INDEPTH
How to demonstrate your impact
Demonstrating impact can be difficult for any information professional. That’s why it’s a key component of CILIP’s Fellowship process. Here Andrew K. Shenton, Curriculum and Resource Support at Monkseaton High School, and a recent CILIP Fellow explores the techniques available to Fellowship candidates in particular.
WHILE this piece has been written with CILIP Fellowship candidates very much in mind, the ideas should also appeal to anyone who needs to demon- strate their value, either to their organisation or beyond it. Having recently become a CILIP Fellow myself, I would recommend formalising your understanding of this process and consider pursuing Fellowship – the highest level of professional registration. The word, “impact” appears no fewer than seven times in the latest guide to Fellowship.1 Showing one’s impact is certainly one of the most daunting requirements for candi- dates because impact implies a direct and beneficial link between one’s own work and related events but unequivocal connections are difficult to establish in our profession. Often, people seeking to do so fall back on mere assumptions. It is tempting to suppose that because one phenomenon follows another that would seem related, the first must be responsible for the second.2
Such
“causative fallacy” on the individual’s part is especially a danger when a prestigious qualification is at stake and the candidate has a vested interest in making a desirable link. In these circumstances, any perceived correlation may not be subjected by the demonstrator to rigorous analysis.
Understanding reach and significance Anyone looking to assess their impact would
36 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Andrew K. Shenton (
shenton1@outlook.com) Curriculum and Resource Support Officer at Monkseaton High School and Consultant/Researcher.
be wise to consider it in terms of two con- cepts employed in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) that is applied in Higher Education – “reach” and “significance”.3 Readers who are active in this sector are likely to be familiar with them already and adopting them for personal purposes for Fellowship may seem entirely natural. The former refers to how widely the impact of the work in question has been felt; the latter is the degree of difference it has made to beneficiaries.4
In more everyday language,
we can equate reach with breadth of impact and significance with depth. Reach can be
January-February 2022
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