Dissecting Your Job

Many corporate information professionals have a day-to-day role that seems to involve few of the traditional ‘library’ skills. My own job, for example, is predominantly research-based, and rarely seems to involve skills such as acquisition, cataloguing, classification or preservation. However, I found that writing a very detailed job description and review of all the work undertaken in my library service started to give me an overview of all the areas of information management that were, or could be, involved on a daily basis. From there it was a matter of carefully analysing the skills involved and reflecting on how they tallied with the BPK.

Even in a heavily research-orientated role, you will find that you are still using the core information management skills frequently. Undertaking a research request and then emailing a response involves the selection and acquisition of resources, a knowledge of classification and taxonomies to search the resources, the storage of information in a suitable format, and the subsequent provision of the information, often using your skills of information architecture to organise the information in a suitable and concise fashion – all the while bearing in the mind the laws of copyright and data protection. Checking-in and shelving journals exercises both collection management and document storage and retrieval skills. When you are planning a training session for a new member of staff, you are using your knowledge of resources, selecting items from your collection, helping to develop information literacy, and working within either a self- or organisation-related framework.

Once you start looking at every role that you undertake during a day, you will see the core skills of librarianship being put to use. The challenge is to be able to step back to assess your actions, to reflect critically, and to be prepared to see core skills at use even in the strangest of tasks.

Developing a Personal Professional Development Plan

Your PPDP is the forum for you to explain why a particular skill-set is both relevant and of consequence. I used the ‘Anticipated Outcome’ section for this. CILIP are not expecting candidates to stick rigidly to the BPK, but are looking for people who can explain critically how their proposed development will aid them professionally. Sector-specific skills are essential to someone working in a corporate or commercial environment, but you do need to reflect upon and explain why certain skills will assist you in developing as an information professional. Enhanced legal knowledge, for example, will bring an improved ability to respond to detailed research requests and will give you experience in alternative ways of gaining professional knowledge appropriate to your role.

Looking at the example portfolios available on the CILIP website, and reading the invaluable Building Your Portfolio: the CILIP Guide (Watson, 2008) will give you a good idea of how a PPDP should be arranged. Combine this with a skills audit and you can start to pull together the areas on which you feel you need to focus. I chose to reflect the skills of the BPK in my PPDP by dividing it into five sections:

• • Organisational & Service Development: understanding my organisation and the corporate and legal sectors

• • Professional Development & Involvement: publication, involvement, and commitment to CPD

• • Generic & Transferable Skills: management, finance, general library knowledge, and reflective practice

• • Presentation & Communication Skills: presentation, training and communication

• • Professional Skills: KM, collection development, copyright, web 2.0, cataloguing and information retrieval

My mentor and I felt that this would give me the scope to focus not only on more traditional library skills, such as collection development and financial management, but also to develop the sector and firm specific skills which I believe are vital for a corporate information professional.

Remember that your PPDP is a constantly adapted work in progress. The final plan submitted in your portfolio can be radically different from your original PPDP, if necessary. One of the key skills needed when chartering is to learn to take stock of all experiences and to reflect on them critically to see what you have learnt and what you might need to improve upon. Even the strangest experiences can help you develop new skills. Our offices flooded quite dramatically one weekend, and I suddenly found that I was exercising such little-used skills as preserving materials and managing health and safety.

The corporate environment

CILIP suggests that a mentor from a different institution, or even a different library sector, can be extremely useful, offering you an invaluable sense of perspective when assessing your work. Whilst this is undoubtedly true I felt, judging from own experiences working in a different sector, that the field of corporate information management is too distinct to allow for a mentor from a radically different field. I believed it would not be an effective use of mentoring time to explain the politics of a mid-sized firm, or the way a research task may suddenly arise and take up your entire week.

However, at the time I registered to Charter (Summer 2007) there was only one legal librarian on the CILIP Register, and only a handful more from any form of commercial environment. I was fortunate that a chartered colleague volunteered to become my mentor, and we co-authored a short appeal in the BIALL Newsletter suggesting that any chartered corporate professionals should think about becoming mentors too. If you feel that you would also like a corporate mentor, and none are available, it is worthwhile being proactive and asking colleagues if they can recommend potential volunteers; the networking gained during this process will be a useful task in itself. Finding the right mentor is fundamental to your chartership.

One of the specific differences of a corporate information service is that it is, very simply, not its own boss. It is but one support department amongst many, and is often relatively small. This can mean that there is little flexibility within the information team to move between roles and practice new skills in the same manner that may be available in a larger academic or public library; or, put another way, working in such a small team can mean all team members necessarily become a ‘jack of all trades, and master of none’. This means that you may have to be inventive when it comes to gaining new and relevant experiences. My mentor and I felt that, within the legal environment, as many new and relevant skills can be gained from learning more about law and the corporate environment as can come from more traditional library training.

For example, as a team we invite lawyers to our team meetings to tell us about their work, which has turned out be enormously popular (everyone likes an opportunity to talk about themselves!) and provides a good opportunity to learn more about your customers' day-to-day information needs. You can also attend in-house legal presentations and seminars, if available. The knowledge of legal and markets sectors you gain can vastly improve your ability to undertake research and to organise information in a way that is logical and helpful to your users (a requirement of the BPK), and also has the very useful side-effect of making the information team look pro-active and raising your profile within the firm. It is also important to read the key publications in your commercial sector in order to keep abreast of all the issues.

I believe that the lack of corporate mentors on CILIP's Register is indicative of the value currently placed on chartership within the sector, and this reflects very negatively. Thus, chartering within the corporate environment has another tangible benefit. As we work in an environment where most of our customers are professionally qualified, it is important to remind the firm that we too are equally as qualified. It is important to try and get the knowledge that you are chartering out there. Make sure that your human resources department is aware of the process and the level of work involved, and perhaps, once you have gained chartered status, or when you have published something or been involved in a large professional project, you can see if the firm will include this on internal newsletters. An increase in awareness of the level of qualifications that are required by information professionals can only benefit you and your colleagues, and help increase your service's profile and value to the firm, which could be vitally important in the current climate – for both yourself, and the entire profession.

The wider professional picture

Whilst my Chartership portfolio, and this article, are both written from the point of view of someone who wishes to remain within the corporate information sector, it is essential – and a requirement of the BPK – that all information professionals remain attuned to the issues of our profession as a whole.

There a variety of ways to remain involved and up-to-date, and the Chartership process provides you with a great opportunity to investigate these. Joining a professional body's committee is one example. I became a member of the BIALL PR & Promotions Committee. BIALL is a good organisation to become involved in for, while it is sector-specific, it includes librarians from academic libraries, and government and professional libraries, so you are involved in developments that affect the professional standards and codes of practice for a wide variety of institutions. Publishing is another way to develop your involvement in the wider community, whether it is 200 or 2,000 words, and especially so if you promote corporate issues through publishing in non-sector specific publications.

It is also the perfect opportunity to visit other libraries: take advantage of the many tours that are organised, or visit friends or former colleagues who move into new sectors. Sometimes the work taking place in other sectors can be instructive. I attended an Aerospace and Defence Library group study day entitled “Library Information Service Survival Guide” which was exceedingly thought-provoking, and I left the day with new, concrete ideas on how to evaluate our abstract service to the firm. If you do not have the time or opportunity to visit other libraries then there are many blogs and specialist library publications which you can read. On a personal note, I found that whilst visiting libraries in other sectors was fascinating, it also reinforced my own commitment to working in corporate libraries, and in terms of your own continued professional development, this can be an invaluable insight.

So why Charter?

All in all, Chartership is an extremely valuable experience. It teaches you skills and learning practices which can accompany you for your whole career, whatever kind of library you work in. For corporate information professionals the benefits may be multiple, and I strongly believe that as a sector we should be encouraging more of our colleagues to undertake the process.