Teams must write up reports of their progress, and this too encourages participants to get down to business and have something to show for their time together. For the library assistants, there are many new experiences. On the one hand, working side by side with librarians is refreshing. Assistants are writing reports, leading training sessions, and planning projects. The new structure allows assistants to argue against ideas that earlier would have been put into operation by their superiors, no questions asked.
Assistants find themselves engaging in managerial level concerns for the first time.
Often they interrupt their primary duties to prepare for CPT meetings. They sometimes attend meetings during lunch. They even take work home in the evenings. Several assistants are better educated than most of the librarians, and the team structure finally enables these overeducated, underpaid workers to display their value to the organization and to be recognized. On the other hand, assistants are not professionals in the same sense as librarians.