Expanding your horizons: Revalidation for Chartered information professionals in non-traditional workplaces

Daniel Park

Librarianship, contrary to the popular myth, is not like Catholicism – once you’re a librarian, you do not remain one all your life. Anyone who has not amassed at least three employers within the last decade really isn’t trying hard enough! The world in which the modern information professional has to exist today is shifting on its axis at a quite bewildering rate, and many fresh-faced individuals at library school who had sighed wistfully over running their own branch library or becoming a subject-specialist in an ivory-tower university are now typing mission statements and attending “energising” breakfast meetings for Fudge Motors Incorporated or some anonymous government or quasi-government department, neither of which particularly cares if you’re a member of CILIP or not, much less a Chartered one.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this very peculiar turn of events – workplace information staff certainly have to put up with being exploited shamelessly for their research and information-handling skills with nary a thought to the complex process by which such skills were acquired, but this is often nicely offset by a handsome salary in comparison to those with similar responsibilities working in the public or academic sectors. There’s also a certain satisfaction to learning new skills to assist your section or department which have little relation to your initial qualifications. Certainly I was amazed to come top of a class of sports development professionals undertaking a Diploma in Managing and Developing Sport a year ago – there’s no way I’d have been encouraged and indeed part-sponsored to pursue such professional development in the traditional library sectors. Nevertheless, it must be said that the further you drift from your information roots, the harder it is to find commonalities with those traditional sectors whenever networking opportunities occur. You have to try extra-hard to find something worthwhile to contribute to when the other individuals at the meeting share increasingly little in common with the work you carry out on a day-to-day basis.

Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that I was derided with gasps of astonishment and disbelief from colleagues in similar workplace jobs when I announced my intentions to undertake revalidation.
‘Are you suicidal?’ sneered one; shaking his head at me as if I’d lost my mind, ‘you’ll be torn to shreds by those self-righteous…’ 
His colleague, who had actually bothered to read the revalidation criteria, mused, ‘Less than half of what you do involves librarianship skills now – how are you going to justify that to a Chartership Assessment Panel?’
Indeed, they were both right in their own way. I’d grown into a nice little comfort zone with my employers, undertaking such professional development as they considered relevant to my position – lots of customer service, but not much in the way of information skills. Was I just setting myself up for one almighty fall trying to revalidate a Chartership qualification I had gained nearly a decade before?

The first thing I did was to attend a CILIP revalidation workshop. I couldn’t be sure if my workplace colleagues were right until I asked questions – and boy did I ask questions! Undoubtedly I made a right old pain of myself at the workshop but I wasn’t getting into this revalidation thing until I was absolutely sure it was worth the investment in time and effort. I was indeed reassured at every turn that professional development gained outside the traditional information and library sectors were transferable, but only if I clearly showed that I had reflected and evaluated on the learning outcomes of that development activity and applied it to my workplace. Looking at the development I had undertaken, it was not difficult to see that the twilight world of the workplace library sector was a potential gold-mine for such opportunities. Far from excluding me from the process, revalidation seemed to be the perfect vehicle to demonstrate to my employers that I was doing an excellent job for them, and that I was continuing to develop professionally for the good of the organisation. This didn’t mean that I could silence those who disbelieved the intentions of the revalidation process. I still received plenty of negative comments from colleagues within the workplace sector about the futility of my quest, but I was at least able to convince my employers of the importance of the process, and received paid time off to attend branch and special interest group meetings, in order to pinch as many ideas as I could for the good of the firm!

Then, just as things were coming together, disaster struck! Reorganisation loomed, the information centres were scaled back at my organisation, and I was facing inevitable redundancy. In desperation I scrambled to collect evidence together prior to the end, and to persuade my line manager to write a personal statement on my behalf. 
I fired off the revalidation submission 24 hours before the ship sunk.

Then all was silence.

To begin with, I wasn’t sure how to progress. I read through the copy of the revalidation material I had retained and decided to strike whilst the iron was hot – and throw myself into further professional development. In between job interviews I undertook a series of CILIP CPD activities, and used the connections I had gained with my trade union, the PCS, to train up as a lay tutor. I’d always enjoyed producing and providing training opportunities and had illustrated that in the revalidation submission, so this seemed like a natural step. Three months after my redundancy I was invited for interview at Batley Girl’s High School, for a position which entailed a large training element. The subject of the exercise I undertook at interview matched some of the material I had been taught at one of the CILIP CPD activities I had undertaken a week before – and I was appointed, the position beginning in September 2006. Two weeks after the news of this appointment, I further received the news that I was successful in gaining revalidation!

Whether or not revalidation had been a success for me as a paper-based exercise, I remain absolutely convinced that tying together the transferable skills I had gained at my workplace library in preparation for revalidation was essential in terms of pushing me on to keep developing my skills in the dark period of redundancy, and gave me the self-confidence to excel in my interviews. Although I am no longer in touch with my workplace sector colleagues, what I hope I have done through this relation of my own personal journey through revalidation, is to show that revalidation is not only possible, but highly desirable for information staff in the workplace sector. Indeed, the revalidation process threw me a lifeline in a very desperate time of my life – one which I was very proud to have been offered by my professional association.

Daniel Park