Meeting with Skills Development Scotland

We have had a couple of meetings before with the staff at Skills Development Scotland (SDS) which was formed earlier this year and incorporates the old Careers Scotland. The purpose of our meeting which took place on Wednesday 17^th December was to plan an information literacy symposium which will take place on 20th March 2009.  Christine, Ian McCracken and I met Douglas Govan and his colleague, Sarah Hall, from the Careers Division to plan the event.

Details are still to be worked out but we want to involve a combination of SDS staff and externals drawn from the work and skills community.  We want to bring representatives of these organisations together to locate information literacy within the wider skills agenda and to identify key issues and common themes. We are planning a half day meeting which will begin with a couple of introductory presentations followed by facilitated workshops where the participants can discuss what information literacy means to them and how it can be used in career choice, progression and work situations. This will be followed by a feedback session at the end of which concrete action points will be decided upon which will hopefully lead to further action.  We will be meeting with SDS staff again in the New Year to finalise details. We are particularly pleased that SDS has accepted the value of information literacy and recognised its importance in career planning and development and as an employability skill.

This brings to an end (for the moment anyway) a lengthy series of meetings in which we have successfully raised the profile of information literacy among both employers’ and employee organisations and organisations involved in skills development.  In the New Year we will begin to implement the findings of these meetings.

This may be the last post of the year so I hope you all have a peaceful and restful break.  Meanwhile I enclose a photograph from last Christmas of Jemima helping to open the  Christmas presents