by Chelle Batchelor, past SLA-UW Student Chapter Member
In late April I had the honor and pleasure of teaming up with SLA President Cindy Romaine to present this talk on the Future Ready Job Search at an SLA-UW Student Night event. As soon as she explained to me the Future Ready concept, I started thinking about how the key components of collaboration, flexibility, adaptability, and community could be applied to the difficult job search we all experience after we graduate with our MLIS degrees. Here are just a few ideas for a Future Ready inspired job search, but please feel free to add more!
Community: it is crucially important to actively reach out to your community of practice while you are in graduate school, and afterward as well. If you are reading this, you’ve already started! The key word here, however, is active, and I think people sometimes miss that when they receive (or give) advice like this. So, you are reading Future Ready 365. Great! But, can you do more? Post something, perhaps? Here’s another example: many people attend large professional conferences as part of their job search, which can be mind-boggling and sometimes even end up feeling like a waste of time and money. The key is, it is very important to get actively involved in the conference in any way you can! Find a way to volunteer, present a poster, or join a committee or peer group as well as attending a career fair or resume review. You can then note your achievements on your resume, and you will be interfacing directly with professionals who might have helpful career advice or leads! The important thing is to find meaningful ways to connect with your community.
Collaboration: I think community and collaboration go hand in hand. By connecting with the community of practice that has evolved around the kind of work you want to do, you will discover peers and mentors who can help you with your job search. Ask your peers to review your application materials, or form a job search support group to trade resumes and share ideas about how to represent your skills. Brainstorm with your peers to help each other think of skills you have gained through your coursework. Ask your mentors for advice on where to search for jobs, what to include in your application, or how you might broaden your job search strategy if you have run out of ideas. Finally, keep your peers in mind when you are searching for jobs. For example, when you see a position that you don’t think is the right fit for you, take the extra step to share it with a friend who might be more interested!
Flexibility: this one is probably the most important, and the most difficult. In my presentation I represented the problem as a Venn diagram. As with a Boolean search, each time you add another “AND” to your search strategy, you narrow your results. So, let’s say keyword phrase #1 is YOUR JOB SKILLS, #2 is GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION and #3 is TYPE OF JOB YOU WANT. 
Once you put those three together, you could end up with a very tiny job market to target! In order to get your first job, you may need to broaden your search. Gain some new adaptable skills, extend your search to places you haven’t considered before, or consider jobs in the tech and information industry that are not traditional “library” jobs. Those jobs might turn out to be a perfect match for your energy and enthusiasm! Don’t just search the library job lists like SLA, ALA, PNLA, LibGig, and LISjobs, try to find out what companies and other organizations are hiring information professionals. Some examples I gave my Seattle-based audience included Serials Solutions, Zaaz, Ascentium, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Adaptability: once you have identified an organization you want to work in, learn as much as you can about them and their culture. For best results, adapt each and every resume or CV and cover-letter to match the job and the work environment of that organization. Look at their web pages and familiarize yourself with the culture you see represented there. Use the language of their website, and especially the language of the job description to describe your skills and experiences in your application materials. If you don’t understand the lingo or are unfamiliar with their corporate culture, try to set up an informational interview with someone in the organization who would be willing to tell you more about the work they do and what they look for in a new employee. Finally, if you are invited to interview for a position, be prepared to answer questions about why you are interested in working for that organization, and why you care about the work you will be doing in the position you hope to fill. Be the person they want!
I hope this information is helpful for those of you graduating this year. It is a tough marketplace right now, and I think you will need to be more flexible in your job searches than ever before. The information profession is changing every day, and while it becomes more interesting, it also becomes more competitive and complex at the same time. Please take advantage of this SLA community to post more ideas for a future ready job search in the comments below!
Chelle Batchelor is the Access Services Librarian at the University of Washington Bothell and Cascadia Community College Campus Library. She graduated from the University of Washington MLIS program in June 2005 and was hired as the Head of Interlibrary Loan at the University of Las Vegas in July 2005. Two years later (almost to the day!) she began her job at UWB. She was an SLA student member from 2003-2005 and is now actively involved in ALA, co-chairing the Access Services Discussion Group and the Cooperative Remote Circulation Committee. Chelle brings the perspective of a UW iSchool Grad whose cohort has gone far and wide in the Information profession in the past six years.
Excellent points on networking. Having done some recent exploration on jobsites, I want to add one note that is obvious to others who’ve had this experience, but I had not realized the uselessness: do NOT BOTHER with Career Builder type sites that are GENERAL in nature; I do not think the creators of the software on those sites, nor most of the company reps that scroll through these sites, GET IT about information professionals. The results are like bad Google searches that hit useless content farms — one gets lists of totally inappropriate job openings that do not match one’s skills at all, even if one tries to carefully craft keywords. Thanks for letting me rant (!), and again, useful post Chelle!
Thank you Sara, rant away! This is a great point!
Some well meaning advice, but having been on the job search for nearly 2 years, (that’s right, friends) I’ve been through the mill with networking. Attending conferences and getting on panels, etc. is a good idea if you can afford the cost while being unemployed, but prepare yourself. Travel, food & lodging, plus conference fees add up. Even if you do manage to score a much-sought-after volunteer activity, you may have to accept some shabby treatment. It can be a real drag to shell out serious money to attend a national conference just to play handmaiden for library professionals who are themselves on a networking junket and can’t be bothered with you. That’s reality. If you’re a fresh young thing with a newly minted MLIS, you can chalk it up to experience, but if you’re middle aged, it can be galling.
Where I live, I negotiated an “internship” at a local college library. In some ways, this has been quite rewarding. I’ve learned how to reconcile accounts, how to catalog, how to organize collections of papers for an archive and gotten my feet wet with digital libraries. All well and good, but in 10 mos., I haven’t seen the library director more than 4 times—3 of them just in passing. Despite my “informational interview” last Sept., she’s never around and is not interested. When you give your labor away for free, that can happen. Though I’ve managed to establish good relationships among the staff, if a job came up I doubt I’d have any more chance of employment than somebody they never saw before. Perhaps less.
Even if you’re a great networker, it’s luck and solid connections that will get you employed. Networking can help, but be careful how much you put into it.
Yes- your comment resonates very much with what I was thinking of when I said attending conferences as part of the job search can feel like a waste of time and money. I do have one friend for whom I think it contributed to her success but it took a long time. Active participation in email lists and conference attendance allowed her to become a part of the community of practice she wanted to join, and after about 2-3 years she did finally get a permanent job (she is moving cross-country right now!). Her target was very specialized, so it took a huge amount of patience.
While the tone of my post above is very positive in keeping with the Future Ready blog, I tried to acknowledge the difficulty of today’s job market in my “live” talk. It’s incredibly tough to get the more traditional librarian jobs, so I encouraged my audience to cast their nets as wide as possible.
Your suggestion of getting an internship is a great example of how skill-building can continue as you search. Thank you for your input, Peter!
“Even if you’re a great networker, it’s luck and solid connections that will get you employed. Networking can help, but be careful how much you put into it.”
Netowrking IS great – but in my opinion, experience and skills are equally important. Networking helps people know about your experience and skills in ways that they wouldn’t know just by reading your resume.
Finding a job is like making a sandwich: you need bread and a filling, but the more you add to it the more appealing it becomes.
Thank you, Peter, for your reply. Thank you, Chelle, for your post.
Peter, I could not add much to your reply. Throughout my comparatively shorter job search (1 month), I have received input that networking and conferences are a waste of time and money. In fact, the conclusion I draw from the input is: “If you do not get a full-time job (from “whatever activity”), “it” is useless.” Put another way, I infer that the input I received is thinking from a utilitarian point of view: Unless it’s of use, to attend “activity-this” or “activity-that,” is an excuse. Please forgive me for the tone of this paragraph. It is not my intent to disparage our profession. In fact, I want to keep positive throughout my job search but I have my challenges with this type of input as I try to justify that there is merit to networking and conferences.
To reiterate, I am for networking and conferences and such but I am cognizant and empathize with Peter. Peter, you did not specify whether you were addressing full-time permanent employment or not so I am going to assume that the former is the case for yourself.
Also, thank you for bringing up the “internship,” something which I have only just considered, but evidently I have not taken the next step and gone and actually done it as you have. Since I have not taken this next step, I really appreciate your insight into your internship experience so that I have an idea of what I might expect or experience if I were to follow-up through on an internship of my own.
Chelle, I am all for the key components you referenced and shared as I alluded to earlier. In particular, for “flexibility,” I will have to try those examples you gave for job searching. For “adaptability,” I have a question because I do not know how to approach it: “What if a position calls for a particular duty or responsibility (sorry, I do not have a specific example) for which I have no or very limited exposure to (read theoretical knowledge) that is a “must have,” but I am willing to “adapt”? I open this question not only to yourself but to any others who might be interested in commenting.
For me, initially, I heard it’s who you know, then it’s what you know, now it’s experience (read experience to perform in the position right away, without training). Any thoughts?
Thank you for the opportunity to post this reply.
Hi Herald, I’m not 100% sure if I understand your question but I’ll give it a shot. I think you are asking what to do in cases where you are applying for a job that requires a skill or you have not (yet) gained but would be willing to learn. That’s tough, because there may be other applicants who already have that experience, so your other strengths would always need to outshine that lack. If the job application includes a cover-letter, this is something I’d recommend addressing there. Discuss your relevant experience or theoretical knowledge, and express a deep interest in learning more on the job. This would be more difficult to address in a resume. A close friend of mine is a computer programmer and his tactic is to self-learn new skills between jobs. So he reads books, takes online classes, and practices new skills on projects he comes up with on his own. Of course, I realize that probably won’t work if it’s something that is best learned on the job, so for those skills I’d refer back to Peter’s idea of volunteering or finding an internship. It’s such a tough market right now, experience is likely going to be your biggest hurdle. I wish I had more to offer!