23 Things for Professional Development –Thing 7 (Face-to-face networks and professional organisations)

Our task in this Thing is to consider the experiences we’ve had with professional organisations and how it has affected our career.

CILIP is one of the professional organisations you could hardly find any librarian in any part of the world not knowing about. I have known about CILIP since I started my career in Africa and I remember a colleague of mine joined then. She however found it a bit difficult arranging money transfer to pay for membership and had to get a colleague with a bank account here to pay for her. I wondered then why she felt she needed to go through all that because she didn’t really need to join CILIP. The equivalent one we had in my country was NLA and this is just like SLA and ALA (I have been on their mailing list for quite some time now).

I became a member of CILIP when I got into UK and paused for sometime when I had a break in my job. I remember I was always scouring the CILIP website when I was searching for a job.

I have now applied to register for my Chartership with CILIP as suggested by my LM. Thanks to her, I never really did see any need for that before.

I have made up my mind to join some other professional organisations as suggested in thing 7 and I have started with LISNPN.