“There’s an imposter syndrome for anyone starting in a new area of work, and the MA helped me to gain the confidence to know I wasn’t just guessing at what I was doing because it was something I’d actually studied”, says Roisin Cassidy, an alum of the Information School currently working as Head of Internal Communications for Education at University College London. Both during her studies and after graduating from our MA Librarianship course in 2014, Roisin has held several information related roles both within Higher Education and outside it, with a career that took her in more directions than she ever even knew existed when she started out.
Originally from Ireland, Roisin moved to Yorkshire in 2010 to undertake a graduate traineeship at Leeds University Library. It was after this role concluded that she applied to the Information School, studying the MA Librarianship part-time over two years.
“One of the things I really liked about studying the Librarianship course was that it was a very practice-focused course”, Roisin says. “Lots of the teaching staff come from the sectors related to what they’re teaching, so you’re getting experience from different types of library sectors. I found that the modules and teaching were not overly theoretical, and I could always ground it in my day-to-day work setting, which made it feel really relevant”. She also recalls how helpful it was to be surrounded by people with different interests to hers, hearing about the different routes available in a Librarianship career.
Roisin says she particularly enjoyed studying the Academic Librarianship module, as well as undertaking her dissertation project, and optional modules outside of her programme relating to web design and content management, of which she had no previous experience and which really helped her CV. “When I left the MA I had no intention of ending up in the types of jobs that I went on to, so I had no idea that pulling on modules like those would be pivotal to me getting other roles.”
“During the second year of my MA I was fortunate enough to get a job as a Faculty Team Librarian at the University of Leeds, so I was managing that alongside studying”, Roisin continues. This role involved managing library collections for subjects like politics, economics and social studies - areas she was familiar with having previously studied business and politics in her undergraduate degree. Alongside looking after the resources, approving reading lists and allocating budgets to ensure the items on said list were available, this job also saw Roisin supporting staff and students in building their research and academic skills. “Essentially it was about making sure we had all the resources and then making sure people knew how best to use them”, she says.
Directly after graduation in 2014, Roisin moved into a role as Technology Enhanced Learning Advisor at York St John University, a position she held for just over two years. “Part of the reason I went down that route was that the role I did at Leeds was very academic skills-focused and I really enjoyed that aspect of it”, she says. At this job, Roisin’s time was spent helping academic staff to embed technology into their curriculum, as well as managing the digital platforms for TEL across the institution.
The biggest change in Roisin’s career came in 2016 when she moved to London and changed sectors away from Higher Education entirely, taking up a role in the Humanitarian Department of the charity Save the Children. She was brought in on a short term contract as a Digital Learning Manager, in direct response to the European refugee crisis. “They had funding in the humanitarian department to develop online learning for humanitarians working in the field and also volunteers”, she says. “The European Refugee Crisis specifically was a very different type of model to how they usually worked because it was a humanitarian crisis so close to home, and there were so many volunteers in the UK getting involved that had never had a similar experience before”. Save the Children were in desperate need of help getting a groundswell of volunteers quick and easy access to information on how to go about addressing the crisis, and Roisin was brought in to make this happen using her expertise in creating digital learning content and distributing it to those who need it most.
Following the success of this role, Roisin secured a permanent position at Save the Children as a Senior Digital Learning Manager. After putting together a team of Learning Technologists that she would manage across a variety of contexts, Roisin set to work developing learning programmes for humanitarian workers tackling a range of crises around the globe. This included creating content relating to education in emergencies, child protection, safeguarding issues, nutrition, health and more, all to be used right on the front lines of some of the world’s most challenging situations. “Outside of just the learning aspect, part of that role was feeding into senior management plans across the humanitarian department as well”, she says.
After nearly four years at Save the Children, last year Roisin pivoted back into Higher Education for another new role. “I really wanted to build on aspects that I’d most enjoyed from previous roles around designing content and communicating what an organisation is trying to do, to get people on board with it and help them understand it”, she says of returning to a more traditionally information- and communications-related job in UCL’s Vice-Provost’s Office for Education and Students.
“My role is to drive forward communications that are in any way related to the education strategy”, Roisin says. “Our office manages a wide variety of education improvement projects across the institution and it’s my job to communicate what those are, find examples of good practice, manage some related websites and work with communication heads from across the university to make sure we’re all on the same page”.
Roisin says she didn’t even know that lots of the roles she went on to take even existed when she decided to study Librarianship. “From my graduate traineeship, I knew I wanted to work in a role related to learning in HE, so I came into the course with a specific interest in academic librarianship”, she says. “The course is so broad that people can come in with many different kinds of interests, and that was mine, though I was exposed to other areas that also caught my attention”. After getting the Faculty Team Librarian position in Leeds, Roisin assumed she would stay in that area going forward. “I have since discovered that your interests can just snowball and take you from place to place”, she says.
Roisin credits the Librarianship course at the Information School with giving her confidence in her career. “At the time it helped me to develop relationships in my workplace because I could come and say ‘I’m looking for a project, here are my interests’, and get to work on real-world problems within their strategy at the library”, she says of the benefit of taking the course alongside her job. These experiences helped her reach more senior positions, and she continued to find aspects of her studies helping her in ways she never expected.
In a strange case of serendipity, Roisin’s MA dissertation looked at the hot topic of Open Access in universities, specifically researching how the in-house Open Access publishing model at UCL - her current employer - would work at the University of Leeds.
“I’d suggest to any new students that they should try and make the most of the variety of different experiences and backgrounds that both the staff and students have”, Roisin says. “It sounds obvious, but outside of modules just talk to people. The staff are so approachable that if you look up what peoples’ backgrounds and interests are, they’d be happy to talk you through what those areas involve, what the pitfalls are and what a career in that area might look like. Think broadly about where a career in librarianship can take you because there isn’t just a single career route and there are so many people on your doorstep who can explain the many options to you”.
Looking back on her varied career and further to her time studying at the Information School, Roisin sees a trajectory of increasing confidence and conviction alongside the continuing success in her work. “I’ve found that you get a lot of different reactions when you tell people you studied librarianship, like ‘why do you even need to study that?’, and initially I felt a bit defensive about it, like I needed to defend it to some people as a ‘real subject’”, she says. “However, through my work experience I’ve become a much more vocal advocate for what librarianship is, what a librarian can do and how librarians are so useful to so many aspects of life. Now I think you just have to fly the flag for it. People need to know how valuable librarians are in any society or industry.”
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