Studying at the Sir Alex Ferguson Library.


bilities would be available if needed. And so, our little Chartership Club was born in the autumn of 2022.


The first rule of Chartership Club... As our club was born into a post-pandemic world, this meant that we had a range of organisational tools at our disposal to help us manage the logistics and communica- tions for our group. A private Microsoft Teams channel gave us a place to chat, file share and utilise a shared notebook for meeting minutes.


The members of the group were split across two different library teams, all with different on- and off-campus schedules, therefore having an online space to touch base and share information was extremely important. We all agreed to hold one in-person meeting a month, from 4pm-6pm, to straddle professional and personal time, and the first of these meet- ings was basically a brainstorming ses- sion. We shared our personal experiences of the Professional Registration process so far, problems that we’d encountered or things that we wished for further clarifica- tion on, and our own individual goals for the month.


One thing our group was particularly hung up on, which will ring familiar to many who have undergone Professional Registration, was our understanding of the PKSB. To gain some clarity, we took advantage of our proximity to the lovely team at CILIP Scotland and invited them for a meeting with our group to discuss all things Professional Registration,


June-July 2026


learn about mentorship opportunities and demystify the PKSB for us. The ever-supportive Sean, Kirsten, and Leah were more than happy to visit and took the time to share their knowledge and best practice with us. Personally, I found this to be one of the best outcomes from our collaborative working experience, as it really helped me form a better under- standing of the process as a whole and to ask my questions directly to the experts. In those initial days of Chartership Club, we helped each other navigate several hurdles, such as contacting potential men- tors, sharing resources around reflective writing, and decoding the PKSB. Having other people to proofread, sense-check and talk things over with was particularly valuable. Additionally, the collaborative process was especially helpful when it came to task prioritisation and balancing your workload. By chunking up the work and feeding back to one another it freed up our time to focus on the important things.


Perhaps you didn’t have time to attend that reflective writing workshop, but someone else did, here’s some notes taken of the key points. Here is a selec- tion of articles a club-mate has read on the Professional Registration process; with the top three they’d recommend. This is also where your individual skills and knowledge can come into play. For example, since I have a passion for creat- ing resource lists, I created a Chartership Club list where I gathered all the official guidance along with resources around


reflective practice, CV writing, some key websites for CPD events and some exam- ple portfolios I found, saving my club- mates time. Another good example of this is that we used our individual networks and professional contacts to set up group visits to different types of libraries.


Reflecting on reflective practice Looking back on our club activities, I can say that it was a useful experience and helped address those initial problems of clarity, accountability and time manage- ment. The club was able to provide us with opportunities that we may not have had, or been confident to pursue, had we been going on this journey alone. For example, I discovered that it really helps my reflective practice to have open discus- sions where I can articulate my thoughts and feelings out loud before getting them down on paper in the form of my evi- dence pieces and I was able to do this by attending events with my colleagues and having informal debriefs afterwards. It also gave me the opportunity to collab- orate with colleagues on things such as conference presentations, blog posts, and other outputs that we could then both use in our portfolios. For accountability, it was useful to have our monthly meetings where we would set individual goals and targets.


We often had weekend meet-ups where we would meet in the library to inde- pendently work on our portfolios, which I found particularly useful to ensure I dedicated specific time to my work under


INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 39


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