Promotion for librarians

The library where I work doesn't have tenure for librarians. A year before I started here, a promotion system was introduced. Professional librarians are hired as Grade 9 employees. With the new system, we are hired at Grade 9, Rank 1 and can elect to participate in a promotion process to achieve Ranks 2 and 3. Achieving those Ranks means raises and increases in professional travel money (budget allowing).

Coming out of the computer software industry, I am familiar with this sort of system. The last thing you want to do with a good computer programmer is to promote her or him to management. And yet, professionals need a sense of moving up. Some kind of professional promotion system that keeps programmers (or librarians) doing what they love is a good way to handle that.

On the other hand, when a new system affects people who have been at an institution for umpteen years, there's bound to be resentment along the lines of "I've been here long enough to prove my worth and jumping through hoops is a waste of my valuable time." I get that.

For me, though, as a new librarian who recently completed the hoop-jumping known as graduate school, the promotion process is perfect. Jumping through hoops is easy--it's when people don't tell me exactly what they want and when they want it that I can get into trouble. Show me some hoops and let's start jumping!

The major production for promotion is a portfolio or dossier or file that documents meeting the promotion criteria levels of independence, job performance, contribution to unit goals, problem-solving, team work and leadership, communication, and professional development. Since I knew within a few weeks of starting work here that this process was in my future, I started a file that is now thick with documents, clippings, emails--pretty much every bit of positive feedback I've received.

We're months away from the first deadline for the next round of promotions, but I knew this was something I couldn't do well at the last minute, so I did the same thing that I did in graduate school: started a group. Actually, the idea wasn't mine--a colleague suggested forming something similar to a tenure group, the kind of thing that happens at libraries that do have tenured librarians. That colleague got herself promoted in the conventional way to head our art library (Yay!) so I got the group started without her.

Our next meeting is Monday. So my Saturday project (I always look for something a little different to do when I work on a weekend day) is starting the process of making sense of the promotion documents and all the stuff I compiled and seeing if the mess meshes in some way. All so that I can report some amount of progress on Monday.

Hope everyone is having a good weekend. Happy celebrations if you are celebrating tomorrow. We have a scaled-down family obligation that will be new for everyone but looks like it's going to work out fine, partly because we have enlarged the notion of family to include our nephew's girlfriend from Singapore. The nephew is in England along with several other family members, but we get the girlfriend for our celebration and that's going to be fun.     #

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