Thing 10

Qualifications and courses....

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do for a job when I was 18 so I decided to do a BA (Hons) in IT with English Literature. I had looked at specific undergraduate degrees for Librarianship but thought it might be better to do a less specific degree. Whilst doing my degree I got a saturday job at a local public library and then I decided that I wanted to carry on and become a qualified librarian. However, just to make sure and also to save up for the MSc course in Library and Information Studies I gained more hours at the library and took another job in a neighbouring library. This was useful to have done as I needed to have at least a year of work experience in a library setting before going on the course. I completed a course on Dreamweaver during the year between my degrees which has been useful later on. I completed my MSc and then not long after applied for a slightly more senior position at a local college and actually got the job! My role involved looking after the library intranet pages using Dreamweaver so my knowledge of Dreamweaver came in handy! I had also covered HTML in my IT degree so this was also really useful. Since working at the college my role has moved away from dealing with Library intranet pages as they once were as now we have moved all of the library information to our LMS, Heritage. I now manage the content on Heritage and still use HTML occasionally to customise certain things on the interface. Whilst working at the College I have undertaken ECDL which was interesting though now we have moved to Office 2010 I feel that I might need a refresher in certain areas! I do believe that if you don't use it, you lose it and I feel that certain things that I learnt on ECDL I have now forgotten e.g. I don't use formulas in Excel very often and really have to think about what I'm doing whenever I have to do something a bit more complicated than usual on a spreadsheet! I have also had quite a lot of training in other areas such as Moodle VLE, presentation skills, dealing with difficult students and a CILIP run classification course. Mostly all the training has been useful, I do enjoy learning new things which is one of the reasons why I'm doing this course! However, I have slowed down a bit with doing courses, I think this is mainly due to changing from being full time to part time earlier this year as I am now a Mum and want to look after my son a couple of days a week instead of having to put him in childcare every day.