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Researching LIS job opportunities and career paths

People network - blue graphicWhether you’re a student soon to graduate and getting ready to hit the job market, an employed professional seeking to make a job change, or a now-unemployed practitioner trying to identify or create new opportunities, LIS job hunting can be an adventure (feel free to substitute your preferred adjective here).

According to David E. Perry, co-author of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 3.0: How to Stand Out from the Crowd and Tap into the Hidden Job Market Using Social Media and 999 Other Tactics Today (Jay Conrad Levinson, co-author, Wiley, 2011), “Every job search is a sales and marketing campaign.”

Although, generally speaking, sales and marketing don’t come naturally to LIS students and professionals, if you approach looking for the right job as a process to move you from point A to point B (okay, and include some sales and marketing), both the job search – and your spirits – may improve. (more…)

Find your tribe

Recently I gave a talk to the Rocky Mountain SLA chapter on adaptive competence. It’s basically the ability to repurpose if not reinvent your LIS career (pretty much on demand) as market needs and opportunities require. Your adaptive competence is built on a core understanding that regardless of your current paycheck, we’re all self-employed – it’s up to us to take charge of our options and outcomes.

One of my recommendations for building adaptive competence, also known as career resiliency, was to find your tribe. Although marketing guru Seth Godin popularized the phrase in his Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (Portfolio, 2008), Godin’s focus was on leading movements. With apologies to Godin, I’m going to redefine and repurpose it here (clear tip-off to my content-developer roots!) to describe a tribe as that group of people who make up your career inner circle. (more…)

Informational interviews: the 5 basics

Thank-you noteWhen you’re trying to learn more about potential LIS jobs, employers, or careers, few options are better than going straight to the source, otherwise known as having an information interview. They’re one of the easiest and fastest ways to increase your career smarts – even when you’re not looking for a job. Why? Because these informal conversations can provide the perfect “reality check” for what you may have read or heard about a particular employer, industry, or career path  – an insider’s view of how the world really looks from those in the trenches.

To max out the benefit of any information interview, however, you want to make sure you do these five things: (more…)

Becoming an agile learner – as painlessly as possible

Ever since Darwin nailed the whole ‘adaptability equals survivability’ thing, it’s been pretty clear that being able to navigate changing circumstances was going to be critical to… well, just about everything. What was once a scientific premise is now also key to career resiliency.

Translation: learn fast, learn effectively, be able to learn on demand. (more…)