Professional Development is Good for You

This week I am working on a presentation for a women’s leadership conference on campus. The conference is pretty small, and the audience will probably just be people from our campus. But I decided to submit a proposal because it has been awhile since I’ve done a professional presentation.

For both professional and personal reasons I have not been actively doing presentations or research for quite a few years. I think now is a good time for me to get back in the saddle.

This is definitely not a requirement for my job, so why bother creating extra work for myself by presenting at a conference? I’ve been asking myself this very question!

As librarians, we are often in a gray area when it comes to presentations and publications. Teaching faculty don’t really have this dilemma. It’s publish or perish for them. But requirements for librarians seem to vary greatly between institutions, and I think sometime it’s not even clear within the institution exactly what the expectations are. But the requirements for my position are quite clear. I am a professional staff member, not a librarian (although I do have an MLS), so I don’t really have to do anything except show up from 8 to 5 and do my work.

So the first answer to why I am pushing myself to work on presentations and eventually write some articles is so I can get another job someday. That seems pretty obvious. But I also think that presenting at a conference will do long-term things that will make me happier at work (even if I have to go through the short-term aggravation of preparing for the presentation). One, I will get to learn something new. I am not presenting on something I am already an expert on. I’m presenting on something that I know a little bit about, but because of the presentation I am going to need to learn a lot more so that I don’t make a full of myself. Learning new things definitely makes me happy, and I think that is true for most people. Two, I will get to meet new people. Some people call this networking. But for an introvert like me, the word networking makes my skin crawl. So I prefer to think of it as relationship-building (I guess that’s better). But I’m sure that by attending and participating in this conference I will meet some like-minded people, hear about some interesting stuff, and get enthused (at least for a little while).

If you have to give presentations, check out the great Presentation Zen blog.