Recently I gave a talk to 10 library students taking a special libraries class. The topic was career and professional development. When I started to prepare for the talk, I wondered what on earth do I know about professional development and career development? I still think of myself as young librarian just starting to dip my toes in the professional development pool. So, I began to think of what I had done within my library career to develop and grow professionally. It was only when I began to reflect on some of my developmental milestones as a librarian did I realize something. Developing one's career requires some risk taking.

I am not a big risk taker by nature. Everything I know about crab fishing is from watching Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel, and there is no way on God's green earth that you would be able to get me on one of those boats. Noo thank you. While I drive a mean Honda Civic stick shift in Cleveland traffic, I am certainly not a NASCAR driver. I like to do fun things and I don't think I am boring, but Risk is not my middle name...it is Aileen. But I have come to realize that risk is not always a bad thing. There is a big difference between working in one of the world's deadliest jobs and librarian professional development.

Measured and calculated risk can actually be good. Don't get me wrong it is scary, but it can be good for you. Sometimes after weighing the options you need to take the professional risks to grow. Sometimes those risks are small like writing a blog, journal article, review, etc. Sometimes those risks can be larger like speaking at conference or being watched live via a webconference by your peers. You haven't seen scary until you realize what you look like on TV. I think some of the hardest and scariest risks can involve changing jobs. Can you move cross country for a job, uprooting your spouse's profession and children's school? Can you accept a new position with more responsibilities, duties and growth but still get paid the same (even after negoitations) as your previous position? While some of these decisions may be easier to make than others, they all involve a certain amount of risk.

There are rewards to taking risks. Everything builds upon each other. For example the poster presentation you gave at MLA led to a nice article published in a library journal. Somebody read that article and thought you would be the perfect person to speak to their group about that topic. Even when things don't go as planned and the move you make turns out to be riskier than you intended, it is how you learn from that experience that can make it better. I am not saying that you will always be able to turn lemons into lemonade. But you can make some things work. For example, if you start out in libraries as a cataloger only to later learn that it wasn't your life's calling (as you originally thought), you can take that experience and perhaps work it to fit another job that you might like.

Life is full of risks, and what we do and how we handle it makes us who we are personally and professionally.