This post was prompted by several recent Twitter threads relating to LIS student placements.

These threads raised some serious questions from a student perspective, in particular about the financial hardship placed on students and the impact on diversity in the library workforce that may arise from placements being more accessible for some students than others.

I agree can't look for work because I have to take four weeks out for placement. There should be a payment a student can get to cover this period. I too am lucky that my wife has a good job but it's still a struggle, what do we pay our fees for?

— Nic Brett 📚🏳️‍🌈 (@purplegrrl) June 18, 2018

Threads also presented concerns from the enrolling institution perspective, where LIS educators must meet ALIA accreditation requirements, determine how best their program might prepare students from an employability perspective and promote the benefits that a work placement can provide, particularly for students with no or little paid work experience in libraries or other information settings.

Genuinely am interested in suggestions. Needs to provide hands-on experience enough for student to understand field in way academic work cannot teach, chance for mentorship by profession, no higher overhead on uni to organise (takes hrs & hrs now) or hosts to accomodate.

— Kathryn Greenhill Wk (@Infoventurer) June 17, 2018

The threads also provided insight into a third view: that of a host organisation of student placements.

Absolutely agree, prac placements take up a lot of staff time for the host org. I have a small team and we've only been able to host 3 students over 10 years. Has to be at the right time and is still difficult to fit in.

— Kristie Jones (@Jones8Kristie) June 18, 2018

It is this third view that I wanted to flesh out in a bit more detail. I took on the role of coordinating student placements at my place of work about six months ago. The activities described below are those that I have personally undertaken as part of this role. I do not know how reflective this is of other organisations, however my goal as the student placement coordinator in my library is to ensure that the placement is a positive experience for both the student and for all the library staff that will be involved.

I hope that by presenting this view students undertaking placements will gain a greater understanding of the effort put in by host organisations. I am not presenting this information to diminish any of the points raised by others above, and I hope that further debate about the value (or not) of placements might be generated by these discussions. However, I would like to make more visible the labour involved from the host organisation's perspective. Yes, there is a big difference in that I get paid for the time I spend undertaking these tasks, but it could be interesting for students to consider the costs of my labour as an investment that my organisation is making in the library profession and its newest professionals.

So, with that, here's a list of what is involved in managing a student placements program:

1. Maintain internal procedures.

At my place of work we currently have a high level principles document but no written procedures. As I work through the process of organising my first few placements, I am trying to combine these two into one new document, which will then need to be approved by library management.

2. Ensure website content about placements is up to date.

3. Maintain an internal spreadsheet of possible student projects, and regularly ask managers and team leaders to contribute to this.

4. Manage a storage area for documentation relating to student placements and ensuring that this is appropriately shared.

5. Maintain a web form for receiving placement inquiries.

6. Monitor inquiries coming in through this form and provide an initial response within a reasonable timeframe.

7. Set up an initial phone call or meeting with the student to discuss their goals for the placement.

I ask the student to provide a CV or link to their LinkedIn profile, which I review before this conversation, and check the list of small placement projects to see if there is a match in interests / skills.

As well as getting a feel for the student’s goals for the placement, we discuss practical details including potential dates, working hours / pattern (if less than full-time), campus location/s, and any special requirements that we should be aware of (e.g. equipment, special needs, flexibility required for caring arrangements etc).

This session often includes some informal mentoring, for example, providing advice on the CV that I have asked them to provide, discussing how the placement with us fits with other placements and study activities, and providing advice on other avenues for gaining entry level experience. Part of this conversation also involves discussing students' previous work experience / career pathways to help them to make connections between work they have done previously and the library sector.

8. Complete paperwork with with the enrolling institution once a placement has been mutually agreed.

This usually needs to be filled in, scanned and sent back. I need to review the enrolling institution's requirements to make sure we can meet them. I also need to check insurance documentation is consistent with our own policies.

9. Develop a draft program in consultation with other managers and team leaders.

This involves a range of activities:

• Multiple emails and phone calls with other managers and team leaders to identify one or more appropriate supervisors and teams for the placement 
• Check the library's various calendars for induction / overview sessions
• Identify upcoming events and workshops  that the student can attend or help at 
• Identify upcoming events and workshops provided at or by other organisations that our staff are attending and that the student can accompany them to 
• Identify meetings that the student can attend as an observer or participant
• Identify staff members who can provide a verbal overview of other areas that the student is interested in, demo tools and services, and possibly even offer a more extended shadowing opportunity
• Schedule a workplace project (if possible) in consultation with the supervisor
• Use a shared calendar to add slots for all the activities noted above, while ensurig the student has adequate time for documentation / reflection to enable them to complete their placement reporting.

I take into the account the following when designing a program:

• The requirements of the enrolling institution - some require work at a professional level and define this in a particular way
• Areas in which the student is being assessed, to ensure that we cover as many of these as possible
• Providing an overview of as many aspects of the library’s work as possible, so that students are exposed to areas that may not be so well-covered in their courses (e.g. library systems)
• The student's express interests, as well as any gaps that they may be wanting to fill 
• Previous work/life experience and transferable skills the student has that can be applied usefully during their time with us
• The operational requirements within the library's teams, including when their busy periods are, to ensure that our own work will not be overly disrupted.

Overall, I am aiming to give students a range of experiences, and in particular to offer them a chance to complete a mini-project or participate in more substantial activities that will enable them to tell stories in writing and verbally when addressing selection criteria and interview questions. 

10. Request a visitor account to be created by Human Resources.

11. Request access to required central systems and services (e.g. email, calendar, internet, shared storage. This is an IT process that cannot be done until the visitor identity step mentioned above is completed.

12. Organise any additional access to any specialist library systems and services that the student needs for their program.

13. Request security card access from Security and a temporary name badge from the library's Business Support Officer.

14. Ensure an appropriate workstation is available and set-up at the location/s the student will be working.

15. Send the student a welcome email.

A few days before the placement I provide basic information required for Day 1, including confirmation of start date and time; arrival point and contact person (usually me); parking / public transport / campus maps

16. Write an internal staff blog post providing basic details of who / where / when so that staff are aware that the placement is happening.

17. Provide an induction / overview session to cover:

• Organisational Chart
• Library strategic and operational plans
• Pointers to key documentation such as the University's strategic documents
• Privacy and confidentiality requirements
• Acceptable use of IT
• Getting the most out of your placement (be involved, ask questions, etc.)
• Overview of  schedule
• Handover to supervisor

18. Arrange for someone to provide a campus tour for orientation purposes. Also check access cards are working and show food / coffee outlets.

19. Ensure an appropriate Health and Safety induction.

An initial tour should include a discussion of evacuation procedures for the workspace the student will spend most time at.

Depending on the duration of the placement, the student may also need to complete Health and Safety Induction, Fire Safety and Manual Tasks and Office Ergonomics online modules on commencement of the placement and this should be built into the program.

20. Midway checkin.

Halfway through a longer placement I have a meeting with the student. This enables the student and I to check in that the goals of the placement are being met and to 're-set' if expectations are not being met.

There may still be time to re-shuffle later parts of the program to focus on areas that the student wants to explore in more detail.

21. Coordinate production of the final report

This is an extensive exercise, as I seek and then collate feedback from all the staff who have interacted with the student during their time with us.

The most recent placement report I completed required a score and comments against 17 performance criteria. I received feedback from ten staff members other than myself and had to condense and summarise this as part of the report writing process.

After discussing a draft of the report with students at the debrief (see below), I need to send this the enrolling institution's placements coordinator or to the student as required.

22. Hold a debrief session.

On the last day of the placement, I have a debrief session with the student.

Generally I will have provided them a day earlier with a draft written report so that we can discuss the assessment that I will submit.

I sometimes provide additional verbal feedback to the student that might help them in their future career (including encouragement to participate in professional events such as those organised by ALIA), and provide them with an opportunity to ask any final questions.

I also seek feedback about how the placement went from their perspective to find out if there are ways we can improve how we plan and manage these.

23. Act as a referee.

As part of supervising a student placement, placement coordinators and supervisors may offer to be listed as a student's referee when they are applying for work.

This means being available for phone calls of up to half an hour, usually at short notice and sometimes years after the placement has taken place.

Last week I gave a phone interview for a placement student who was with my team over two years ago. I did this happily, even though the person had not given me a courtesy heads-up that they were still using me as a referee for their applications. (Top tip: your referees will be able to provide you with a better reference if you let them know what jobs you are applying for and who might be calling them.)

NewCardigan's GLAM Blog Club provides helpful monthly writing prompts for for people who work in galleries, libraries, archives and museums. This month's theme is Control.

If you move into a supervisory or management role in libraries, you will probably at some stage participate in a training course requiring you to take a personality test like the Profiles Performance Indicator or the DisC profile. The rationale for this is that understanding your strengths and weaknesses will help you to become a more effective manager or leader.

I’ve done several of these tests and the results have been consistent in revealing (to no-one’s actual surprise, let alone my own) that I have strong perfectionist tendencies.

So what? you may be thinking. Isn’t everyone that works in libraries a bit of a perfectionist? Isn’t perfectionism one of those fake weaknesses that you wheel out in job interviews when in fact you are quite proud of your 110% attitude to anything and everything? Wouldn’t libraries be better if we were all a bit more perfectionist, not less? If we reduce our focus on quality even by a smidgen, isn’t that the beginning of the end, the start of the slippery slope, the end of the world as we know it…?

Well, no actually. Unless you are undertaking the proverbial brain surgery or rocket science in your library, perfectionism is probably more likely to affect you (and others around you) negatively not positively. In the long run it will probably stop you fulfilling your leadership potential. Here’s just some of the reasons why:

• You will get less work done and miss deadlines because you will be overly focused on completing each task to an unnecessarily high standard.
• You won’t understand fully what constitutes good performance. You'll forget that you are being judged as much, if not more, on your ability to deliver outcomes and to deliver those in a timely fashion. You'll also forget that your time - all the hours that you are spending on formatting not content, on sourcing that one perfect image for your slidedeck, on consulting just one more person to be totally thorough - is usually someone else’s money.
• You will never be able to enjoy finishing things and will rarely stop to celebrate your milestones because you are only focused on how what you have done could have been so much better if we had just been able to [insert unhelpful stuff here]
• You will annoy more senior staff by failing to deliver what they need and wasting their time as a result. You won't realise that you aren't actually helping when your manager asks you for a 2-page briefing paper and then you deliver a 10-page paper full of background material that makes the issue more complex for her not less, that raises more questions than she had before, and that doesn’t make any recommendations because you still haven’t analysed all the information in the universe that might be relevant.
• You will apply the same high standards you apply to yourself to your colleagues and people you supervise. Unsurprisingly when people fail to live up to your unrealistic expectations you will be disappointed and judgmental. Congratulations - you will be well on your way to getting a reputation for being hyper-critical and demanding, and for micro-managing.
• You will fail to delegate because deep down you don’t believe anyone else’s work will be up to scratch. Sadly, you probably won’t even be aware of how arrogant this is.
• When you finally do delegate, you'll disempower your employees by pointlessly reworking things instead of coaching them to improve, providing clear guidance and then accepting what is produced.
• You will get frustrated because things aren’t the way they should be, and you express your frustration inappropriately through anger, emotional outbursts, cynicism, sarcasm, or more passive-aggressive means.
• Or you will turn those frustrations inward, burn yourself out and end up physically and or mentally unwell. All because of your inability to say This is good enough now. I’ve done as much as I need to. Now let it go.

I don’t know why I am the way I am. There is probably some deep reason that would require hundreds of hours of therapy to reveal that! What I do know is that I have found it almost impossible to address this on my own. I’m getting better at aiming for good-enough rather than perfection, but this is after years of support from a manager that knows me really well and has agreed to provide me with firm-but-caring feedback when she observes me falling into my old ways. She doesn’t let me get away with it and so as time goes on some new habits are slowly forming. I also have a colleague who inspires me with his ability to make quick decisions and move things along. I admire his attitude that all we can do is make the best decision with the information we have available, that sometimes we will make mistakes but mostly things will work out OK if trust in our own judgments, and more often than not we are better off taking action rather than going round in circles talking about things and never actually doing anything.

So if a personality test reveals that you are a perfectionist, don’t see it as a badge of honour. Take a few days (or a few years, in my case) to reflect on the unconstructive behaviours your perfectionism might be leading to in the workplace, and elsewhere too. Talk to your supervisor, your colleagues, a mentor, basically anyone who can help you by gently and repeatedly pointing out when you go beyond what’s really required, when what you’ve done is already good enough.

NewCardigan's GLAM Blog Club is out of the blocks for another year, providing helpful monthly writing prompts for for people who work in galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Recognising that the transition from one year to the next is often a time for reflection, this month's theme is the same as last January's: What I want to learn in the year ahead / What I learned in the past year. 

If 2016 was the year that I began to more fully embrace my role as a hybrid library/IT professional, 2017 was the year I lost my ambivalence about becoming a manager.

I transitioned into my first management role in late 2014. This happened after many years of telling myself that this was not the pathway for me. I was so convinced of this that I spent a year in a mentoring program ten years ago identifying career pathways that would help me avoid management roles without completely stalling my career progression or meaning that I couldn't have a leadership role of some kind.

In 2014 I saw a job ad that changed my mind for three reasons. Firstly, it was working for someone that I admired, who I knew would be a good role model, mentor and source of support. Secondly, I had been in the organisation for long enough to know it had good frameworks in place for developing staff who were moving into supervision and management. Thirdly, I was starting to realise that as lots of library profession leaders were transitioning to retirement, someone would need to take their place. Could that be me at some point in future? I felt scared to step up and take on a lot more responsibility than I had ever had before. But if I asked myself the question If not now, then when? the honest answer was There won't be a better time, you idiot! so I decided (with encouragement from my partner, friends and some colleagues) to go for it.

2017 was my third year in that management role, which recently expanded to cover both library systems and research repositories. Last year a lot of things finally starting 'gelling' for me. My learning has not just been about management in an objective sense i.e. what tasks are involved, and what is expected of someone at that level. I've also had to consider what management means (or could mean) to me. My ideas of what a management role involved were very limited prior to actually having one; I now know my existing knowledge and skills were more transferable than I thought. I also understand much better how some of my strengths can be expressed in a management role and how I might address some of my weaknesses over time.

Here are some thoughts on this process that might help you feel better about taking this plunge at some point.

Managers manage lots of things, not just people

I though most of my job would be about supervising people but actually a not-exhaustive list of the things that I manage includes staff, business processes, systems, time (my own and that of others), corporate information, risk and compliance, budget, procurement, contracts and vendor relationships, recruitment, projects, policies/procedures, a workspace, and health and safety.

Yes, managing people is a large and important part of this, but it is definitely not everything that I do.

You can't be good at everything, and that's OK

If you are managing lots of things (see above), it makes sense that you will be better at some things than others, right?

Of the list above, I'd self-assess as really competent at some, including a few things that other people probably find difficult or very very tedious. If you need to run a tender process or to review and negotiate a systems contract, I'm your go-to gal. I can spin up a position description and run a recruitment exercise for a new job, no worries at all. Spotting a copyright / privacy / reputational risk at a thousand paces or working well with pernickety folk responsible for compliance with IT architecture and governance are also things I know I can do. 

But then there are other things I still find difficult and will likely spend the next twenty years trying to incrementally improve. Finance-related tasks that do my head in seem to be a breeze for others. Managing staff remains a work-in-progress; as an introvert with a preference for logic and systems I find it really challenging to lead a group of human beings who all bring their own backgrounds, thought processes, motivations, emotions, interests and relationships to the workplace. On bad days I feel like I will never even really understand other people I work with, let alone be able to motivate or inspire anyone.

What I have learned is this: I don't need to be great at everything. Not only that, from three years of observing management-level peers and superiors, I now know that not only am I not good at everything, neither is anyone else! Everyone is just trying to do their best and everyone has their blind spots.

It's not even possible that any one individual could flawlessly handle everything a management role in a messy, ambiguous, ever-changing 21st century organisation might throw up. Three years in, I know that there are plenty of ways in which I am a good manager. I also know that the best way to deal with the things I'm less good at is to acknowledge them and ask for help. In my experience this will be freely given because our profession is full of lovely people who want to help other people succeed.

A big part of management is managing yourself

This recent Huffington Post blog article provides a neat introduction to what this might mean in the workplace. It describes self-management as demonstrating "self-control and an ability to manage time, priorities and decision-making capacity."

For me this has meant coming to grips with a number of things. Here are just some.

I'm being watched (and judged) all the time
This is an uncomfortable truth for those of us at the introvert end of the spectrum. Being a manager (or a leader of any kind, really) means you are a role model, whether you like it or not. People are taking notice of the way you present yourself (both in person and online), what you say and the actions that you take. You just have to get used to it.

I can be myself, but I should try to be the best version of myself
Does being watched and judged mean that you should pretend to be someone you are not? No. It's definitely important to be authentic and to develop your own management / leadership style that works for you (and your organisation). It's OK to be yourself, but important to think about how you are presenting that self in a professional context. Outside of work you wouldn't go to a wedding in the outfit you do your gardening in, or talk to your nana the way you talk to your friends. That doesn't mean you're being inauthentic or untruthful; it just means you are gloriously mutable, like every other human being ever. In management, as in the rest of life, there's a performative aspect that you can choose to be scared of or choose to control (most of the time I still waver somewhere inbetween).

My emotions have an impact on others
With heightened visibility comes heightened responsibility. If I am sad or angry or frustrated or stressed, if I roll my eyes at someone's idea or burst into tears in a meeting, that will have an impact on other people. This doesn't mean striving to have a poker face on at all times or to be an automaton without any feelings. It does mean acknowledging the feelings that you have (especially those you are trying to hide from others, and even from yourself) and trying to express these in timely and constructive ways that don't hurt other people. I'm not always very good at this and hope it's something I can get better at in future.

I need to be deliberate about how I spend my time
This includes being more careful about commitments I make and learning how to say no to things. It means actively managing time; blocking out chunks in the work calendar so that high-priority work can be done without distractions; restricting email checking to allocated times during the day; and ensuring meetings I make are not just talkfests but actually have outcomes.

Being in good physical and mental shape helps me do my job better
Librarianship is knowledge work, but don't believe for a second that being physically fit won't help you be a better manager. Losing weight and getting more active has given me more energy and concentration. It also reduces the risks associated with sitting at a desk in front of a computer for 40+ hours a week. I walk through native bushland once or twice a day, just taking the time to slow down and observe incremental seasonal changes in my local environment, and this reduces my stress levels and puts a lot of trivial work-related things into perspective. Reading fifty-plus novels a year gives me the same pleasure now that it did when I was a bookworm child; now it also gets me out of my own busy head for a little bit of time each day.

In 2017 I started to embrace my new role and to reflect more on what a satisfying career path in library management could look like. I don't have any firm ideas yet, but I am looking forward to finding out what comes next! If you have been thinking about a management role, but have been putting off applying for things through lack of confidence or lack of insight into what the role actually involves, why not make 2018 your year to explore this? You might be pleasantly surprised by what you find.