A few weeks back I attended the Gold Coast regional meeting for ALIA’s National Advisory Congress. The actual congress is next week in Alice Springs, but the minutes from the regional meetings are now available on the ALIA website. The focus is professional development. Skimming through the minutes of these regional meetings it’s clear that members want to participate in professional development, but are somewhat disenchanted with the record keeping required for the ALIA PD scheme. Another key theme is that there is not enough incentive to belong to the scheme. A couple of letters after your name and a certificate is not enough for most. They would like to see it linked to some career or remuneration outcomes.

It’s important I think, to distinguish here that generally members are motivated to develop their skills and learn new things, they are just not motivated to do the record keeping to obtain a certificate and a couple of postnomials.

I have been audited once for the PD scheme and I have to report that it wasn’t a whole lot of fun pulling together the year’s evidence that was scattered in print and electronic sources at home and work. The PD scheme has an online service for recording points, but it does not provide a way to collate the certificates, reading lists and learning reflections that are required come audit time.

Accumulating points is actually easy - it’s the record keeping that is a pain.

Here are a few ideas that might make the process easier:

• Record your learning reflections in a blog - use a tag such as “professional development” to make it easy to identify them. Writing counts towards points too - so keep up the blogging
• You probably already have PD events in your electronic calendar (Outlook or similar) - use a tag or category to identify them as relevant events for your PD scheme
• Record the number of points/hours as you go in your blog post or comments fields of your social bookmarks
• List all your professional reading as you go in a social bookmarking site (Connotea, Citeulike) or use Zotero. Delicious is probably not going to be enough as you will want to record bibliographic citations. Once again use a tag to differentiate them from your other bookmarks
• Use a wiki instead to create your own professional development portfolio. In addition to recording your reflections and professional readings you could scan certificates and upload them to the wiki. Wordpress also allows pdf files to be uploaded so could be used in a similar way.
• Don’t duplicate record-keeping. If your workplace requires you to complete feedback forms on PD events, keep a copy for the PD scheme too.

Do you have any tips for making record-keeping easier?

Minutes from the Regional meetings are available from the ALIA site : 2008 National Advisory Congress