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In September 2008, I’d
just quit my teaching job and started library school. In October 2008, the
bottom fell out of the world economy, and suddenly I wondered if I’d ever have
a job again. I knew that when I graduated I’d be facing not only my very capable
classmates, but a lot of unemployed librarians with more experience, and for a
small pool of jobs. I figured I’d better be strategic about my library school
experience to make myself as good a candidate for that job as possible. Here’s
what I did.
First, I read a whole
lot of job ads for anything that sounded interesting. I included ads that were
out-of-date or in parts of the country I couldn’t move to, because the point
wasn’t to apply: the point was to make a list of all the skills that showed up
over and over. Then I divided those skills into three bins:
- skills I had, and could
prove that I had;
- skills I had, but couldn’t
prove;
- and skills I didn’t have yet.
I then spent the rest of
library school generating proof for things in the second bin, and (provably)
picking up skills in the third. The proof is critical here - I didn’t want
anyone to have to take my word for it that I had those skills. I wanted
prospective employers to be able to evaluate externally verifiable evidence
with their own critical thinking skills.
Some specific examples
of choices I made to develop or substantiate specific skills:
- Teaching: I could already point to my resume lines about
teaching middle school, but I also taught some workshops for the Simmons
GSLIS Tech Lab. Campuses are great for this; there are a lot of people who
are happy to say yes and give you a venue if you volunteer to do
something.
- Writing: I knew I could do this but I couldn’t prove it, so I
started a blog.
- Integrated library systems
experience: Simmons had an ILSes class,
so I took it.
- Coding: I didn’t know much, but I learned more by taking a
databases class that included some PHP. Then I developed those skills
further by building a database-backed web site
as a final project for another class.
As you can see, proof
comes in many forms: concrete resume items; your transcript; letters of
reference (e.g. from professors or internship supervisors or the like); anything
you can put online. Different skills lend themselves to different kinds of
proof. The key, in all cases, is you don’t have to take my word for any of
this; you can look at my web site or resume or transcript or letter of
reference and make your own decisions.
There were, of course,
skills I wanted to get that I couldn’t. I could learn about the open source
integrated library systems but not the proprietary ones (as it’s hard to get
exposure to them outside a workplace). I wanted to develop my leadership skills
through activity in student organizations, but my childcare situation didn’t
allow for that. I kept telling myself we all have both strengths and
constraints; having a strategy let me make thoughtful choices within those
constraints.
So I walked right into a
job post-graduation, right? Well, no...the economy was still pretty terrible,
and I was still geographically constrained. It took the better part of a year
to land that job. But in the meantime, I got some contract work doing library
things, and I got to meet a bunch of those people that we’d talked about in my
library classes - and I actually had something to say to them. And when I did
get that job, it was a strange and marvelous one that hadn’t even existed when
I graduated. It took a while for my work to pay off, but it when it did,
it snowballed into much bigger things.
Andromeda Yelton does freelance software development; speaks and writes on library technology issues; and teaches librarians to code. She is on the Board of Directors of LITA and the advisory board of the Ada Initiative. She blogs at Andromeda Yelton: Across Divided Networks and tweets at @ThatAndromeda.
LOVE this post! I will be attending Simmons in the fall to pursue my MLS and have been facing these challenging questions of what skills do I actually have, need, etc and this has given me a lot of interesting questions to mull over. Thank you for sharing! This blog makes the first slow hour working at the circ desk on Saturday mornings fly by.
ReplyDeleteThanks! Simmons is where I went too - they have a pretty big variety of courses, so if you figure out your bins early you can fill a lot of them with strategic course selection. :) Good luck with the MLS!
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