Professional Registration interview with David Smith OBE

This is the first in a planned series of blog posts conceived as a spin-off of our series of member interviews and focusing on the experience of Government Knowledge and Information Management (GKIM) Professionals when undertaking CILIP Professional Registration. The survey and roundtable with GKIM colleagues on their experience of Professional Registration  highlighted a strong interest in learning from others in the sector. These interviews are a step toward providing that opportunity.

We’re delighted to have David Smith OBE as our first interviewee in the series. David was formerly Head of Profession for GKIM, and until his retirement was Head of KIM and Departmental Records Officer at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (now the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government). In the latter role he led eDiscovery and KIM activities in the Department for the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. In addition to being awarded an OBE for services to GKIM, he has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from both GIG and the Information and Records Management Society (IRMS), and a Special Recognition Award from IRMS for his leadership and support as Head of Profession during the COVID-19 pandemic. He has also recently been elected as a trustee of CILIP.

This piece is written by David in a personal capacity, and we publish it to further the sharing of knowledge and perspectives on Professional Registration, rather than as a statement of CILIP or GIG’s stance. We appreciate the candid insight offered and invite readers to consider a range of views on this topic.

    1. Give us the context of your decision to pursue Professional Registration. What were you hoping to get out of the process?

Having done the CILIP (Library Association as it was then) Licentiate in 1985 and Chartership in 1987, as retirement drew near I felt I ought to “bookend” my career by undertaking the Fellowship.  I suppose that I hoped to get a sense of personal achievement from the process, rather than necessarily career advancement – but that is probably reflective of where I was in my career. 

    2. How did you decide where to start the process of Professional Registration? Was your journey straightforward, or did it take lots of turns or reach dead ends?

I have acted as a CILIP mentor in the past, so knew my way round the PKSB reasonably well and this was my starting point.  Having assessed myself (and you don’t have to show competence in most of the areas covered by the PKSB), I reflect that there were a couple of issues for me:  

1. as someone at the end of their career, much of what I was doing was broadly management and far less “hands-on” than the PKSB expected. Not an impossible obstacle to get around, but it needs candidates to think about their role in enabling things, not simply doing things.  
   
   
2. the PKSB is a wee bit compartmentalised, so some activities carried out in the context of GKIM – working on Public Inquiries for example – do not fit easily into a single area.  I am aware the PKSB is being revised, so I am sure the bright, new shiny PKSB will be even better.

Was my journey straightforward?  Nah.  When reflecting on my career, I had a lot of career to look back on: I’d advise candidates to focus on the last 3 (5 if you push it) years of their experience – Fellowship is not a long service award.  Candidates may find section 3 the trickiest: your impact on the wider profession.  As Government Head of Profession for GKIM this was the easiest section for me, but I was definitely atypical.  Probably the best advice I can give is to frame your impact in terms of what you were allowed to do as a Civil Servant, which inevitably limits your public utterances to a certain extent.  Think about what work you may have done within the context of the GKIM profession, rather than CILIP at large necessarily.  That said, I think CILIP needs to reconsider what is being asked in section 3 as part of its review of the PKSB.

    3. What sources of formal and informal support were most useful to you as you went through the process?

As suggested in the guidance I got myself a mentor to guide me through the process.  The recommendation is that it be someone outside your sector, so I had a librarian working in a university library as my mentor.  She was excellent, put up with my truculence about the whole process with infinite patience, and, with light touch throughout, provided first class input.

    4. What tools and techniques did you use to ensure you made steady progress with your portfolio and reflections alongside your work and career? Did anyone else help you with this?

The submission needs to be reflective in style, which I kicked against having had delivery, delivery, delivery drummed into me.  My mentor helped with this, so that my final report was far more reflective.  While certainly not “David Smith’s Greatest Hits” (which would have made for a fairly short report anyway), nor was it the “Collected Failures of Smith” (which would have exceeded the word count): I think you can mix things you achieved which you are proud of with things that went less well and your reflections on how they could have gone better.  A pair of 20-20 hindsight spectacles helps with this. 

Start thinking early about who you want support statements from and engage with the people you identify – if they are willing, but time poor, you might provide them with a helpful draft supporting letter to assist with them martialling their thoughts about your contribution.  You might say they will simply sign the draft you have provided.  I could not possibly comment.  Obvious candidates for support letters include your line manager and your mentor (if you decided to have one).  Pick people who can comment on your professional practice – a letter from your Mum or Dad, supportive though it doubtless would be, will cut little mustard with the CILIP assessors.

The whole process is a masterclass in bureaucracy, and I speak as a former bureaucrat.  Consequently, it is important that you read the byzantine rules about how to format the submission.  Some of guidance on the CILIP website is contradictory, so drop a line to the support page on the website if you have any specific queries: I found they responded quickly and helpfully.  In creating the final submission, make sure you know how to do references/anchors in Word; you need this to make your contents page work properly, and to link your bits of evidence to your submission narrative.

Make sure you have all the documents that you are asked to submit: not all may be easy to obtain, or you might not possess them.  I had to dust down, and update, my rather ancient CV for example.  You are asked for corporate aims which can be a right royal pain as they may sit in a departmental Annual Report or a set of pages on your intranet.  Exporting these formats was “challenging”, so I screen-shotted some of the trickier web pages.  As these tend to give a “landscape” rather than a “portrait” image, make sure you learn how to combine pages of different orientations within the one document in Word.

In terms of evidence, be realistic about what you submit: there is likely to be only so much excitement in your post over the previous few years, so don’t worry if you have nothing spectacular to report.  Perhaps more important is giving the assessor the context of what you have done – very important given the necessarily quasi-secretive GKIM inhabits (and more so in some sectors of GKIM) – without breaching any security constraints you have.  As with all the report, be reflective until your ears drop off.

Aside from my mentor, nobody else helped with my submission (aside from those providing support letters).  This was a personal choice, and reflected the hermit-like approach I took to doing it.  My retiral date was my “burning platform”, so I completed my submission in about five months (ungodly haste – don’t tell CILIP) to meet that in good time.  Another approach is to work with others also doing submissions and to provide mutual support and encouragement: that has worked well for others in GKIM.

    5. Did you obtain what you were hoping to get out of Professional Registration? Were there any other benefits to completing it that you weren't expecting?

Insofar as hoping to obtain Fellowship, I was successful.  Other benefits?  None really – another set of letters after my name, and the honour of paying a higher subscription rate to CILIP.  Obviously, there was a sense of personal professional satisfaction in achieving the Fellowship, and there are plenty articles on the internet extolling the merits of achieving accreditation, chartership or fellowship.  Other people will doubtless have other benefits; this is simply my own personal reflection as applied to myself.

    6. Are there any other reflections on the experience or advice for current and future candidates you'd like to share?

CILIP membership is less than 25% of the estimated 36,000+ librarians in the UK, and of the CILIP membership, a worryingly small number have sought accreditation, so I think CILIP have an issue to address there, no matter how improved the PKSB is post-review.  Personally (and this does not necessarily reflect the views of CILIP) I think there are a number of issues facing GKIM wannabe Chartered/Fellowship librarians:

1. There doesn’t seem to be any requirement to be chartered/fellowship accredited in GKIM job adverts; at best it is a nice to have but rarely, if ever, a mandatory requirement (sure, sure you’ll swear you’ll undertake CILIP accreditation if given a post you are applying for, but once in post …).  This is not going to sell the idea of undertaking CILIP accreditation to professionals developing their career.
   
   
2. There are other professional organisations in the GKIM accreditation space that are vying with CILIP: IRMS, ARA, IAPP to name but a few, so (whisper it) CILIP is not the only option.  These august organisations are not mutually exclusive however: I hold a fellowship from both CILIP and from IRMS, although both go about the fellowship process in barkingly different ways.  Again, CILIP really does need to sell accreditation if it wants to get more people undertaking the process.
   
   
3. The professional pride and recognition that comes with accreditation is all very fine, but it does not pay the bills. Nor, I suspect, do the topmost levels of the Civil Service care a hoot whether we are Chartered/Fellowship librarians or not.  I would like to see some formal recognition by government departments and associated bodies of staff achieving CILIP accreditation, be it certification, chartership or fellowship, ideally in the form of an increase in remuneration or a bonus.
   
   
4. Related to this, CILIP must do something to engender meaningful employer recognition within the Civil Service, both centrally and its non-departmental public bodies.  A revision of the PKSB is all fine and well, but if employers do not value, understand or care about CILIP accreditation, then it will be a wasted effort and the haemorrhage of chartership or fellowship candidates will continue.  This is a problem across the whole sector, not merely GKIM.  This in turn is likely to contribute to the worrying decline in CILIP numbers as GKIM staff do not see what benefit CILIP membership has for them and sets up a dangerous death spiral.

So, having been critical of the process, do I think it is worth doing accreditation? Clearly, having been professionally accredited for over 40 years by CILIP, I think so.  

I think it helps you reflect on your career to date and going forward, which is very useful in terms of identifying future training needs and giving you the confidence to apply for posts that you might think outside your comfort zone or competency level.  

It is a useful addition to your CV, and possibly an essential requirement for applying for professional posts in other sectors.  

It can also act as a confidence boost, particularly for those in professionally isolated posts where proper professional assessment may be non-existent.  In the last 22 years of my career, my fellowship application was the only time my professional performance was assessed by someone in the profession, so the process can help you if you suffer from imposter syndrome.  

There may be occasions, for example submitting evidence to legal proceedings, where you need to demonstrate your professional competence: having CILIP Chartership and/or Fellowship status helps demonstrate this.

Finally, as Robert Burns said: 

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!”

- I think CILIP professional accreditation does contribute to this, and as such is to be valued and sought.

Thanks to David for sharing his advice on successfully completing Fellowship and his wider thoughts on Professional Registration. If you’ve completed Professional Registration, work in the areas of GIG’s remit and would like to share your reflections on the process, email Naeem Yar to take part in out Prof Reg interviews.