On
Wednesday 7th October we were honoured to receive a talk from none
other than CILIP President herself, Jan Parry, at RISC in Reading. Thank you to Matthew Henry for writing the following summary of Jan's talk.
Jan started the informal presentation with
a brief roundup of her career, including how she got into librarianship, and
how she got out of it again but used her professional skills to great effect in
a wide range of applications. Of course, she was more modest than this but her
CV includes senior Whitehall civil service positions working with Secretaries
of State and other ministers and more recently being a member of the
Hillsborough Independent Panel’s Secretariat.
Jan was not ashamed to admit that, having attained
her degree in Librarianship and Information Management a little later in life
after starting her career at the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate library,
she discovered that she was ambitious.
She didn’t let on to anyone else – even her
family – but quietly went about her duties confident that there was almost
always a better way of doing something.
She also believed that she was capable of discovering and implementing
those improvements, and that the only way to achieve them was building a case
for them using evidence and demonstrating that they were effective by collecting
data and communicating them.
The key to her message to us CILIP members
at various stages in our information careers was that the very same principles
apply to us as individuals. We should be able to communicate what we do, and its value, easily and quickly. And
for this, librarians, “you need your business head on.”
If someone asks you what you do, don’t give
the passive response “I’m a librarian” or “I manage a library service.” Better
to say something like, “I’m an expert in finding information from a wide range
of sources, and fast.” You might not be a natural self-promoter but becoming
one will help to advance your career.
Jan told an anecdote about one civil service
colleague who sought out his boss every day to give an informal report on what
he was doing. Some in the audience thought this might become counterproductive,
but this employee apparently got a bonus every year for his efforts. Jan
recommended an alternative tack for those of us who don’t want to look like the
school swot (because, lets face it, how many of us actually were the school
swot?). Instead, write a weekly email to your superior, copied to his/her manager, outlining your
achievements and ideas that week. Do this religiously. After a year your manager
will have ample material with which to perform your appraisal, you will
definitely have been noticed, and – perhaps most importantly – you will have
had to stretch yourself in order to have written about your progress,
week-by-week.
As to what that progress might be based on,
with information services forever having to justify their resources – even
existence – you should find ways to gather evidence, whether it be qualitative,
such as written feedback or quantitative, such as user numbers, resources
accessed, costs saved, etc.. All of this should be documented and ready for if
– when – your service is under review.
In short, get a career plan. Don’t wallow
in the “duvet of librarianship”. There are no longer jobs for life so you need
to be ready to measure, improve, and move on and up.
Inspiring stuff; and it was easy to see why
Jan has been so successful.
Matthew Henry library assistant at Reading
Libraries and MSc Library Science student at City University London. Twitter:
@matthew1001001
Jan has kindly shared her presentation slides for those who weren't able to attend:
