Information Services Today

Chapter 36, “Career Management Strategies for Lifelong Success,” addresses the ways that information careers have evolved, and continue to evolve, in response to ongoing changes in the information professions. Kim Dority, author, consultant, and blogger on information careers, points out how today’s information professionals must be more innovative and change oriented than ever as they face a challenging, but also very exciting, future. Dority outlines strategies for career development that combine goal setting, adopting a self-employment mind-set, and developing professional equity, while being flexible, adaptive, and knowledgeable about future career possibilities.

In a world where the skills that information professionals possess open up numerous career possibilities, Dority notes the importance of developing a self-employed mind-set that is founded on the idea that the individual is in charge of his or her job choices and decisions. She further emphasizes the importance of defining success on an individual’s own terms.

Dority cautions new graduates to keep two considerations in mind: the first job is only the first job; and building a career is an unpredictable and often changing trajectory. She suggests creating career action plans, setting goals that can be used throughout the career, and developing career agendas. Finally, she notes the importance of developing professional equity—by investing in what one knows, who one knows, and what is known by others about them. The chapter is accompanied by a wealth of online resources, including LIS job boards, online career development resources, interviewing tips, and more!

Today’s library and information science (LIS) students are launching their careers in a professional environment increasingly defined by creativity, innovation, and technological advances. Seasoned information professionals are finding their roles no less change-driven, requiring them to adapt existing expectations—and expertise—to new realities. Creating a resilient career as an information professional, one that can anticipate, position for, and make the most of change, has never been more challenging. But neither has it ever been more possible.

The key is to develop career strategies that not only complement the information professional’s competencies but also provide a competitive edge when it comes time to search for or transition into new jobs. These competencies provide LIS students and practitioners the ability to pivot, position for, and pursue lifelong and fulfilling careers.

• how to adopt a mind-set of self-employment to take charge of one’s career direction(s),

In addition, readers will learn and be able to apply the process for setting and achieving their career goals, a process that can be repeated throughout their professional lives with each career transition. Finally, readers will learn strategies for continually expanding their key asset—their professional equity—throughout the course of their careers.

There are many ways to deploy information skills. A primary challenge for many LIS students and information professionals is simply determining how to narrow down the many options available to them. As the San José State University School of Information’s annual report, MLIS Skills at Work: A Snapshot of Job Postings, makes clear, information skills continue to be deployed in increasingly diverse ways and for a continually expanding universe of employers.¹ To help think through the possibilities, one approach is to consider potential jobs or career pathways by defining the characteristics of LIS work: What work will be done? And, for whom is the work being done?

In terms of what work an information professional might do, the Snapshot’s broad categories include:

But within those categories are dozens of unique and interesting information jobs that demonstrate the stunning diversity of roles within what used to be considered predictable career paths.

• public libraries (see also chapter 8: “Community Anchors for Lifelong Learning: Public Libraries”);

• academic libraries (see also chapter 7: “Learning and Research Institutions: Academic Libraries”);

• school libraries (see also chapter 6: “Literacy and Media Centers: School Libraries”);

• research institutes, think tanks, or foundations, among other environments (see also chapter 9: “Working in Different Information Environments: Special Libraries and Information Centers”).

They also work as independent information professionals, where the “employers” are clients, or as information entrepreneurs, creating information-based products and services. As opportunities for information professionals continue to both contract in older roles and expand into newer ones, the only given in this dynamic field is that the coming years will bring even more opportunities, many of which can be barely imagined today.

It is hard to imagine a more exciting time to be launching a career as an information professional. True, the challenge of creating a rewarding, growing, sustainable career path given the lack of predictability in the information field may sometimes seem more disruptive and daunting than exciting and energizing. Add to that the fact that there are hundreds of approaches and environments within which to deploy LIS skills, and it indeed can become a bit overwhelming.

Information professionals should realize that, regardless of what point they are at in their career, they are self-employed.³ Information professionals are in charge of the job choices and career decisions they make, the results of those decisions, and the opportunities they have been offered throughout their careers. This type of career self-direction requires information professionals to identify, define, and take responsibility for what they want in their jobs and their careers. Embracing a self-employed mind-set empowers information professionals to decide what work they will do, for whom, and how.

CASE STUDY

Embracing a Self-Employed Mind-Set

Imagine a recent graduate, Letisha, who previously worked as a nurse and is now considering potential jobs using her newly minted MLIS degree. Letisha might decide to:

• focus on consumer health in a public library setting (perhaps creating LibGuides on clinical trials, genetic testing, or how to navigate the Medicaid system);

• work remotely as a reference librarian and the nursing program departmental liaison for an online academic library;

• join the staff of a national health care company as a data manager;

• collaborate with two former MLIS classmates to start a specialized medical research and alerting service for geriatric nursing clinicians;

• sign on with a nonprofit disseminating health care information to immigrant and/or under-served populations;

• pursue a nursing/health care informatics project or contract work, either remotely or at the client’s workplace, for one of the LIS contract or staffing agencies; or

• work as a specialist in developing and sharing consumer health information materials for a hospital’s medical library.

Besides providing a sense of how broadly LIS skills might be applied, Letisha’s choices are important for another reason: by embracing a self-employed mind-set, she very possibly could do every one of these jobs at some point in her career if she chose to.

In The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha emphasize that:

This advice should resonate strongly with information professionals hoping to create resilient careers.

Being able to confidently make choices, and then make the best of those choices, is a critical competency for building a resilient career as an information professional. What types of decisions might someone need to make?

Imagine the career choices of Jesse, who is seriously thinking about his postgraduation job search. He will need to decide some of the following:

• What is his preferred geographic region? Does he prefer the city, a midsized town, or a small town?

• Does he want high-growth/learning curve work or does he want a job within his existing comfort zone?

These questions represent a very small subset of the types of choices and decisions information professionals will face while building a resilient career. As the profession changes, so too do the career opportunities it provides. As automation displaces some information and library roles, it creates others. As company mergers do away with some positions for corporate librarians, information professionals may identify new ways to contribute their information skills (for example, as an embedded librarian⁵). Career decisions typically depend on personal preferences, career goals, and market opportunities.

Just about everyone has a definition of success—in other words, the criteria or benchmarks that signal the achievement of an individual’s career aspirations. The challenge is in separating what others view as success from how information professionals themselves may individually define success. For example, common success indicators for various professions might include:

CASE STUDY

Career Success Indicators in the Information Professions

When asked about their own success indicators, University of Denver MLIS students identified their career success indicators as:

• “Having a positive impact on others’ lives”

• “Making a difference in my community”

• “Helping connect people with information to achieve their goals”

• “Growing in knowledge and contribution year after year”

• “Mastering the confidence to advocate for myself and others”

• “Learning to lead effectively and compassionately”⁶

Each person will have his or her own interpretation of what defines success. Factors such as personal values, goals, cultural environment, the expectations of family and friends, and perhaps even the views of faculty or mentors who have been especially influential all contribute to shaping what career success means to each individual. The key for information professionals is to be able to identify what truly resonates with them as defining a successful career, as opposed to simply working to fulfill the expectations of others.

When launching a career as an information professional, many students and recent graduates feel a tremendous amount of anxiety about landing the “perfect job”—the one that enables them to use all their LIS expertise; work with a terrific, collaborative team; learn from a wise and compassionate boss; and do the work they have dreamed of since that first day in graduate school (or possibly before). For an information professional starting a new career in the information professions, there are two considerations that are useful to keep in mind.

• First, that first job is only the first job. It is a starting point from which new professionals can launch their careers in myriad directions. The first job does not define subsequent job choices, but how well new information professionals handle that first job can certainly open up bridges to other, more desirable career opportunities. Information professionals should focus less on how ideal that first job is and more on how they perform in the job.

• Second, building a rewarding and resilient career as an information professional is a highly iterative (and often serendipitous) process. Therefore, although career agendas and plans are certainly important, information professionals should remain open to new people, experiences, learning, and challenges to position themselves in the path of opportunity.

When thinking about what type of career path individuals might like to initially pursue, one of the most important skills to master is the ability to vet assumptions. In other words, just because someone’s dreamed of being a reference librarian in a public library for the past ten years does not necessarily mean that person has a realistic, current understanding of what that job entails. This is where vetting assumptions comes in. Some of the best ways to verify expectations about specific career paths include:

• Read print and online publications related to the target career path. Look for information about trends, issues, jobs contraction or expansion, and best employers (especially ones that are growing/hiring).⁷

• Monitor bloggers and other social media writers who comment on aspects of the target career path. Look at how they portray the work, whether their comments are positive or negative, and whether they are discussing emerging opportunities (and if so, what are they saying?). Check out the resources mentioned in chapter 3: “Librarianship: A Continuously Evolving Profession” for a good starting point.

• Join discussion groups (for example on LinkedIn) and if possible, professional associations such as the American Library Association (ALA),⁸ Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T),⁹ Special Libraries Association (SLA),¹⁰ Society of American Archivists (SAA),¹¹ ARMA International,¹² and so on. Gain insight about the work, the employers, and trends or issues related to both; associations are also often a great way to find salary information.

• Conduct as many informational interviews as possible with information practitioners who are doing the work of interest or working for employers of interest: ask very specific questions that either confirm or dispel expectations about the job.

• Do volunteer work, internships, or part-time work in the environments of interest: get a sense of how much the reality of the work aligns with one’s imagined assumptions.

The goal of vetting assumptions is essentially to keep students, new information professionals, and LIS career transitioners from investing time, energy, and passion into a career path that in actuality is a poor fit for them. It is also an easy and effective way to narrow down hundreds of potential LIS career options into a more manageable size—perhaps several dozen or so. Additionally, these steps can be repeated as necessary to help navigate all future career transitions

Career action plans and career agendas are essential to help information professionals stay on course with their overall career goals. What is the difference between a career action plan and a career agenda? A career action plan is a broad strategic road map for longer-term career development comprising goals, strategies, and tactics, while a career agenda is a short list of tasks to complete within a certain situation. Both are important elements of a take-charge, entrepreneurial, resilient LIS career. And both can help individuals build the career they aspire to in different ways and situations.

• defining the tactics that will become the “action items” of those strategies.

Career action plans often cover anywhere from one to five years, depending on how long it is likely to take to achieve a specific goal, so they should be used as an ongoing guide to help evaluate potential career decisions.

CASE STUDY

Building a Career Action Plan

iSchool student Kate set a goal to build postgraduation career opportunities in the archives field over the course of her two-year MLIS program. Given this, her career action plan might be to:

• take advantage of every archives and records management-related learning opportunity provided by her iSchool program;

• gain a better sense of opportunities in the archives and records field; and

• start building visibility as a strong, engaged professional contributor among future potential hiring managers.

As a next step, Kate’s tactics or action items for her “take advantage of the school’s offerings” strategy might look like this:

• meet with an academic advisor within the next six weeks to identify and schedule out all iSchool courses related to archives and records and management to ensure that she will stay on track through her program;

• join the iSchool’s student archives group and attend all group workshops, webcasts, and career sessions, ideally helping with programming so she can meet guest speakers; and

• identify archives and records management internship opportunities early on in her program.

Career action plans and their pattern of goal-strategies-tactics can be used repeatedly throughout a career to accomplish a multitude of objectives; it is especially useful for career transitions, such as preparing for a promotion request, making job changes, or bridging into a related job field.¹⁴

A career agenda, on the other hand, is a focused list of items to achieve within a certain situation or setting. The purpose of a career agenda is to keep individual career plans on track while also fulfilling primary commitments, such as taking courses as a student or learning the ropes of a new job as a recently hired employee. For example, MLIS students begin every course with the framework of the course syllabus, which is what the instructor expects students to undertake, learn, and complete.

But every course can also provide an opportunity to accomplish additional career goals, such as improving public speaking skills, learning how to lead virtual teams, boosting research skills, or trying out project management approaches. While an information professional’s first job may be an entry-level position, the new information professional can make the most of the opportunity by deciding what else to learn and accomplish in addition to the basic job responsibilities and by taking charge of their professional growth.

The easiest way to set a career agenda? Identify one (or several) items that, if improved or increased, would help open up the next level of career oppor tunity, and identify the amount of time involved in that action(s). A first-year career agenda might involve the following action items:

• figure out and implement three ways to increase productivity for existing job responsibilities;

• identify, reach out to, and build professional relationships with two experts in the area of their career interest;

• volunteer to participate in a new multi-department initiative if the opportunity arises;

• observe workplace colleagues, especially those older and younger, to learn at least one new skill (i.e., people, process, other); and

• choose one job-related LIS topic to “go deep” on and become the team expert while also building professional value to current or future employers.

Career action plans and career agendas enable information professionals to keep their careers on track and moving forward regardless of what else may be going on in their work lives, now or in the future.

Growing rewarding, resilient LIS careers depends on many factors (including “being in the right place at the right time”), but underlying and informing each of those factors is a concept called professional equity. Like a financial asset, professional equity grows the more one invests in it, and the more a person invests in it, the more independence and opportunities it will provide.

The stronger each one of these elements is and the more time and effort invested in each one, the greater and more rewarding the career opportunities will be throughout one’s career.

What a person knows is a combination of domain knowledge (or discipline-specific professional skills and areas of expertise), general professional skills, and business skills.

When MLIS graduates launch their new professional careers, they do so with a wealth of current knowledge, advanced technology skills, information about best practices in multiple settings, and knowledge of related disciplines such as marketing and public relations, human resources management, or nonprofit administration. That is an impressive knowledge base, but in the LIS world, it is only the beginning.

Information professionals know that developing a plan for continuous learning is the key to remaining current in their field or specialization. This can be achieved through a variety of ways such as:

Belong to LIS organizations with a strong professional development mission, for example, those that provide webinars, workshops, and courses for members. ALA has an eLearning program along with webinars hosted by many of its divisions. SLA and SAA both offer certificate programs.

Sign up for additional, refresher courses from a graduate school or other MLIS-focused program.

Develop a Personal Learning Network (PLN),¹⁵ which is a diverse community of individuals willing to share their expertise and insights to help other members of the network, whether through social media, face-to-face meetings, discussion groups, or other channels. Given the global nature of today’s information work, many PLNs now include connections, experts, and resources from throughout the world.

Find mentors or workplace specialty coaches, specifically colleagues who have a skill of interest and who are willing to take the time to share their knowledge.

No matter what process information professionals use to continue to grow what they know, the ability to learn continuously and effectively—learning on demand, creating and directing their learning path, and applying learning immediately—should be considered a core career competency.

Investing in who a person knows means focusing on one’s connections, both professional and personal, otherwise known as a professional network. The longer individuals work, and the more often and actively they collaborate with others to accomplish key work or volunteer goals, the likelier it is that their community of connections will continue to grow as well.

There are many ways to grow a professional network. Connections should be relationship based (i.e., authentic concern for the well-being and success of others) rather than transactional (i.e., the “what’s in it for me” approach). The basics of network building include actions such as:

• introducing oneself to people in social or professional gatherings and then following up with them via e-mail or a LinkedIn connection invitation to cement the relationship,

• volunteering in both LIS and non-LIS situations and organizations (for example, a community event) to get to know new people while also contributing to the greater good,

• reaching out to individuals for informational interviews, following up with a thank-you note (always!), and then staying in touch with that new connection,

• building positive relationships with faculty, administrators, and fellow students while in graduate school and after graduation, and then joining the alumni group as well, and

• joining and becoming active in professional associations at the international, national, and local levels, and making sure to build positive relationships with everyone encountered throughout the association.

It is essential for information professionals to stay connected with their network on a regular basis. One good approach is to try to reach out via a phone or e-mail “catch-up” several times a year if possible. Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, SnapChat, WhatsApp, Skype, and Twitter also provide a strong medium for staying in touch with colleagues, alumni, and other key professionals. Knowing what connections are up to is not only beneficial, it can also provide information professionals ideas for how they might be able to help each other. That sort of generous reciprocity, over the course of a decades-long career, will provide a stunning return on investment in terms of career opportunities, personal reward, and professional impact.

TEXTBOX 36.2

Network Versus Networking

• Network: a group of connections among various individuals.

• Networking: an action-based activity that includes introducing oneself to new people, introducing others to each other, and finding ways to help people within one’s community of connections achieve their goals.

A professional reputation, or brand, tells others what to expect from an individual. In Be Your Own Brand, authors David McNally and Karl D. Speak note, “A personal brand promise is a way to state what you are committed to being for others.”¹⁶ A professional reputation or brand may be, for example, a promise of what one knows, what one is capable of, what one’s values are, how one treats people, and how professional one is.¹⁷

People have a brand whether or not they choose to actively shape how others perceive them—it is simply human nature for people to jump to conclusions about others, often based on wildly mistaken assumptions. That is why it is worth the effort for everyone to take the time to think about how others might or do perceive them based on what information is available (especially online) to others. The goal should be to showcase one’s best attributes, including professional strengths and passions.

An individual’s goal in building a highly visible professional reputation/brand is to make sure that when someone thinks of them in a professional setting, the strengths they would like to be known for come to mind. Contributing to professional conversations, creating new knowledge, curating existing knowledge of value to the profession, and sharing information (online, at a conference, in a professional journal, webcast, or other means) are all valuable and effective ways to develop a professional brand.

Another aspect of reputation building that is equally important, if less visible, is the personal reputations that are built with colleagues throughout one’s career. This reputation is built on actions like finding ways to help others without regard to one’s own immediate benefit, for example, by making sure that other contributors get due credit, giving a public “shout-out” to colleagues who have done something exceptional (or even something just kind or generous), or quietly helping a classmate who is struggling with an assignment. This is not so much about competence as it is about character, which will have every bit as much of an impact on the quality of one’s career.

Information professionals may be interested in increasing all three elements of professional equity at different points in their careers—not just when they are looking for their first job. The strategies discussed in this chapter can also be used to help experienced information professionals enhance their professional equity as well. For example, information professionals already in the field can:

• reach out to people doing interesting or admirable work in the LIS field to request informational interviews,

• take the initiative to create an event that brings people together to learn about a specific topic.

Social media and sharing platforms (for example, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, and YouTube) provide information professionals extremely easy and valuable ways to position themselves for career opportunities and increase their professional equity if used wisely. Information professionals can post slide decks from their best presentations, share a creative video they have put together on an LIS topic, start a specialized LIS Twitter topic feed, or create/contribute to a Facebook group devoted to their professional passion. Each of these options provides a way for information professionals to showcase their skills and strengths in a very public arena and makes them more “findable” for potential employers.

The key word, however, is wisely. As most have experienced, it is extremely easy to cross the invisible line dividing professional from unprofessional engagement online. And once a post, tweet, comment, or share has hit the web, it pretty much never goes away. It is important to keep in mind before hitting that send button that whatever is said or done online can be seen as a reflection of an individual’s judgment, professional demeanor, and basic common sense by hiring managers. Words to live by when it comes to social media: when in doubt, don’t.

One of the most important career competencies going forward will be the ability to pivot quickly and effectively as LIS employment paths continue to expand in some areas and contract in others. This will not only be a critical factor in creating a resilient, rewarding career but also in the ability to thrive in existing LIS jobs.

In addition to continually building one’s professional equity, the following career competencies will enable information professionals to successfully pivot into the exciting new professional opportunities on the horizon:

• an ability to anticipate and position for changes in one’s professional environment;

• a willingness to focus on the opportunity—rather than just the disruption—inherent in change;

• a commitment not only to ongoing learning but also to learning from anyone, anywhere, anytime;

• an ability to move forward with confidence despite not being certain of outcomes or success.

As LIS students and information professionals move through what is likely to be exciting, multifaceted careers, the best long-term asset will be a personal commitment to self-leadership and taking charge of one’s own goals, decisions, actions, and outcomes (see also chapter 37: “Leadership Skills for Today’s Global Information Landscape”). Not every decision will be the right one, but every decision will be one that can be learned from. And that is the key.

Be sure to check out the wealth of resources in chapter 36 in the online supplement, including recommended books and articles on career strategies, a list of professional LIS organizations, links to job-trend and salary reports, a list of job boards for LIS-based careers, and various online resources on résumés, interviewing tips with strategies for informational interviews, and more.

NOTES

3. Cliff Hakim, We Are All Self-Employed: How to Take Control of Your Career (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003).

4. Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (New York: Crown Business, 2012), 4.

5. David Shumaker, The Embedded Librarian: Innovative Strategies for Taking Knowledge Where It’s Needed (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2012).

6. Personal communications between author and University of Denver LIS Career Alternatives course students, September 1998–June 2017.

7. For an excellent overview of trends monitoring, a valuable skill both for LIS careers and information work, see Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream (New York: Public Affairs, 2016).

13. Although written specifically for those contemplating a career change, another good resource on the idea of creating and using career maps is Liz Ryan’s Reinvention Roadmap: Break the Rules to Get the Job You Want and Career You Deserve (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2016); Kim Dority, Rethinking Information Work: A Career Guide for Librarians and Other Information Professionals (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2016), 193–209.

14. For more on career action plans, see Dority, Rethinking Information Work, ch. 4.

15. Center for Language and Technology, “Welcome to Introduction to Personal Learning Networks,” University of Hawaii at Manoa, http://clt.manoa.hawaii.edu/projects/pln/.

16. David McNally and Karl Speak, Be Your Own Brand: Achieve More of What You Want Being More of Who You Are (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002), 75.

17. For more insights on professional branding, consider exploring Dorie Clark, Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), and the older but still useful William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson, Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007).

36 Career Management Strategies for Lifelong Success

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