Things 10 and 11 on the CPD23 programme are all about paths into librarianship and progression once you’re there. Two years ago I blogged about my route into librarianship – please go and read that post before continuing here, if only because it’s got my best ever opening line.

So now you’ll know that I fell into the profession. When I set out I didn’t know about the graduate trainee scheme, but I sure wish I had. I first heard about it when I started working at the University of Oxford; each year they have a cohort of around 20 trainees. From the outside it seems like a really valuable experience and a great way to learn some new skills and work out if librarianship is the career for you. While I was at Oxford Laura Wilkinson was responsible for the trainee programme and she set up the graduate trainee blog. In its second year it’s still going strong and is worth a read for an insight into what the trainees get up to.

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I did a full-time Masters in Information and Library Management at the University of Northumbria. In the last few weeks I’ve learnt that this course is no longer running in this format and can only be done now by distance learning. On the whole I think that this is a good thing. While there were some great benefits of doing the course full-time – it only took a year and had face-to-face lectures through which a community was built up – I feel that I would have got much more out of it had I been working in a library at the same time. Some people on the course did work throughout but I think they would admit that managing the two was often a stretch. By far and away the best part of the course therefore was the placement where we actually got to put into prtactice the theory we had learnt.

Since taking on my first professional post I have toyed with the idea of Chartership. However I just can’t see the benefit for me. It’s a lot of work and these days I rarely see it as a prerequisite for jobs I might apply for. If I were to do any additional qualifications I think it would be in something more practical and useful to my career progression such as teaching or marketing.

Throughout my career I have had what I would consider to be two informal mentors; Andy Priestner and the aforementioned Laura Wilkinson. Whether they are aware of this I’m not sure. I respect both of them professionally and have sought advice from them on a variety of different topics. Where I feel they have helped me most though is as sounding boards. I will often go to them just to bounce ideas around and inevitably come away clear in my mind about how I will progress.

• Thing 9: Sign up for a Delicious account, bookmark and tag some of your favourite web sites.
• Thing 10: Add other Delicious users to your network so that you can easily view their bookmarks.

I have been using delicious now for nearly a year. I can’t claim that I go back to it regularly to find things but I find it reassuring to know that I have some links to helpful tools and useful articles there in case I need them someday. I think the ones I go back for the most are those for web design, especially when I’m trying to find a funky colour to use.

The only way to manage your links in delicious is to use tags. It is so important to be consistent so I really like that you get recommendations from your own set of tags when you save a new link.

It was my job recently to move all of the library’s links to free resources on the web over to delicious. Prior to this we had kept them on a page on our intranet but this was so unwieldy and made adding a new link extremely time consuming. The ability to tag the bookmarks makes it so easy to group like items and hopefully for our users to quickly and easily locate links of interest to them.

Before now I haven’t ever used the network feature of delicious. For thing 10 I added two of my fellow 23 things team members. I find it odd that there’s not a way to search for friends/colleagues on there by email address. Unless I’ve missed something adding people to your network relies on you knowing their username.