Those thinking of returning to library work in 2020 face the toughest job market. Unemployment figures are beginning to climb nationally. The uncertain situation in many libraries, the majority closed, operating a greatly reduced face-to-face service, staff redeployed into non-library roles or providing services via libraries from home sending unclear signals about whether organisations are going to be hiring anytime soon. While some information and library posts continued to be advertised throughout the crisis, this appears to have slowed down in line with recruitment in other sectors. Despite the fact libraries are operating differently, those relying on temporary casual work, or being hired through local agencies, gaining unpaid work experience, or seeking regular voluntary work can forget about it too. Those ‘good and meaningful work’ routes into library work we returners often cling on to, that don’t pay as much as we used to get paid, but will hopefully give us some fresh experience and may even lead to a better position, will all but dry up now, won’t they? On top of that, as the crisis continues, we are beginning to witness organisational troubles that may lead to redundancy for library workers.
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Doesn’t it feel like this has become a test in surviving a little bit more than the usual job search emotional rollercoaster?
So, if you’ve recently returned or if you’d hoped that Spring / Summer 2020 would be time to launch that return, you might be experiencing some rather complex feelings right now. You must undertake your job search in a stressful and anxious environment as we all continue to live our lives during a world-wide pandemic and it’s not that easy making sense of our new reality as a library returner or as anyone else. We all face an ever-changing situation.
While recruitment may have slowed, it hasn’t stopped. Maybe not in all sectors but a quick scan of the information jobs being advertised by recruitment agencies, LinkedIn and job listings throughout the crisis has shown that there has been a steady trickle of positions advertised in the Knowledge and Information Management sector, the Commercial sector, the Health sector, the Academic sector, and the Schools sector. Encouragingly, I know that some of these advertised positions made it to interview and beyond. People have been hired.
Ok, so what have you got skills-wise?
Don’t forget what skills and strengths you have. You’ve acquired skills on your career break. Prior to that break, you gained qualifications and lots of experience. Just because you took that career break you don’t really want to start at the beginning again. In spite of that we don’t have the luxury of a returners programme in information and librarianship to help us transition back to our former careers. Instead we must be a bit more resilient and create a personal, do-it-yourself version, a pick n’ mix upskilling, with resources like library returners as a meeting point for support.
The library returners programme:
7 suggestions to get you going again
1. Identify your skills and strengths
What exactly do you want to do? Which is your key strength? What are your core values? Which activity in particular are you good at? Start jotting down some answers. If you’ve kept up your professional membership perhaps now is the time to take another peep at CILIP’s Professional Knowledge & Skills Base (PKSB).
2. Refresh your CV and LinkedIn profile
If you’ve been brave enough to use the PKSB as a framework for identifying your skills and strengths, it’s definitely a good moment to update your CV and your LinkedIn profile.
You need to work on five basic areas of your profile before moving on to anything more complex – identifying your keywords, knowing what to put in your headline, checking and possibly refreshing your summary, asking for recommendations with confidence and consistently showing up in searches. Read LinkedIn for library returners for a quick refresher.
Skills based CVs are recommended for those of us who have taken a career break. CILIP have written a very basic information page for librarians here. You can also find various bits and pieces written for a number of different blog posts on the library returners site by typing CV in the Search box.
If you’ve got any great advice about CVs, LinkedIn profiles and applications forms, please add it to the comments below.
People visiting the site are often asking about this stuff and I feel like I revisit a lot of the same ground so it would be excellent to pass on!
3. Consider the Careers Service
If you are finding the CV / Linkedin profile refresh a bit of a headache, it may be time to set up a meeting with a Careers Adviser to discuss your next move. You could try your local Careers service, where you set up a session (for free) to your specific needs or you may wish to employ the services of a specialist career coach (at a cost). Another option is to approach your former university service, a recruitment agency or if you are a member of CILIP, to explore their careers hub service. In the UK, the career service is devolved and may place emphasis upon different services, for example, Careers Wales, do provide basic advice for returners to work, a summary of which you can find here.
Have you ever used a career advisor or service or recruitment agency? Were they useful?
Regular readers of the NLPN blog will know all about the good work they do for new librarians including, amongst other things, maintaining a list of people who have specifically volunteered to show the type of work they do in their home work environment. Job shadowing opportunities in librarianship were originally developed for new professionals and students but NLPN and the people that put their names to the list let us access their services too. I’m aware of this owing to me putting it to the test here. Also see this article for more information about job shadowing for library returners.
Consider virtually shadowing someone or offering to virtually host. Write up about your experience.
There are other ways to approach people to find out about their roles during your job seeking process. You could try out an informational interview, meetings which are set up with people in roles or organisations you’d like to learn more about. iRelaunch offers some tips to holding successful ones here. Like shadowing, there’s no reason why this meeting cannot be moved online. You can also approach people via social media. People are generally happy to be sounded out and answer a question or two.
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5. Enrol in some training
If you returned to library work in some capacity pre-COVID 19 and you have not been furloughed, then you are extremely likely to have experienced remote working since March 2020. Be clear about the skills you have gained, e.g.
self discipline
self direction
technical skills
If you are looking to return to work after an extended break, you will need to show employers that you also have these skills as remote working is likely to remain part of employment culture from now on. But how do you get the skills? The team behind Women Returners have prepared useful webinars, one of them, Upskilling in preparation for your return to work, explores how to achieve new skills.
As you can see from the webinar, Hazel Little describes the different platforms to turn to (e.g. from professional organisation websites to podcasts and TED talks) and the different online resources available. Many of the resources that you can access are free. This is really encouraging for everyone looking to return to work in 2020 but who may have had to put their plans on hold due to COVID-19.
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It may be worthwhile for returners to think about areas that an employer would expect library workers to have covered, e.g. it is likely that digital skills will be expected by all sectors but are there particular tools with which you need to be familiar? This is where chatting over a virtual coffee, setting up an informational interview or scanning tweets on Twitter can really help and send you to register directly for the training or development that you need. Plus remember you don’t have to have completed the course and received the certificate to put in on your CV application form. It is enough to have started it.
What digital tools do you think are important for someone returning to librarianship to know ahead of their return to work?
Allowing library staff to access online learning while working from home has meant that lots of partner organisations have opened hitherto subscription only training for free. This has meant that those in a workplace setting may have had the opportunity to upskill in line with their job profile or to try out a new venture, something they may not have had the time for in the past.
You may want to put a plan together to work out the areas where you need to gain more experience, retrain, or upskill.
There are many courses out there, but which one? Here are a selection of a few I’ve stumbled across in these past few months.
General – MOOCs
Coursera – Courses, certificates, and degrees online from over 200 universities worldwide. Many courses can be taken free of charge but if you want a certificate to show you took the course, it will cost you money.
Edx – 2500+ online courses from 140 institutions, a mixture of paid and free. A useful selection of library and information courses, many of them free, e.g. Managing a Diverse and Inclusive Workplace for Public Libraries from the University of Michigan (Free) 2-3 hours a week for 4 weeks.
Hubspot Academy – Free online training, good for social media training, email marketing, content marketing
Specialist
Webjunction – Webjunction is such a rich resource for librarians and information professionals and you will probably find a course to suit your needs and it will be without charge. If you are returning to the workplace after a long break a good place to start is the free, online Alternative Basic Library Education (ABLE) programme which was developed by theIdaho Commission for Libraries to provide basic library knowledge and skills for staff members who have no formal education in library science. The course is a decent refresher in three key areas – Collection Development, Technical Services, and Public Services.
Library juice academy – Lots of short courses available on a wide range of subjects but mainly at a cost. Though CILIP members get 20% off all training.
Specialist training by professional body
CILIP (elearning hub) – The professional body in the UK has a wide range of training available, some free to non-members. The eLearning page is now filtered by PKSB headings. Members also have access to professional journals. For some this has been a good time to progress with CILIP revalidation.
Online conferences
Various web addresses. At different times throughout the year.These are easy to access and you can also view past conferences. They are almost always for a fee and while this sum is vastly reduced from the cost of a normal entry it is probably prohibitive for many on career breaks.An example can be found here: Next Steps: Create and Cultivate a Career That Matters
What about your experience, have you had time to undertake training you never had time for before? Have you progressed with professional registration?
6. Practise being interviewed
What’s happening with library interviews and is it worth all that preparation? Well it seems that either one scenario or the other is taking place.
Applications are being placed in a holding place until ‘normal service’ resumes and face-to-face interviewing can restart.
Organisations are happy to proceed with phone or virtual interviews using online applications such as Webex, MS Teams, Skype, WhatsApp or Zoom.
This being so, it would be wise to brush up on interviewing practice. For:
But if you are serious, perhaps you really need to practice video interviewing with a friend! Reach out to your contacts to see if they’d be happy giving you a test online.
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7. Sustain yourself
We have all needed time to rest and reflect during this time too. Sometimes the competing interests we are coping with are overwhelming. What is more, for everyone reading this blog post, the situation will have been different, from the single dweller at home alone, perhaps occasionally feeling isolated, to the returners juggling large families being home-schooled, finding it hard to get a moments peace. Let’s face it, these examples are in themselves overly simplified.
Likewise, there’s been lots of advice available about how to manage ourselves during this unprecedented situation.
On the library workplace side…
I have been exploring the research interests of Amanda M. Leftwich @mindfulinlis@thelibmaven and Bobbi Newman @librarianbyday who, in their work related to mindfulness in LIS (Leftwich) and fostering wellness in libraries (Newman), have asked us to consider ourselves, and to take into account our needs as library workers as well as the needs of our readers. Speaking plainly, mindfulness is the ability to pay attention in the present moment. But you can explore further these ideas and gain far greater understanding by reading:
Key to this is whether you think offering mindfulness training to returners and practicing mindfulness exercises can help with building resilience and be good for your own mental and physical health. What do you think?
Your next strategy: the best way forward while still trying hard to remain positive
The coronavirus has changed job searching for everyone. Despite this, library returners need to continue to work on the things that they have always been doing – sorting out their skills, refreshing their CV / LinkedIn profile, networking, connecting with people, signing up for training, and looking after themselves.
Returner industry expert and Founder of iRelaunch, Carol Fishman Cohen, states that in previous downturns, relaunchers did two things:
Got specific – on their skill set and what they wanted to do, i.e. specific targeting of certain roles.
Became subject matter experts all over again in their field, i.e. effectively went back to review books, to talk to former colleagues, to research who were the experts in the field and what the subject controversies were. (Today we can look them up on Twitter and follow them, read their books, articles, podcasts, websites and so on.)
But returners were also very patient!
Share your best way forward in the comments box below.
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