Continuing Professional Development

Margaret Mead, American cultural anthropologist

Hello lovely readers ☺

Since we noticed how much you loved our post on Chartership, we thought that it might be useful to share some of the various materials we are using to build up our portfolios.

Have you ever heard of CPD? And CLPL?

“What does CPD stand for, once again? Continuous Panic Developing? Chronic Professional Delay? Or is it maybe a gym class? Core Pelvis Deltoids?”

None of those actually. CPD stands for Continuing Professional Development. You probably knew this before, but we are not big fans of acronyms, thus we prefer to ensure that you all know what we are talking about.
And CLPL is the same thing but for teachers and it sounds cooler, they say (by the way, it means Career-Long Professional Learning)!
What maybe not all of you have realised is the huge number of ways of CPD-ing. We thought it would be useful to list some ideas and resources to help your professional registration, your career progression, skills enhancement, life improvement, person betterment… it’s up to you! You choose!

According to various factors, like time, space, and, of course, money, you might find that some of these methods will apply better to you than others.
In our chartership journey (which is very far from being completed), we have found the following quite useful!

Reading: Simple and effective method, it can be time-consuming, according to your reading speed, or super quick if you are a speedy reader. It doesn't matter if they are physical books, eBooks, Audiobooks, you name it: it is important that you are able to reflect on what you read and you are able to provide examples on how you are going to apply what you learned in your everyday practice. Remember that there is a wealth of resources available via CILIP, or via CORE, which is the world’s largest collection of open access research papers, or subject repositories. There is also the open database Unpaywall which collects free scholarly articles. Or Information Professional, the very informative CILIP Magazine!

Webinars: Have you ever tried a webinar? If not, we would kindly recommend them! Luca has recently attended a Webinar on Webjunction on fake news and relevant skills for the modern internet user and student. And while it might sometime be challenging to tune in at the right time, due to time zone difference and other timely impediments, the good think about Webjunction is that you can access all their webinars recordings even after they have finished. All webinars come with a lot of extra materials you can read and use in your practice. For instance, from that webinar, Luca has been able to organise and deliver a lesson on fake news to some ecstatic second-year students that learned how to debunk memes and miscaptioned images!

Podcasts: I guess many of you have heard of the “LibrarianswithLives” (Twitter @libswithlives) podcast, well, I hope you have! If not, we would recommend you to catch up ASAP! It is a brilliant example of how CPD can also be informative and entertaining at the same time!

Trainings: Internet for librarians is full of so many opportunities for learning. Have a look at these courses. For instance, “10 Things” is the 10 weeks training course provided by the Scottish Government Library to help you hone your social media and information skills. Next course will start on Monday the 17th of June! But you need to register to get full support from the community. Or you can try Massive Open Online Courses, AKA MOOCs, or Coursera equally interesting and more specific to your needs.

Conferences: If you have resources, or your organisation is happy to help your professional development, a good CPD chance is conferencing! We have the CILIPS conference coming up next week, and we are all going to be there, just look for us and say hi if you recognise us! We are happy to chat and expand our networking pool! If not, you will read about the conference on these pages soon! But if a conference is something unachievable for now, remember that many conferences make available on their websites slides of the presentations that were delivered during the event. Even if it is the case of waiting a few days or weeks, it is surely worth having a look to see if there is any content of your interest. An excellent example is the LILAC Conference, which has an archive of past conference presentations. Or you can look up for material from conferences or presentations or workshops on SlideShare!

Meetings: what about a good old team meeting-brainstorming type-of-thing? Communication within the team/department/institution is the best way to be up-to-date with what is happening across the institution and improve your awareness. 

Social media: this can be a very useful tool to keep up-to-date with what’s going on in your profession. Twitter is probably the platform which is most widely used by companies, institutions as well as individuals. You can follow them, but you can also keep an eye on what happens at various events by following their hashtags. A nice and increasingly popular way of participating in the conversation on professional topics is contributing to the regular appointments on Twitter with #uklibchat or @newlibsuk 

Libraries/institutions visits: when you have worked for some time in a certain workplace, you would have understood what is working well and what are the issues of that place. It would be a good idea to arrange a visit to different workplaces within your profession so that you can understand what can be improved in your working environment, or see what can be done differently. Visits are a great opportunity for networking, too, and we all know the power of networking!

Research: if you are keen to spend more time and effort, then you can always opt for the traditional research methods, like surveys, interviews, focus groups, systematic reviews and so forth, to evaluate the quality of the services provided at your institution or test the ground for the implementation of new ones.

We hope to have given you some ideas to carry on with your professional development and to have inspired and motivated you. We also hope to meet some of you at the CILIPS Conference. ;)

Cheerio!