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.

  by  bbsc30 

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 11: Find and listen to some podcasts
• Thing 12: Search YouTube for videos and discover YouTube channels

When I was a kid I didn’t read that much I was much happier listening to story tapes and when I listen to the radio I would much rather hear spoken word rather than music – these are the two main reasons why I love podcasts. I started listening to podcasts when I worked on the Oxford Digitisation Project. One of my main tasks was surveying the collections across Oxford’s libraries to see what could be digitised; it was a very repetitive and mundane task and podcasts were the only thing that kept me sane.

The podcasts I am currently listening to are

• Filmspotting
• Friday Night Comedy
• In Our Time
• The Moth

Now what about YouTube. I like YouTube but I’m not the kind of person who can spend hours searching for videos on it. I tend to only go to it when someone shares a link with me and more often than not I find the videos I watch are information related. Whilst on holiday recently I spent an evening sitting in the hotel bar observing a group of businessmen huddled around a laptop watching videos of car crashes on YouTube – I don’t understand the appeal.

For thing 12 I signed up to a couple of YouTube channels. One of them was the Common Craft channel. If you’ve not heard of Common Craft’s In Plain English series then I’d thoroughly recommend you check it out. Here’s their video on Twitter to get you in the mood for next week’s things…