As I’ve mentioned in previous posts and my Library Routes, I came to librarianship from an extremely technical background.
My BSc. was in the InfoComms department at Manchester Met, so I was lucky enough to be taught by some excellent information professionals as part of my degree and they were also the reason I discovered Graduate Traineeships when I started panicking slightly about what I was going to do next. I applied to just about every traineeship going, I think and ended up interviewing for six, mostly law but I did also interview at the V&A, which was pretty awesome.
I ended up being offered one of the two positions at The Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn in September 2006, which was a fantastic year – it’s a very small team and the graduate trainees were the first port of call for *every* enquiry, so our work was extremely broad. We were also lucky that because it was an Inns of Court library, we had access to resources that as a law librarian later on, I would miss greatly! We got a firm grounding in how to do paper based enquiries as well as how to do them through the electronic resources, which was invaluable when things went down!
I’ve mentioned before that I wish I had been more involved with CILIP but I did get involved with BIALL that year and it was also the opportunity to see if it was what I wanted to do without increasing my student debt. Of course, I then did go on to increase my student debt as it turned out that, hey, I enjoyed being a librarian! I started my MSc. at City University in September 2007 and graduated in May 2009 – I had to take some time out of my full-time degree for family/health reasons, so submitted my thesis in the January round.
While I did my degree full time, I also effectively worked full time, including a stint as a Barristers’ chamber librarian, a Knowledge Management assistant, a publishing front-half assistant (surprising amount of info retrieval!), evening work at Gray’s, evening work at an academic library and finally, while writing up and after thesis submission, as the solo librarian for a large US law firm’s London office. After that, I took my first full-time post-qualification job as a systems librarian in the health sector. I’m playing library sector bingo, you see… ;)
I’m currently working in Knowledge Management for a global engineering company, which is pretty awesome.
Of course, after qualification, the next – optional – step is chartership. Now, if you’d asked me two years ago, I’d have probably told you that no, I wouldn’t probably charter but as I’ve become more involved in my professional organisations, I have started to change my mind about chartership and I will be looking at starting the process in the next year or so, once I know more about what I’ll be doing next.
which, in a way, leads on the Thing 11 – mentorship. I don’t have an official mentor at the moment but I have been very lucky to work for some people who have been extremely free with their advice and I have been very grateful to them for that. I also consider my peer groups to be unofficial mentors – I have had so many amazing and excellent conversations with people (normally with a glass of wine…) that have been very useful.
Obviously, if/when I start the chartership process, I will have a more official mentor but for the moment, I am happy with the opportunities I get now. I also hope that at some point, I can provide the role of mentor to someone else!
