CPD23: Thing 21: How to identify your strengths, how to capitalise on your interests, how to write something eyecatching that meets job specs

To complete this thing, we are asked to identify activities and interests that could be applied to our careers. First we are asked to answer some questions:

What do you like to do? I tried to identify this when responding to Philip Pullman's speech at the Library Campaign conference last month. See that blog post for the full argument but, in summary, I enjoy the connectedness of library work, the potential (too often blocked or unrealised, sad to say) to connect people with the universe of human knowledge and culture.

What do you dislike? Like Pullman, stupidity, also routine, time-servers, the intellectually dishonest and fraudulent.

Do you remember the last time you felt that feeling of deep satisfaction after creating, building, completing something? Last week, after delivering a one-to-one database training session.

What was it about? The knowledge that the person I was working with had made real, demonstrable progress in her understanding of the tools available to her, and the process of research and enquiry.

What skills do you need to do the things you like? I could be a better searcher, and a better teacher, I'm sure. I can't identify more specific skills.

As for making a list of activities and interests, I submit this blog, and the running blog, as answers to the question. I do sometimes forget about achievements, but there's much to remember from career that has lasted over thirty years. The area I wish I could apply more to my working life is my interest in languages, more specifically Latin and Greek. I fear my career has developed in other directions and the chances of becoming a classics faculty librarian at one of the dwindling number of universities that still teach classics are remote.

My cv is up to date. It has had to be so in the recent periods of job-hunting.

Finally, we are asked to offer an interview tip. I shall give not one but three:

• In my experience, it always pays to be shaved, showered and sober, like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe.
• Less facetiously, I find it increasingly useful to write notes of interview questions as I'm asked them. There ought to be no disgrace in this, unless you are the sort of candidate who, with a note of the question in front of you, still rambles and fails to answer, in which case you have no excuse
• And, something I have never quite mastered, it is probably a good thing to extract a laugh or two from the panel, but it must be done judiciously. With hindsight, I have approached some interview panels in the same frame of mind as a comedian going out to play the notoriously difficult second house at the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night.