I had my annual review with The Boss this week. How it works is, you sit down and decide on which initiatives you’re going to work on, and what other personal projects (if any) you’re going to do. Then the following year you and The Boss look over the year and see how things went. Thankfully I’ve had a reasonably productive year:
- work blog, RSS and at the moment our team wiki
- project that involved me going to KL earlier this year (see March archives)
- writing for publication
Items one and two were the team initiatives, and item three my personal one.
I was a bit worried about the third item on the list, because although I have been writing, nothing has been published in the traditional sense as yet. Thankfully writing not-one-but-two papers for a conference counts.
I also made a point about writing this blog – and told The Boss that ALIA does accept blogging as a Continuing Professional Development activity (thanks to the Real Public Librarian for that tip, which started me investigating further!).
ALIA says that:
“Professional development is a significant component of career-long learning and is intended to:
- maintain and improve members’ technical knowledge;
- maintain and improve members’ professional skills and competencies;
- assist members to remain flexible and adaptable; and
- provide reasonable assurance to the community that members are keeping themselves up-to-date through such activities as professional reading, participation in seminars, courses and conferences, and workplace learning.”
For some reason these points (above) are on a members-only page so I can’t link to it.
According to the CPD Officer:
“Members of ALIA’s PD scheme can accumulate points if, when starting your own blog you find maintaining the blog encourages you to reflect on professional practice; read blogs to keep up to date with sector issues, and co-ordinate content or prepare non-refereed articles for publication in electronic format.” From ‘Keep on blogging’, InCite, October 2005, p.8.
I can’t seem to locate an HTML version of the article in InCite, but it is available in PDF. (Scroll to page 8.)
I’ve finally joined the Professional Development Scheme as I now have an activity I can bear to do to participate (blogging).