she works, Karen and I decided that we'd cancel the May meeting. Having been a little snowed under at work lately, I'm beginning to feel a little burnt out so am happy to have the break!

April Mentoring Meeting

We had our April meeting last week where we talked about the Library + Information Show (LIS), library visits and this weblog. I won’t record our discussion about the LIS as it pretty much duplicated my entry about it below (opens in new window). As far as the visits are concerned, it was really just a quick update on the actions that I have taken towards arranging library visits. The first one was this Monday (hope to get something written up soon) and I have two more scheduled for next week (May 3). I have also started trying to track down my counter-parts in other industry organisations but I haven’t really thrown myself into this task yet and so have only made marginal headway (actually, just one lead…) We also talked about my looking into a visit to the British Medical Association – I need to inject a bit of variety to my visits (mainly government and legal so far) and the BMA has a well established library service (and happens to be only a few doors down the road from me).

I have picked up a list of actions that I need to get organised before 17 May:

Action: D – post question to Listserv regarding ethics issues encountered in workplace (this one has been outstanding for some time now – oops)
Action: D – review PPDP and identify list of actions and create a schedule for their completion (don’t want to be rushing them through in August!)
Action: D – investigate library visit to the BMA
Action: D – set some deadlines to get portfolio of evidence together for: a)CCI work and b)NCSL work
Action: D – look into the Network of Government Library and Information Specialists (NGLIS)
Action: K – send NGLIS weblink

That’s pretty much it. Work towards Chartership is moving along smoothly so far and as a result, our meetings (since submitting the PPDP) are pretty efficient things. I think that starting in May, they will begin to get a little heavier as I concentrate on getting my portfolio of evidence and my statement sorted out…

March mentoring meeting

Last night we had our monthly mentoring meeting. This was a bit of a regrouping and reassessing meeting having been focussed on finishing and submitting my PPDP.

Agreement review
The first thing we did was to review the mentoring agreement. As per our originally submitted agreement, we reviewed it at the six-month mark and agreed that it still reflected the way we were working and that we were both happy with the way it was going. This whole conversation took about 10 minutes but it was useful as a prompt to make sure that the relationship is working out from both perspectives.

PPDP submission acknowledgement
We then had a little chat about acknowledgement from CILIP on receipt of the PPDP. Not too long after Karen sent in the PPDP, I received a letter from CILIP acknowledging the PPDP and the mentoring agreement (which had been submitted some months earlier – I was a little surprised to see that in the same letter, but there you are!).

Library visits
With those two items on the agenda ticked off, it was on to the library visits that we had discussed. This was a slightly embarrassing topic for me as of all the actions agreed around these visits (identifying libraries, actually arranging and attending the visits) that remain outstanding are mine – [awkward/guilty feeling]. Reminded by Karen (and still feeling guilty), I committed to getting those all at least arranged by the next meeting.

Action: D – arrange library visits by 19/04/2007

Portfolio
Our final item was one that we both had put onto the agenda – the portfolio. I was keen to run through the different components of the portfolio and talk about formats. Karen was keen to discuss the contents and find out how I was doing with assembling materials. This one is a lightly less embarrassing topic for me as I have actually made some, albeit tentative, steps towards pulling things together. I have created a table of the different sections of the portfolio (which match the different sections of the PPDP) and started to record evidence items against each. The idea is to help me identify gaps early-on. I have created a file of course certificates and have set aside copies of relevant documents that I have created in my current role that I will include. Where I am overdue is on the review of materials from previous jobs. I have always kept copies of pieces of work that I was particularly proud so will be able to pull a few things together but there are some pretty minor things that might be a little more difficult.

There are a few items that I might have to go through archived emails from previous jobs to find (not entirely sure that I should have copies of these archives but let’s just move on!). For example, in my current role, I don’t take meeting minutes. In my previous role, I used to have my team rotate chair and minute-taker at our meetings and so had plenty of examples. Another is personnel reviews to show line management experience. At the moment, the one position that reports to me is filled by a temp so no personnel reviews. In my last role, I had five direct reports so had many personnel reviews to write. Hopefully, a deep trawl of the files that I do have from previous roles will turn up some good samples!

In terms of components to the portfolio, I wanted to be clear in my mind what they were so here is the list with which we came up:

• Portfolio Table of Contents
• Evaluative statement (<1000 words, check formatting requirements)
• Detailed CV
• Organisational charts from all previous jobs
• Personal Professional Development Plan
• Personal Professional Development Log
• Weblog
• Portfolio evidence:
• from first job (1999 to 2003)
• from second job (2003 to 2006)
• from third/current job (2006 to present)
• Evidence of participation in mentoring scheme
• x-references to blog entries
• copy of mentoring agreement
• copy of scheme evaluation

I will also need to submit alongside my portfolio:

• An application form (must request this from CILIP in late August)
• Mentoring scheme evaluation form

I think that what I will do is base the submission on the sections identified in the PPDP and for each of these, provide the PPDP parts, the PPDL parts and the evidence. At the beginning of this ‘book’, I will have a ToC, followed by the evaluative statement, the CV and the org charts and at the end, I will have the evidence of participation in a mentoring scheme section.

So that’s it. For the sake of a challenge, I’m going to try to create a diagram to represent the contents and see if I can upload it to the blog…hopefully there is a diagram below!



Hmm - having some trouble with that...I think that worked...did that work? It would seem so!

Receipt of PPDP and Mentoring Agreement

A little more than six months after the date I registered my mentoring relationship with CILIP, I have received confirmation of receipt of the mentoring relationship form and my PPDP - I guess the PPDP submission stimulated that letter. The good news is that I won't need to chase it up with CILIP.

February mentoring meeting

Although it hasn’t been long since our January meeting, Karen and I met up last night in order to go through the personal professional development plan (PPDP) draft that I had sent over to her earlier in the week. This thing needs to be submitted in the first six months of the process and my six months are up in a few weeks so it was important that we get together to go over it. Aside from a few changes to the content and layout (and shamefully, a couple of typos), it looks about ready to go.

I have used the CDL PPDP for CILIP Chartership Candidates document as an outline for the different categories in my PPDP. At first, I found creating the PPDP quite daunting. With nothing more than a pretty generic template to guide me, I was struggling to get my head around how to structure it and what to include in it. The CDL document, though, provided me with a structure and some description around the sort of thing that should be included under each heading and sub-heading. This really helped to focus my effort and to generate the content. I haven’t followed the CLD document completely; I have left a couple of sub points out, mainly because they just didn’t apply to me.

One of the most (worrying?) glaring blank spaces in the document is under the ethics heading. I just couldn't think of anything that I could put under that heading that fit with my role. We had a lengthy discussion about ethics in librarianship in general and then talked a bit about how that might apply to my current role. In the end, it looked like with the exception of anything particularly out of the ordinary occurring, I would need to fill that space with actions to the effect of discussing it, reading about it, and abiding by CILIP's code of conduct. That code states that CILIP will pursue disciplinary measures against professionals acting in breach of it. I'm not too clear quite how that would work and one of the actions for me coming out of our conversation was:

Action: D - to post a question about ethics and CILIP's disciplinary actions

So the plan is for me to make the changes that we talked about, agree the final version, print it out and sign it before sending it over to her to sign and submit to CILIP. I’ll feel a lot better once this first ‘assignment’ is completed!

January mentoring meeting

My mentor and I met again yesterday. We seem to be meeting every two months despite originally planning to meet monthly. This isn't proving to be a problem but there are a couple of things that need to get done that are coming up so we will probably use all of those monthly meetings in the coming months.

We reviewed my draft Personal Professional Development Plan (PPDP) draft and discussed a couple of the gaps in it and how best to fill them. There weren't too many gaps; worryingly, ethics was one of them. The other gaps were around a lack of engagement with the profession. I think that my activities are a little thin on the ground here because I am one of those information professionals who works in isolation from others (in my case, I am surrounded by engineers...lunch time briefings and information discussions usually focus on things like the use of hydrogen fuel cells for heavy transport rather than library-related issues). So we have agreed a few actions to move the PPDP forward and to address some of the gaps:

Action: D - put PPDP draft contents into CILIP template
Action: D - create a parallel PPDP document containing after-the-fact analysis
Action: D - start work on long-term training plan
Action: D - make a list of libraries I'd like to visit and make some cold calls
Action: K - contact some colleagues regarding potential visits for me to follow up
Action: D&K - prepare for discussion on ethics at next meeting

And that's it...I am going to try to get the content transferred into the CILIP template today given it's a bit of a copy/paste job - perfect for a Friday afternoon!

November mentoring meeting

Last Thursday, my mentor and I had our monthly meeting. This time we talked about a range of different topics (career development, CV formats, writing for publication) but the main topic was my Personal Professional Development Plan (PPDP).

This is a document that is meant to be a roadmap of my intended continuing professional development (CPD) over the coming year. We are given a template to use for this document by CILIP and I had a quick go at filling it in but when I met up with Karen and we started discussing it, it was clear that I had hugely underestimated what was required here.

I was completing the template in a bulleted format but it seems that they (the evaluation committee) are expecting something significantly more substantial. Karen provided me with the detailed guidelines that are provided to civil servant applicants so I’m going to use that as a template.

Unfortunately, because the guidelines that I am following are quite new, there aren’t many examples out there to look at. We have agreed that I am will look into attending a Career Development Group (one of the CILIP special interest groups) sessions on the Chartership process (I have already attended one of these but it was a long time ago) and on the PPDP – hopefully they will have some useful examples for me.

Action: D – find and register for Chartership process seminar and PPDP information seminar

I also now need to go back and alter the project plan to reflect the fact that I am going to be spending a lot of time on the PPDP over the next month in preparation for our next meeting where we will have a look at my first draft copy.

Action: D – update project plan to reflect additional time required to complete PPDP

I will write a separate entry pertaining to some of the specific suggestions and conclusions that we reached regarding the PPDP itself.

First Meeting with Mentor

Well, we arranged and have now had our first meeting (yesterday) and agreed that we could work together. In the name of privacy, I shall refer to my mentor as Karen.

Karen and I went through the things that we needed to do to get started. Now I'm not the best at following protocols and filling in forms. My partner thinks this is strange given I love organising information. I guess I'm all about organising information "my way"...

Anyway, fortunately, Karen seems to be on a similar wavelength and wasn't too stressed out by the fact that I hadn't really done any of the forms that I was supposed to have done before our first meeting.

Out of the meeting came a few actions (looks I'll be a little busy):

Action: D - complete the mentoring agreement document and forward draft to K (did it this morning - one down!)
Action: D - get written confirmation of CILIP's recognition of my MLIS in order to pursue "Pathway 2" (did it this morning - two down!)
Action: D - get written confirmation of the guidelines that I'm to follow in this process (did it this morning - three down!)
Action: D - set up folders (structured according to CILIP categories) on work and home computers to capture bits and pieces of work over the next year to put into portfolio
Action: D - trawl through home computer files for suitable evidence to put into portfolio (specifically, things from last job and from Diploma)
Action: D - start a journal to capture ideas and thoughts as part of this process over the next year (hey hey - you're reading it! four down!)
Action: D - prepare a timeline (project plan?) of activity based on the requirements in the Guidelines (the idea is that as we go along, we can add the training schedule and the regular meetings that we'll be having - a picture of where we're going)
Action: K - find out about the Chartership Group at her organisation and "get me invited"

So that's it. I've got a few more things to do before this ball is well and truely rolling (setting up the folders, have a trawl and putting together a project plan) but it's off to a start - properly this time. I need to inform my employer that I'll be pursuing chartership. Normally, I would have done this earlier and in fact, I did inform my employer way back when I registered but I have since changed employers and after only a week and a half in the job, my boss went on leave for three weeks...so this is all going to be a bit of a surprise. I'm not worried, though. The organsiation and my boss seem to be pretty reasonable and so will no doubt be happy to support me through the process. He's back on Monday so I'll give him a day before we have a little "catch-up".

Now that I've written about the journey to date, I'll start focussing a little more on the thoughts, experiences and ideas aspect of this journal.

Finding a Mentor

First stop, the CILIP Chartership webpages. Working as a sole professional (has always been the case for me), I really needed some help finding a mentor for this process. Fortunately, CILIP provide a list of mentors (by region) and an indication of their mentoring workload.

When I first consulted this list (back when I had originally registered), it wasn't really a helpful list. It contained name, email address and current mentoring workload. Not much there to use when selecting a mentor. My solution? I complained. I'm not proud but I was frustrated. Since then, the page has been amended to provide additional information regarding the mentors' organisations and job titles. Much better.

So how did I choose one? Well, I started by looking at the company names. I wanted someone who worked in a similar organisation under similar circumstances (i.e. not traditional library setting). Then, I used the job titles to identify someone who was not doing a traditional librarian's job. I know that job titles mean very little and that in the great scheme of things that it shouldn't really matter but... Basically, I just didn't think that I would really have much in common when it came to professional difficulties, experiences and ambitions with the "Librarian" at "Some Council Public Library".

So, having identified a few names that looked suitable, I started down the list. The first couple of emails bounced back! This was a little frustrating but I pressed on. I tried another person who already had one mentee on the go (and capacity for two more) only to be told (very politely I should add) that she already had a full case load. Hmmm... this webpage wasn't looking too up to date. My solution? I complained - again (I'm sure CILIP's Qualifications team are building a file on me). I suggested that the site ought to be updated and requested that I be sent an updated list in the meantime. Quite what my rush was after letting it sit for the better part of two years, I don't know; I guess it was just that I finally had momentum and didn't want to risk losing it!

CILIP replied promptly and I went through my selection process again and tried another name. This time the email not only worked, but the individual didn't have a full case load. Hurrah!

We agreed to meet to discuss the mentoring aspect of the Chartership process and to see whether we could work together (code for "see if we can get along").

So, with a mentor lined up (albeit provisionally), I was feeling a little more on top of things...time to set the first meeting.