Thing Ten - My Route into Librarianship

I first started thinking about librarianship in the third year of University - the traditional year for desperate career consideration. In retrospect I genuinely cannot recall why I decided upon librarianship; perhaps I should blame the careers service. In common with the rest of the world I was surprised at the need of a masters qualification, and started looking into the trainee-ships. Eventually after a lot of, ahem, interview practice, I mananged to get a trainee-ship at East Surrey College, a vocational college. And it was perhaps only through preparing for various interviews that I actuallyy came to realise how much I cared about libraries, and how much I wanted to work in them.

I really enjoyed my trainee-ship; the team I worked with were a really lovely bunch of people, and I was given quite a range of interesting tasks and jobs. I'd never worked in a library before, save a week's work experience in my local public library once - so this year taught me a lot. I also found it very valuable to have a year's practical experience when I was looking for jobs after my masters. It was also my first experience of working with teenagers, and I surprised myself with how much I enjoyed it.This greatly influenced my job-searching for my first post.

I completed my Masters at the University of Sheffield. I decided to do a Masters in Librarianship rather than information management, because I thought the modules looked more interesting, and also because I definitely wanted to be able to call myself a librarian - the highest ambition of geekdom. The course was by no means perfect - I would have valued a bit more practical training in cataloguing for example - but generally it was a very useful and interesting experience. I also made lots of good friends on my course, so I'm glad I did it in one year, at the university (as opposed to distance learning) - though it was obviously a bit of a thwack financially...

In the future, I plan to charter. I'll probably start over the next few years. I want to demonstrate my commitment to my chosen to career, and chartership is obviously a good way to do that. And, what's more, quite a lot of posts will require it from applicants! I think chartership is also a good opportunity to look at one's skillset and see what's missing -which will undoubtably be useful.