Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal June 2009 Volume 7(3)

CILIPS Conference: Careers

Tips to get to grips

Joanna Ptolomey decided to stand back and take better control of her career. Here, she offers some top tips so you can do the same.

I don’t want this article to start being negative but, let’s face it, some days are just a grind. As I write this, it is Friday, soon to be the weekend, but I have had a choc o’bloc week full of deadlines, meetings, new service development and financial decision-making. And that is just my work like, never mind what I like to do in my personal life.

However, this week is no different to others and it’s not just me that feels like this. I have many colleagues and friends in the library sector who report the same: weeks filled with changes, meetings and deadlines. It can seem that there is little time for examining the quality of how we spend our time in our work. Do we feel like we are in charge of our career? When do we seriously feel like we have enough time to allocate to our career as a library and information professional? Our annual review, when we (and our employer) assess our competencies and KPI’s (key performance indicators)? Or, my favourite, the New Year (new you) when we all tend to become obsessed with taking charge and changing our world for the better… well, at least until 6 January when everyday life and demands start creeping back in.

I don’t mean to mock or make fun, but this was exactly the position I found myself in. Fed up with lack of time and inability to sustain the momentum for changes in my career, I started to feel less in control. So, I started to look seriously at how I could incorporate changes into my everyday workload that would help manage my processes.

I discovered that the main success criteria were around changing my mindset. I thought very carefully about what was important to me as a professional and professionally and how I wanted to be viewed.

I decided upon five key cornerstones of what I believed in.

1 Be bounded by your profession, not a job description. I had already worked as a librarian in NHS and the corporate world and before being a librarian I was qualified and worked as a planning engineer in the construction industry. I knew that I had transferable skills and knew that value-added deliverables were important to users and clients.

2 Take ownership of information handling and management expertise. Everyone knows that “knowledge is power” and some people are certainly expert subject specialists, but are they best placed on “information journeys”?

3 Plan to deliver relevant valuable resources. Whatever sector I would find myself working in, the key was to deliver on time and give the most value for whatever your resource is.

4 Does your contribution have built-in success criteria for the group? What are you working on? Perhaps it helps deliver part of your organisation’s strategy and reach a particular user group?

5 Your actions will be your promotion. Do you constantly deliver? People will always remember if you fail to deliver and opt out. What is your attitude? 

Having some key cornerstones is all very well and good, but how does this actually help me to manage my career on a day-to-day basis? I needed to get much more specific and after much thought I came up with a further 10 ideas that should help me “get to grips” with who I am and what I really wanted out of my career as a library and information professional.

• Learn from yourself.
• Identify success criteria.
• Reactions to change.
• Commitment versus interest.
• Creativity.
• Dangerous comfort zones.
• Being brand savvy.
• Behaviours… people and work.
• Planning to deliver.
• Understanding your role in business.

Using the five cornerstones and 10 “tips to get to grips” I started to get a better understanding of where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do with my career.

Joanna Ptolomey was speaking at the CILIPS Conference on 2 June. Joanna’s work includes research projects, consultancy, developing courses and writing. She is Chair of the Scottish Health Information Network.

View CILIPS Annual Conference 2009 presentations on Slideshare

Information Scotland Vol. 7(3) June 2009

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