[CPD23] Thing 15: Events

Attending

I've been fortunate enough to have been able to go to lots of events this year. I went to the CILIP New Professionals Open Day in October, which was a brilliant way to start off. It would be very easy to start off a new job (especially one that has the word "trainee" in the job title!) feeling as if I should keep my head down until I've learnt more, and not interfere with what the professionals are doing. But at NPID2010 many of the presenters were people with only a few years of experience, who had got stuck in and got involved in everything they could, which was incredibly inspiring.

Other things I've been to this year have ranged from a TeachMeet to the New Professionals Conference in Manchester a few months ago. I've made a point to blog about events as soon as possible afterwards, as otherwise I find the details and even important points slip away fairly quickly.

LibCampUK is coming up in October - I was a bit wary of this at first as the concept seemed very loose! But now it seems like almost everyone in my Twitter feed is going so I'm glad I did sign up, will be nice to meet a lot of people face-to-face finally! I would love to go to a huge conference like the IFLA conference or ALA annual, but would definitely require a helping hand from a conference bursary to be able to do that!

Speaking

I'm good at other things though...

I haven't presented at any events, and I can't see it happening any time soon! I think it's best to play to your strengths. I'm a pretty awful public speaker so while I could happily write a paper, it would probably do more harm than good to my career for me to get up and present it! At the Libraries@Cambridge conference in January the trainees put on a presentation about the Graduate Trainee scheme in Cambridge, and since there were seven of us which would be rather a lot to get up on stage and speak, we split ourselves into writers and presenters and it worked very well.

Organised 

I haven't done any organising for conference type events, but  I'd feel more confident about doing so after having been involved in organising various events for Cam23 2.0. We've had a launch party and are currently thinking about the wrap event, and we've had a couple of reflection week meet ups in between. So far most things have gone very smoothly - Doodle has been great for deciding dates and times, and having a team of organisers means that when I forget something someone else will remind me! Always important. There have been one or two hiccups along the way, but again, these are  much easier to overcome with a good team.