Ruth Buckingham wrote:
>
> Is professional
> awareness normally a separate section or should we be referring to these
> issues in other relevant sections? I'm a little confused!

I had separate section, myself, which was (if I remember rightly) two
pages long and titled "Other training received and wider professional
involvement".  (I can check when I get home if anyone is really
interested - my PDR is not on my work computer).  I also included as an
appendix the report I had written on the MARC harmonisation meeting,
which had been circulated to work colleagues.

My main reason for having a separate section was that the wider
professional issues mostly didn't relate directly to my main
professional experience (which is fairly limited to cataloguing and
enquiry work), so wouldn't fit easily into my other sections.  I was
able to list courses and conferences which I'd been on (3 short
conferences and one course in my five years) and mention the other parts
of my Route A training programme (shadowing a subject librarian, etc.)
as well as saying I read a lot of professional literature and follow the
discussion on various e-mail discussion lists.

The chief difficulty I found with "wider professional awareness" was how
to bring up a topic if I hadn't really had any involvement with it
myself.  This is why it was useful to be able to say that I had attended
a workshop on the Disability Discrimination Act, and so on.  Talking
about the subject then flowed naturally from that introduction.  If like
one of my colleagues these wider issues impinge on your work (she is
part of a group looking at the library's provision for disabled users)
then you should find it even easier to talk about them.

If you've only got one or two years' experience to describe you may have
lots of spare words for going on about professional issues, but if I had
been much more wordy I would have had to miss out some other important
things in my report.  Having the report on the MARC meeting as an
appendix meant I could include a lot of discussion of a professional
issue without adding to the word count (or having to write anything
new)!

Hope that clarifies things?

Hilary Phillips
(who is not sure yet whether she's going to be ALA or MCLIP - the
approval came before unification but I didn't send my form back until
after...)