Would you recommend librarianship? The results!

So, would you? Most people have an automatic response to this question - many people will say 'yes' straightaway because they love librarianship and know it is largely misunderstood, while others will say 'no' straightaway because they've had a rough time of it.

What I'm interested in is, would you ACTUALLY recommend it to someone, who might then act on your recommendation? I was asked about entering the profession in an email recently, and my reply sounded, I realised as I re-read it, quite negative. That's because I think you have a responsibility when someone wants your advice to actually think about what you're saying! And there's a lot to be said for not-entering librarianship (by the end of the decade who knows how many worthwhile jobs there will actually be, for example) just as there is a lot to be said for entering it (it's ace). I sometimes worry that we're so busy promoting our value and the value of the profession, that we blindly tell everyone to become librarians even though they might not thank us later if they become one.

So I asked Twitter, a brief and unscientific 24hr poll. 133 responses. It started off more or less equal, with recommending just about edging ahead of not doing so - when I tweeted something to this effect, the vast majority of the subsequent votes were in favour of recommending it. So I don't know if that's because people who hadn't previously voted felt moved to 'defend' the profession, or just a coincidence.

So of the 133 respondents, 72% would recommend this profession of ours.

Here's the split by country. This started off VERY interesting because the US had 100% of voting no, but then every single other vote from that country was yes so it ended up being a landslide in favour of recommendation... Ireland, from this miniscule sample-size, doesn't look much fun.

So would you recommend librarianship to a friend? I'd like to hear what you think in a comment.

Some reasons I can think of why I wouldn't recommend it:

• you can't avoid starting at the bottom (can't do the MA until you've had a year of experience, can't get a higher graded job without the MA);
• some career paths hit the buffers very early on unless the right person happens to retire / move etc;
• the long-term future of the profession is far from certain;
• constantly fighting peoples' misconceptions of what we do and how valuable it is (I think the need to do this may fade over time because I'm far less fussed about it than I used to be);
• there are far more capable librarians than there are decent posts;
• the money isn't amazing for the first few years (I know it's very cool to not care about money but when you're having to buy new shoes for your toddler every 3 months, you do);
• you have to fork out a fortune to do the MA but, if you think about it, the difference between librarians with the Masters and those without it is very rarely the Masters. It's a qualification that is both essential and of questionable value. .

Some reasons why I would recommend it (heavily academic-librarianship bias here):

• it's fantastically engaging;
• the community (if you chose to be part of it) is kind, fun, and unremittingly helpful and happy to share information and advice;
• you get to work in a role that helps people, which is genuinely fulfilling even for a partial-cynic like me;
• unless you're unlucky you won't be expected to work longer than the hours of your contract (so many non-librarians I know work all the hours God sends, and are incredibly jealous of the flexitime scheme I'm on);
• libraries are supportive employers, generally;
• you get to investigate, write about and train people on stuff you're interested in anyway, in my case;
•  you can do academicy stuff like presenting at conferences and writing papers, without having to actually BE an academic;
• once you get up the ladder a bit you get a lot of freedom and your time is self-directed as well as self-managed;
• the people you work with are NICE. .

For me, my day to day environment is the most important thing. I'd rather live in a smaller house in a nicer area than a grand house further away from town. I'd rather work in a nice room with nice people who will understand if I need to go home and pick up my daughter from nursery, than have a high status job with a company car a career trajectory ending in a six-figure salary. My job is challenging but fun, it suits ME better than any profession I could imagine.

But everyone is different, and I'm already entrenched in this profession, whilst at the same time developing the skills to keep working if this profession ceases to exist - that's a very different situation from advising someone to just now start applying for entry-level library posts with a view to doing their Masters in October 2014 and maybe, just maybe, getting a job they really want in 2017ish.

Where do you stand on this? What would you add?

New Professionals! Get hold of a Library organisational chart and start plotting your path...

 

I believe that as a new professional in the information industry, you're better off with a plan of where you want to be, and specifically HOW you want to get there. Some people (who I respect very much)  have advocated a 'relax and see what happens' approach, pointing out the need to be able to try new things you'd never have thought of, and be taken off in new directions. I agree with this, but I still think this:

The profession is SO competitive now, if you can come up with a plan of how you'll move through it then it's worth doing so, even in the knowledge that it's perfectly okay not to stick to it if something interesting comes up.

So how do you go about this? Well first of all you need to know where you'd actually like to end up. (And by 'end up' I don't necessarily mean the job you'll retire in - just the one you're aiming for in the medium term.) There are various ways of getting a feel for this:

• Talk to people in those roles (seriously do this - it's MUCH more effective than anything else I can think of. If you'd like to chat about what being a Subject Librarian involves and the skills it requires I'm very happy to do so)
• Try and get some work-shadowing in those roles, or an actual job in a more junior version of the same role
• Read about how people got where they are today via the many excellent stories on the Library Routes Project
• Keyword search the Library Day in the Life wiki for the kind of job titles you're interested in, and see how people in these roles actually spend their days
• (I'm probably missing something useful so please leave a comment with more suggestions if you have them...) .

Once you've formulated an idea as to where you want to get to (and keep in mind this may evolve or change completely as you go along, which is fine), you can start to plan how to get there. Relating to this there are two important things which I've mentioned on here before, and in talks to New Professionals.

Firstly don't think of Librarianship as having a career-ladder, think of it is as having a career-climbing wall. Ladders go straight up and have evenly spaced rungs; climbing walls require a certain amount of traversing or diagonal movement, and a certain amount of inching forward followed by ambitions stretches, to get to the top of them. The example I always give is if you want to be a Customer Services manager for your library - the natural place to start is in Customer Services itself as a lending assistant (or whatever - the terminology is interchangable here but hopefully you know what I mean) but there's often a 3 pay-grade gap between asssistant and manager, with no obvious jobs in between. It's very, very rare for anyone to jump three grades in one go - so you need to go diagonally upwards so you're high enough up the grade structure to get a high-graded role, whilst trying to retain the relevant experience necessary to become the Customer Services manager. This improvisation and flexibility is not very ladder-like, and much more akin to a climbing wall.

The second thing I always advocate is to find the job you really want (Head of Special Collections, Subject Librarian, Children's Librarian, Law Librarian or whatever) and when you see it advertised at the kind of place you want to work, download the job spec and save it in a folder even when you have absolutely zero chance of being able to apply any time soon. Look at the person specification and make sure you shape your professional experiences to hit every single one of the essential and desirable skills over the coming years (either through jobs or involvement with professional bodies or writing papers or giving presentations or all four of these) so that you're in a position to nail the application in the future. Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity as they say - every time a great job comes up, you have a chance to try and manipulate your future luck in your favour...

 The Organisational Chart

So to the point of this post, the Organisatinal Chart (known also as Organisational Structure, Staffing Framework and, apparently, an 'organogram'). The Organisational Chart shows how the hierachy of any given organisation works - who is at the head, who is responsible to and for whom, how the teams fit together, and who manages what. It's quite hard to get hold of ones for organisations you don't work for, so I'd recommend finding your own library's (it's probably in the intranet somewhere...) and saving a copy into the same folder as your ideal job spec. Obviously libraries in different sectors have very different charts, so if you're aiming to work in the academic sector then a public sector chart may not be of much use to you.

I can't find a single Creative Commons example online (for obvious reasons) so here's a link to a publicly available chart for a big library. Obviously the point of this chart is to detail the positions and how it all fits together, but for the excited new professional it's a chart to literally plan an upwards trajectory with a highlighter pen (if you print it out - I wouldn't recommend using one on your monitor). Ask yourself, which of the higher jobs than mine can I get next? Does it lead to the job I really want (or the job before the job I really want)? Could I stand doing X for a year if it helped me get to Y the year after, or am I better off doing Z for two years and getting more relevant experience outside of the workplace at the same time?

I think it's particularly important to look at where the tree structure stops or hits a dead-end. Look at the role you're in now - is the only position directly above that your boss? Is your boss likely to leave any time soon? If not, you need to make proper plans for progression or you'll be doing the same thing you're doing now in 5 years time. Is there a path which opens up lots of possibilities for you, as opposed to the 'dead-mans shoes' syndrome of waiting for one or two people to retire or leave? Is the division you're in one with many holds on the climbing wall or just one or two (both of which someone else already has a firm grip on)?

I'm not advocating naked ambition - ambition for ambition's sake is something I'm not a fan of at all. But you DO want to be fulfilled, and ultimately you will want to earn a decent wage rather than get stuck on an okay one forever. If your current path hits the buffers in one job's time, think about the fact that you're going to be in this for 20, 30, 40 years so even if it's worthy and fulfilling now, it may not be stimulating when you're still doing it in 2020. Because as much as the rhetoric around library jobs is often about how 'none of us are in this for the money' and 'I just want a job I'm happy doing' the fact is there are lot of frustrated librarians who have just got mired in a certain part of their library and can't see an obvious path forward. So I really think it's worth being aware of what the future possibilites are, so you can start planning how you'll meet the challenges and achieve whatever it is that will make you happy.

It is, in my view, much better to be happy than successful. Being the 'best you can be' is only worth it if it makes you happy - I see a lot of people putting pressure on themselves, hitting great heights, but not being overly content. But forward planning never hurts, so even if you're not aiming for Head Librarian (I know I'm not - I'm going to completely ignore all my own advice and stagnate in my current job forever, although I did a lot of the above into practice to get to this position that I actually like in the first place) then knowing what you ARE aiming for will help you stay fulfilled.

If you're interested, there's a whole page of essential advice for new professionals elsewhere on this website, put together from the quotes of loads of librarians who have been there and done that...

Good luck!

- thewikiman

Good presentations matter

Last week I was involved in a CPD session at our staff festival, aimed at people interested in presenting at events and writing for publication. My colleague Julie Allinson did the publications part - she recommended Mike Ashby's guide to writing a paper (PDF). I did the presentations bit, and it was based on a mixture of a recent LibMarketing slideshow on making good PowerPoints, and advice about public speaking that I'd previously written or read. It's worth a look particularly if you haven't already seen 'Good Slides Matter', because it refers to some research behind what works and what doesn't in multimedia learning, and advises how to build presentations accordingly. There's also some SUPER-ADVANCED MEGA TIPS at the end... :)

Good presentations matter from Ned Potter

Thanks to @girlinthe for drawing my attention to the multicolor search engine - a brilliant tool! Try experimenting with putting in the two main colours of your library brand - you can then do away with templates entirely.

- thewikiman

A guide to networking for new librarians

I was really pleased to take part in the Annual programme for the ALA's New Members Round Table, last week - it was a webinar and the whole thing was recorded. You can watch and listen to it online here (it opens in Adobe Connect) - I talk about the 'What' of networking (starting around the five-and-half-minute mark) and finish things off with the 'Why' (around 42 minutes) - in between the How, Who, Where and When are covered by Loida Garcia-Febo, Courtney Young, JP Pocaro and Pat Hawthorne respectively.

Huge thanks to Bohyun Kim for inviting me to present - it was nice to take advantage of the technology to do something with the ALA without having to be at the conference in the US, and I enjoyed the webinar a lot. Appropriately, I made a few connections at the event and found it to be good networking experience.

Being forced to define networking for the purposes of the talk, and take a step back and look at what it means and involves, was a revealing experience, in particular because it made me realise how much of what I think about having a brand can apply to networking. In particular:

• Networking, like developing a brand, is a means to an end and that end is opportunities to do interesting or fun things - you meet and connect with people who expand your horizons, expose you to new ideas, and collaborate with you to do cool stuff. (Unlike brand networking is also an end in itself - it's just fun to talk to nice people.)
• If developing a brand is a natural byproduct of pursuing your professional interests in as networked a way as possible, then developing a network is a natural byproduct of the same thing, really.
• Related to the above: in my experience it's easiest to develop a network by positioning yourself as part of the dialogue in librarianship and contributing, than for example saying 'I'm going to make X connections' and actually setting out specifically to develop a network or market yourself .

I find my network (essentially: you lot) to be THE single most useful thing in my professional life, and in the webinar I reflected on a clear delineation (marked by the 2009 New Professionals Conference) of pre-networked-Ned and networked-Ned - all the interesting things have happened in the latter period. I could neither have written my book nor got my current job without my network. So a: thank you! And b: if you're wondering about taking the plunge and networking more, it's worth it. Becoming part of something bigger is a great thing.

- thewikiman

You already have a brand! Here are 5 ways to influence it... (#CILIPNPD12)

Yesterday I presented at possibly my favourite library event of all, CILIP's New Professionals Day. I love it because it gets so many people fired up and energised, and there's so much enthusiasm about the place. I was honoured to do the first talk of the day, and my presentation was about two things: firstly the fact that you don't have to be a super-librarian to get on in your career, and secondly that we all have a personal brand so if you do want to try and build that brand, there are steps you can take to do so positively.

I wanted to dispel some myths (particularly that we all have to aspire to be like the really well-known, uberlibrarians), following on from this blog post about whether or not we really have to market ourselves at all, which explains a lot of the stuff I talked about yesterday.

Here's the presentation (works best on full-screen):

You already have a brand! Here are 5 ways to influence it... on Prezi

I did a couple of things I've not done before, and I'll be doing both again as I liked how they worked - I got people to talk to each other (I know, hardly revolutionary is it! But I'd not done it before in a talk, only in a workshop scenario) for two minutes about what 'brand' really meant and it really seemed to energise the room, and I asked people to tweet definitions too, using some software in the Prezi which picked up the tweets in real-time. If you want to try the Twitter thing, here's what I used to do it.

There was some brilliant live-tweeting of the event (particularly by Annie_Bob) and people really seemed to get what I was trying to say, and be re-assured by it, which is great. In some cases (I'm looking at you Bethan Ruddock :) ) people actually restructured what I'd said into far better and more eloquently put points!  So as so much is unsaid in the presentation materials themselves, I put together a Storify of people's tweets.

Annie Johnson has also put together Storified boards of lots of the talks and workshops across the day, which can be found here.

What I was really trying to say...

Believe it or not, despite having thought about it loads, talked to other librarians about it loads, blogged about it previously and prepared a whole keynote on it, I have just now, this morning, 3 days after the event, come up with a sentence which encapsulates what I was really getting at with this first part of this presentation:

Ultimately, what gets you the job which pays your wages, is your ideas and the stuff on your CV which is relevant to that particular job. The whole process of building a brand, marketing yourself: that's a means to the end of getting more opportunities to add exciting and relevant ideas and things on your CV, rather than an end in itself.

Other blogposts about the New Professionals Day

If you've written a review or account of the day on your blog, let me know in the comments and I'll try and add to this post and collect all the links together.

So far I've found these:

• LIS New Professionals Network
• Neon Librarian
• Lady Pen's Treasure Trove
• Great Scott!
• Sensible Shoes
• Every burned book
• Boolean Berry
• Information Overload
• Siobahn B in the library
• Girlinthemoon - it's a pre-NPD post but it contains her beautiful Prezi...
• Girlinthemoon again
• Librarians on the Loose
• Tattle Tape and Tea
• But I do like Cardigans
• The Library Cauldron
• Taken for Binding
• Pretty curious, no?
• But I like saying sshhh..
• All the presentations from the keynotes and the workshops in one place .

The theme seems to be that people are taking actions based on what they've heard and done on the day, which is exactly what an event like this should make happen.

Thanks to Richard, Matthew and the other organisers for such a great day! I really enjoyed the other workshops and talks, particularly Emma Illingworth's session on CPD: she's a great teacher, skillfully letting us feel like we were coming up with the ideas... Her point was that we knew all this stuff already - sometimes, though, it's really helpful to have all the stuff we know drawn out of us, collated, and expressed.