The blog of Elena Menéndez
CPD
CILIP’s draft Body of Professional Knowledge and Skills
Apr 29th
As part of their Future Skills Project, CILIP has recently invited members to feed back on the first draft of the revised Body of Professional Knowledge and Skills. I have already submitted my comments using the online form, but I thought it would be useful to spend a little longer reviewing the document.
The proposed BPKS clearly tries to address the problems attributed to its predecessor, often criticised for being woolly and impractical. I certainly think it is a step in the right direction. The coverage is good and I like the matrix approach. It is obvious that CILIP have tried very hard to accommodate everyone and everything into this framework. Perhaps that is the problem with this draft: it is trying too hard not to miss anything. In fact, the introductory text on the consultation page is a bit of a give-away:
This consultation aims to identify any gaps and gauge opinion on whether the subject headings we have included are the right ones.
I did not find any gaps (although I am by no means an expert on some of the wheel wedges). For me, the issue was that there were far too many strands, too many headings and subheadings and quite a lot of repetition. Even without the descriptions, the list of “skills” is far too long.
If the new BPKS wants to become the standard competence framework the information industry, it needs to be, first and foremost, usable. It should communicate, pretty much at a glance, where you are as a professional, and what steps you need to take in order to move forward in your chosen career path. It also needs to work on variety of professional environments. In my opinion, making it too specific is a mistake and I believe there are some things that should be addressed.
- Soft skills: I see no point in having a section on communication skills. They are important, yes, but they do not define what we do. I feel the same about research skills or information synthesis competences (collating, abstracting, summarising…) These are common to professionals in most fields and the BPKS should focus on what differentiates library and information professionals from everyone else. I’m not even sure that the sections on ‘Professional confidence’ and ‘Leadership’ are necessary. Most of the headings in these areas are behaviours rather than skills, and they can be covered by the level of competence.
- Tools and technologies: I think there is too much detail about understanding technology and using certain tools. An information professional should be able to pick and choose the most relevant tools at the time, whether it is a thesaurus or social media or something we haven’t yet heard of. Listing particular names is only going to date the document and make it more difficult to maintain. At most, they should be included as examples, nothing else.
- Core skills and duplication: As I mentioned above, I did notice quite a lot of repetition across the document. For example, ‘evaluation’ and ‘financial management’ appear in more than one place and section 12 (strategic planning) ends up as a replica of section 11 (resource management). There are also strong connections between sections that could be merged together, e.g., section 8 (marketing and customer focus) is really a subset from 9 (service design). I think more could be done to distill the core skills that define the profession. Tina Reynolds makes an interesting point about giving a whole wedge of the wheel to Records Management (RM). My feeling is that although in some cases RM is very specialised and separate field, other times (or perhaps it would be better to say in some organisations) it is closely intertwined with information management and perhaps even librarianship. As someone who has worked for many years in hybrid role, I know very well how blurry the edges of professional areas can be. I am in favour of better definition of professional boundaries, because it provides clarity and helps people find support networks, but it has to be done in a way that is flexible enough to accommodate these role discrepancies. Perhaps a solution would be to focus not so much on the label, but on the tasks that record managers do, e.g. content creation, management and disposal. These are skills that are required outside strict RM.
- Self-assessment: The BPKS has a table linking qualifications, knowledge and skills, and competence level. However, professional competence is not just determined by qualifications and the skills definitions are quite woolly, which means the whole thing is too vague and subjective to be useful. Working through the toolkit and scoring oneself should be straightforward and consistent.
Neat solutions
Complex as it must be to come up with a solution that is concise, flexible and usable, I believe it can be done. I have read blogs drawing parallels to skills frameworks in other professions, e.g., law, surveying or health, but there are other examples that are much closer to home.
The Government Knowledge and Information Management (GKIM) Professional Skills Framework is one of them. CILIP have obviously used this framework to inform the new BPKS. It is referenced at the end of the draft and the section on “Using and exploiting knowledge and information” has been added pretty much verbatim. The framework clearly defines four categories with a business, user, process or compliance perspective. It also specifies four competency levels: practitioner, manager, leader and strategist.
Our IT department is currently being mapped to the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). The BCS (Chartered Institute of IT) also uses SFIA (branded SFIAPlus) as the basis for their career framework for IT professionals. SFIA is divided in six strands: strategy and planning; business change; solutions development and implementation; service management; procurement and management support; and client interface. And it has seven competence levels: follow; assist; apply; enable; advise; initiate/influence; and set strategy/inspire.
What I like about these frameworks is that they are manageable and very easy to interprete. They clearly identify professional pathways and link career stage to competence level, addressing the issue of consistent self-assessment quite effectively. In both cases, there is additional documentation fleshing out the detail, but even without it, I would be quite happy using tools like these to explain where my role fits in the big scheme of things.
I really hope the consultation process provides CILIP with useful feedback that allows them to address the remaining issues and come up with a solid solution. Oh, and I understand the consultation is still open until the end of Sunday 29th April, so if you still haven’t had your say, you better hurry up and send your feedback before midnight!
Reflections of an analytic mind
Dec 1st
Some months ago I blogged about my take on reflective practice. Since then I have been doing a lot of thinking around the topic, mostly because I have started to put together my CILIP Chartership portfolio and demonstrating that I am a reflective practitioner is a key part of the process. After staring at several blank pages, wondering how to start writing reflectively I realised that, before I could go any further, I needed to get a better sense of what my reflective style is.
I reflect, therefore I am
I say this because ‘I know’ I have a reflective style. As explained in my previous post, reflecting comes naturally to me, and this has been confirmed by feedback from others, in various situations, both at work and in education. Whenever I take a learning styles questionnaire, invariably I come up as reflector-theorist-pragmatist in fairly equal parts – my activist is lagging well behind. Why then, am I finding it difficult to write a reflective blog? In part, I guess, it’s lack of practice but there is more to it than that. I started blaming it on the way my mind works and the way I have been trained to think like a scientist.
And then it just dawned on me that having an analytical mind doesn’t stop me from engaging in reflective practice, in fact, it should be quite the opposite.
Doing it like a boffin
Logging it: A lab book is one of the most important tools a scientist will use.
It seems to me that the social disciplines have claimed ownership of reflective practice, when in fact scientists do this all of the time. As a scientist, reflecting is a quick cyclical operation. Look back to those days in the chemistry lab. Following a procedure for an experiment, you were told to observe and write copious notes. What happens, can you explain the reaction? What would happen if you repeated it in different conditions? Can you improve the yield? This experiential learning – which also forms the basis of scientific research – relies heavily on reflective practice.
In my previous life as a research chemist I had to do this all the time and I learnt most of the key skills that still serve me well today: attention to detail, analytical and organisational skills, problem solving, and creative thinking amongst others.
The big difference between the pure science and social science approach to reflection is that the former works only with hard facts, whereas the latter is happy to bring in a subjective perspective. I think it could also be said that the reflective practice cycle in hard science happens faster and in smaller increments. That’s how I learnt to apply my analytical mind in the lab: observe problem, hypothesise solution, apply solution, observe reaction, prove or disprove hypothesis and continue this cycle until a theory could be established. By repeating this process it became, not just a way of conducting lab experiments, but also the way in which I operate and approach every learning experience.
Way forward…
There are good and bad news here. On the positive side, I think this reinforces even more the extent of my reflective nature. On the down side, it tells me that I have become so used to my own version of the reflective cycle, that it is difficult for me to externalise it.
What I think I need to do is follow this same process but slow it down so there is more room for the subjective observations to emerge. I also feel that I should not be afraid to use description mixed with my reflection. Much of the advice you get about writing reflectively says to avoid description and that has been worrying me, because I realise I do have a tendency to describe facts (that analytical mind again). However, taking a look at my old lab books, which are in a way the ultimate log, I realised that writing down the facts allows me to review them, draw conclusions and build solutions. Deep down, I’m always going to want something ‘solid’ behind what I say. It’s what makes me who I am, and if accepting that helps me to move forward and find my reflective writing voice, I think I may be onto something.
CILIP Career Development Group National Conference: ‘The Practical Professional’
Nov 21st
Today I attended the CDG National Conference in Bristol. It was a small but very well organised event, which mostly ran like clockwork. Congratulations to the organisers!
Apparently the presentations will be available from the event website at the end of the week so, rather than doing a session-by-session review, I thought I’d focus on what for me were the main themes of the day.
Job losses, restructures, budget cuts…
There is not getting away from the fact that many librarians have been having a tough time lately. Several presenters drew on their experience to come up with their own survival guide. I’d sum up their advice like this:
- Every challenge is an opportunity – make the most of it.
- Be prepared: look ahead, take in the environment. How are social or economic changes likely to affect your role or your organisation?
- Keep reviewing what you do. In terms of service, why are you doing what you do? Does it align with the users’ needs? With organisational objectives? What is the impact? From a personal point of view, be a reflective practitioner, gather evidence of your work, continue to build your CV so you have it ready if you need it. This fits in with the philosophy of the Chartership process.
Career moves from sector to sector
Clearly, career moves are no longer just the result of a desire to try something new. Instead, they have become a necessity for some colleagues forced out of their jobs by redundancy. With opportunities shrinking in some sectors, information professionals are trying out new avenues and this is what I gleaned from their advice:
- Core skills are valuable and transferable. Review what you have and make sure you target the new sector effectively by highlighting and, if necessary, explaining relevant skills.
- There is plenty of crossover between sectors, but also big differences, so do your research before jumping in. Be flexible but know your goals and decide how much you want to compromise.
- Soft skills are very important. Several people mentioned that it was their non-librarian skills that got them their new job. I thought that was very interesting and matching what I have been reading / seeing in other professions (e.g., information technology, workforce development).
Personal development is a must!
Everyone attending the CDG conference should know this already but there is no harm in saying it one more time:
- We need to keep learning and developing, regardless of environmental conditions. Phil Bradley gave the example of someone saying they couldn’t be bothered with Google+ because it was “another thing to learn”. Ahem!… That’s what we do, isn’t it?
- Various speakers mentioned the importance of knowing yourself, your goals, your interests, your beliefs and tailoring your development accordingly. This is often overlooked, but very sound advise – you are much more likely to succeed doing something that is already in your nature.
- Similarly, I liked the concept of reviewing your career looking for patterns, do you gravitate towards roles that have similar tasks? If so, why?
Networks
The importance of the network, both as a source of professional advice and peer support, was also highlighted throughout the event. In an impassioned talk about the role of social media in libraries, Phil Bradley said that networks are not only becoming virtual, but also replacing websites and traditional search engines as sources of information. People are the new authority and info pros should make sure they are perceived as credible sources. I have some qualms about this premise, but they probably belong on a different post.
The event gave plenty of opportunity for networking action, particularly with lunch being followed by a speed-dating “game”. I have to be honest, this would not normally be top of my list of fun ways to spend an afternoon (I’m being polite). So I was very surprised to find the activity a) an interesting – and dare I say fun!? – way of meeting others and learning what they do, and b) the easiest “networking game” I have done for quite some time. This was helped, I think, by the feeling that I was talking to like-minded individuals – perhaps I am more of a “librarian” than I had thought! 
I also noticed – and others agreed – that explaining roles got easier as we moved from one group to another and refined the information we passed on. This reinforced an idea I have been toying with for a while: I need to write down a “mini job description” that I can draw upon quickly and easily so I can answer properly when someone asks what I do!
All in all, a good day and a great chance to hear about the varied roles librarians play and all the weird and wonderful paths that lead to becoming an information professional. I didn’t hear anything completely new, but that is good news, as it goes to show how good my organisation is at engaging in staff and service development.
CPD23 Thing 5: Reflective Practice
Jul 18th
Reflections - Image by Jason Truscott
Thing 5 of CPD23 asks us that we consider reflective practice and what it can do for our professional development.
I find the term ‘reflective practice‘ slightly misleading. If this method was simply about developing professional practice through reflection, I would have no problem at all. I’m naturally reflective and I invariably get classed as a reflector whenever I take a Learning Styles questionnaire. The problem is that to engage in reflective practice requires much more than simply… well, reflecting. It’s really what comes after the reflection that is crucial to the process of personal development. From the analysis of any experience I should be deriving some conclusions and, from these, planning the action to be taken in the future. It’s this concluding and planning that I often struggle with, particularly if it has to be documented.
In the last couple of years I have tried to get on top of my personal development plan – which I suppose is the place where I should be summarising all of the actions. With the help of my mentor and my manager, the plan has come a long way from its very vague beginnings, but it’s still very much work in progress. I need to get better at updating it and reacting to change. I also should be incorporating more development actions in the soft skills areas, something that it’s quite difficult to evidence and keep track of.
So yes, I can definitely see the value in using reflective practice, but for me the technique is still work in progress. I feel I can reflect, I just need to get better at taking action. I guess in itself that is evidence of reflective practice 😉
CPD23 Thing 3: Public Image Ltd
Jun 30th
Thing 3 in the CPD23 programme has got me thinking seriously!
I’ll start by saying that, if I’m entirely honest, I am slightly averse to using the word “brand” when talking about people. Two reasons: 1) It reminds me of Stuart Baggs “The Brand” 😀 and 2) I dislike the implication that people are products that need packaging and marketing. In my idealistic and probably slightly simplistic head, I prefer to think that my value is demonstrated by the quality of my work – or, to take it back to business, the product should sell itself. I know, however, that in reality things don’t work like that and without a good marketing strategy, most products will fail, no matter how good they are. Besides, managing your professional reputation or public image makes perfect sense – particularly if you are self-employed or work in the corporate world – and obviously, online presence is part of that public image. In fact, I think that as with many things web, we artificially separate the physical and virtual aspects of the problem, when in reality they are the same. The main difference is the amplification you get in the digital world. If I made a faux-pas at an interview or networking event, a few people might know about it, but the equivalent mistake online can reach all the corners of the planet in the time it takes to press ‘upload’. Plus it can be perpetuated in the collective digital memory for the foreseeable future. Scary prospect.
So, let’s talk about my ‘brand’, or as I prefer to call it, my ‘public image’. Jo suggests that we ask ourselves some questions:
What name(s) do I use?
I’ve sort of taken the opposite approach to what Thing 3 suggests. Instead of labelling my profiles in a way that would make it easier for people to find me, I’ve deliberately used different names in different places, depending on how official or public the account is. This was mainly out of concerns about digital identity and its implications in terms of security. You may think you’ve shared this here and that there and it’s all disconnected, but in fact it’s not. A simple Google search and anyone can build your full profile. I may be feeling particularly sensitive to this issue, having just got back from the i-Society conference, where various aspects of cybercrime were discussed and having also read WoodsieGirl’s account of her problems with a stalker, but it’s certainly something worth considering.
When I started creating online accounts I took the view that people who needed to find me, would find me through e-mail, my employer’s website etc. For everything else I felt it was best to keep some distance.
The result is that I don’t use the same name consistently. For Twitter, and a few other services, which are a mix of personal and professional I use a nickname. I started using it for Twitter because it was short-ish and didn’t take too many characters, then it stuck! As my real name is not English it’s relatively easy to find me in a UK Google search – in an international scale it’s a different story. There is also the complication of having two surnames – long story, don’t ask! 😉 I sometimes use them both, other times only one. I tend to use both surnames (hyphenated) at work and with people who know me personally. For everything else I use just my first surname. I know it probably makes no odds whatsoever, and anyone with a couple of neurones could find out I am the same person in no time at all, but somehow, it makes me feel safer.
I’m terms of managing my digital identity, I often wish I could have known what I know now when I first started to create online profiles. I could have been much more systematic about it. Even so, I have done a certain degree of re-organisation and consolidation of accounts and usernames over the years and I’m fairly happy with what I have now. As the time went by, I also became more relaxed about using my real name in more public places. I guess it’s a trade in for being a part of the network, but I still like to stay in the shade every now and then!
What photos do I use?
Similar to the name thing, in public accounts, I try not to use photos where you can see me clearly. For some things I use cartoon avatars, for Twitter and this blog I use a photo. If you see me or know me in person, you’ll probably recognise me, but it’s not too clear and hopefully it would be a struggle to pick me up in an ID parade 😉
Do I merge professional and personal identity?
To some degree… It’s really quite difficult to keep them separate in today’s connected society. I don’t have different accounts for the same service, but I keep Facebook for personal stuff only – and in any case, I don’t use it all that much. I try not to get too personal elsewhere, but hey, rules are there to be broken so expect random tweets about football, royal weddings or Eurovision 😀
Do I need a visual identity?
Possibly. This is something that I have been contemplating for a while. Not in a large scale, I wouldn’t design matching business cards (though Jo’s cards are ultra-cute!), because I use the ones provided by my employer. The way I see it, when I’m out on a business trip I’m representing them, so it doesn’t make sense to have a personal card. It would be different if I had my own business. But yes, I certainly think it’s a good idea to present a unified look. I have seen some integrated websites, blogs and twitter profiles that look fantastic. Most of them belong to designers, and I suppose in that field, your visual identity is key. I’m not sure ‘visual’ is a strong requirement for an information professional but it certainly isn’t going to hurt.
………………………………..
To be honest I’m not too worried whether my online profiles, including this blog, reflect my ‘persona’. The blog is not me, it’s just another part of me, like my work life and my personal life are all elements of me, but none of them is the full picture. I certainly try to keep things polite, though. Nevermind employers, I just wouldn’t want my mother to find anything too controversial and if it’s online, she will! Thanks Google! 😀