Career history: Melanie

I then moved to London to work in a central government department library where the main focus of my post was cataloguing and enquiries. After a few years I was successful in applying for a promotion and was appointed Deputy Librarian at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) in Surrey.

When I joined VLA, the Library was taking the lead in the early stages of a project to set up an intranet for the Agency. I welcomed the opportunity to get involved and learnt how to use Microsoft FrontPage to help build the site and create web pages. Once the intranet was launched it became clear that more time and resources were needed to develop the service and work on a strategy. At the same time the Head of Communications was also keen to develop the use of Defra’s Corporate Directory within the Agency and work on a knowledge management strategy.

This led to me being offered the opportunity to work on secondment with the Head of Communications on these various projects and support her work on knowledge management. This eventually became a permanent post and another colleague filled my previous post in the Library - so there was no going back! I must admit I was a bit anxious at first about moving out of the Library permanently, especially as I found that communications could be subject to some negativity and criticism.

Since moving to communications my range of responsibilities has grown and I am now responsible for VLA’s various internal and external communication tools including the intranet, staff newsletter, team briefing, lunchtime seminar programme, annual review, website and press enquiries. I have also written guidance on email management and my next project is to tackle forms. When I first moved to this post I had one member of staff; an intranet webmaster. I now have a team of four as communications is now recognised as a core part of VLA’s business.

My work on communications has introduced me to new skills such as publishing, drafting strategies and business cases, project management, editing and proof reading. However, my library skills have helped me on the way particularly when working on indexing and organising information on the web sites, and dealing with enquiries from the press and from within VLA. My job title may refer to communications but my role encompasses various aspects of information and knowledge management. My primary responsibility is to gather, organise and present information to ensure colleagues and customers are able to easily and quickly access information they need.

When people ask what I do for a living I often also mention that I am a qualified librarian as I still value that qualification and experience. I have continued my membership of various library groups and work closely on some projects with my colleagues in both the Library and Records Management at VLA.

At the moment I don’t know whether I will move back to library work; I never say never as you never know what opportunities are around the corner. However, I believe having a library and communications background could well lead me into another area of information management in government. There are plenty of opportunities in the civil service and if you welcome learning new skills and taking on new challenges you can have a very varied career in government.