CPD In Your Later Career

Hmm! Does early 30s qualify me as an older thing? Certainly not in the library I work at. The average age there is early 50s.

Maybe it's a mindset? Act your shoe size not your age. That works out better.

What if you've switched careers a few times so you're still a young thing for this career. When I was training to be a teacher my tutor said that over the course of our lifetime we'd have about 7 different kinds of job. So far I'm on job #4. How do you train for that? Take it one job one skill at a time? What kind of attitude do you need? Yep I think it's back to mindset.

Stromness Library on Mainland Orkney

It is as Gandhi says "Be the change you want to see in the world." I want to exude adaptability in the hopes that I will have adaptability returned to me.

National Library in Tibet

So far I'm interested in things that I can related to my work: reading (duh!), travel (apparently broadens the horizon and allows me to view other libraries and ways of doing things) and book arts (a lot of effort goes into making a hand-bound book so why do we grab it by the top of the spine?).

At the moment in Ireland there aren't that many jobs going in libraries; therefore I'm moving around within my library (yes it's MY library) to get the most varied experience that I can. So far I've been to Customer Services, Inter-Library Loan, Special Collections and a Health Sciences library. The Health Sciences library has been really handy as it's also a branch library so I get to see what happens when staff are security, customer services, information services, basic IT troubleshooters etc.