It’s happened to all of us who’ve spent any time in the workplace, and after being read the riot act several times, you realize that the best way – in fact, the only way – to handle this type of career crisis is head-on. As soon as you realize you’ve made a mistake that may have an impact on the company, you want to pull together the following information, and be prepared to lay it out for your boss:

1. Identify what the mistake was, and the potential damage that did or may result from the mistake.
2. Identify what steps you can take or have taken to remedy the situation. (Your boss may have different or additional actions steps for you to take, but it helps if you’ve already tried to come up with some solutions.)
3. Identify what happened to cause the mistake (focus on the relevant process malfunction or missed step; you don’t need to tell your boss that you missed something because you stayed up all night playing Texas hold’em with the tech services team and were suffering from major sleep deprivation).
4. Describe what steps you will take in the future to make sure the mistake doesn’t happen again (again, focus on the process – how you will double check the key information, verify that all steps have been completed, etc. No need to mention your pledge to avoid playing cards til 4:00am on a weeknight in the future….)

Your goals in mastering your “I screwed up” statement are to make it clear to your boss that you know you messed up, and you intend to take responsibility for it (thus building your boss’s confidence in your honesty and reliability). Also, you want to make sure that you’re the one delivering this information rather than the woman three cubicles down who’s got it in for you.

Bottom line:

• Never let your boss learn of your screw-up from anyone other than you.
• Never try to hide information about a mistake; know that it will almost always surface, and in the worst ways at the worst possible time.
• Never let your boss get blindsided by something you did and concealed from him/her; it makes bosses look bad, and they’ll never forgive you for it – or trust you again.

So start rehearsing your speech now: “Ah, boss, do you have a moment? I need to tell you about a situation that came up and how I’d like to handle it if this sounds okay to you….”

From a conceptual standpoint, equity refers to how much investment you’ve built for a given asset, which might be your political reputation and influence, the value of your home relative to your mortgage, or the amount of standing and influence you have in your community of choice.

From a career standpoint, professional equity is a combination of the job skills, expertise, and experience you’ve accumulated, the relationships you’ve developed, and the reputation you’ve built so far in your career.

The Skills, Expertise, and Experience Piece

In 1999, Tom Peters wrote The Project 50: Fifty Ways to Transform Every “Task” into a Project That Matters!, touting the importance of looking at your work as a series of “projects” that either provided you with terrific learning experiences or demonstrated your extraordinary skills. Since then, the concept of building your professional portfolio around several (as many as possible) signature projects has gained traction as a way of providing evidence not only of what you know, but also of what you can do with that knowledge.

How does this work in real life? Look at career opportunities from the perspective of how they’ll help you document outstanding work. Join, create, and/or lead projects whenever you can, even if it means putting in extra (uncompensated) hours or volunteering outside of your job. Your goal is to find ways to distinguish your contributions, and working on high-visibility projects is one of the easiest and most effective ways to do that.

The Relationships Piece

Every day in your career you have an opportunity to build positive long-term relationships with co-workers you’ve identified as people you enjoy, admire, respect, and/or can learn from. Working with them, you have an opportunity to see very clearly who they are, how their values align with yours, and what professional skills they bring.

You also have an opportunity to help these individuals build their careers. In so doing, you build long-term and mutual respect, trust, and goodwill. By being a positive player in your co-workers’ lives and careers, you signal that you care as much about their success as you do your own. And you will be building professional relationships – and equity – that will sustain your career for years to come.

There are all sorts of ways to build positive connections with your co-workers and others with whom you come into contact in a professional way. Some basics:

• support others’ success through your connections
• share your knowledge and experience
• find opportunities to applaud others’ achievements – in public
• model positive collaboration
• find ways to reach out and help others, especially with their careers

Think of this as career karma – the good that you do for others can’t help but come back to you.

The Reputation Piece

What kind of professional reputation do you have, or would you like to build? Your professional brand is basically what people think of when your name comes up: your character, values, judgment, intelligence, reliability, creativity, and similar significant characteristics.

You build your professional reputation by the work that you do, your visibility within the field, your communications (in person, in print, and online), and your engagements (read: associations in which you’re active, volunteer work, etc.). The longer you work in the LIS profession, the more engagement you’re involved in, and the more actively you establish your online presence, the stronger your professional or career brand will be.

Putting Them All Together

The good work you do, the strong relationships you nurture, and the professional reputation you build provide the sturdy platform you’ll need to continue to build your work opportunities over a decades-long career. Multiplied over years of work engagements, your growing professional equity will be the greatest asset you have for creating a sustainable career.

• You need a master’s degree to work in a library?
• You’ll never get a job (or one that pays anything)
• It’s stupid to go to graduate school at your age
• What on earth are you going to do with that?
• Are there even go to be libraries anymore?
• Why would you need a degree in that, everything’s on the Internet!

Okay, my favorite was my (former) husband’s request that I not tell anyone that I was getting a master’s degree in library and information science because it “sounded like a kindergarten degree” and embarrassed him.

At the time, I was too young to know how to verbally stand up for myself (and insufficiently experienced in martial arts to whop him upside the head with a well-placed kick). But actually he was just one of hundreds of friends, family members, bosses, co-workers, mothers-in-law, kids, and others who don’t get why we’d “waste our time” on an MLIS, and would much prefer that we do something related to either 1) meeting their needs, 2) getting a job right now that contributes to family finances, or 3) pursuing a degree that they can brag about.

So I thought I’d go on the record with why I’m really glad I got an MLIS, and why I would do it again in a heartbeat.

• Information is the world’s currency, and an MLIS can position you in a multiplicity of ways to become part of the flow of that currency. You can do it in ways that pay you $38K a year or $125K a year, depending on your interests and skills. I’ve used my degree in at least 15 different directions, had a blast, and made grown-up money in the process.

• MLIS skills can be deployed in all types of organizations, including libraries, can be endlessly repurposed, and can be easily updated (we know how to find and use information to learn cool new stuff!). You can choose which of hundreds of potential career paths to pursue, or create your own.

• MLIS skills lend themselves to independent work, should you have an entrepreneurial streak. Or you can do freelance work on the side, in addition to your day job, or plan for part-time information gigs in your retirement.

• MLIS skills are broad-based rather than rigidly focused (read: MBA), so in a world where all the boundaries are dissolving and new opportunities are replacing old established structures, MLIS skills can be endlessly adaptable. With a bit of career exploration and networking, you can come up with multiple alternative ways to deploy your skills.

• MLIS skills make a terrific foundation upon which to layer or build additional expertise or specializations. In any other professional setting, you’ll always be the one who can dazzle the team with your information magic.

• Librarians and other information professionals as a community are amazingly willing to share knowledge, support each other, and generally are much more collegiate in every situation. It means you can extend the reach of your knowledge by tapping your support network.

• MLIS skills lend themselves to supporting life circumstances – you can move from part-time work to full-time work to freelance or project work, and still be professionally active and engaged.

• We always get to look smart to people who don’t have a clue how to find, evaluate, organize, or manage information. They think we can do magic (and who are we to tell them otherwise?).

• There is so much upheaval going on in the profession, so many new technology, programming, and outreach experiments taking place, that it’s like working in a constantly changing, challenging environment where we have pretty much no idea how things are going to turn out – how many career paths offer that level of adventure?

• Lastly, I believe information is the most powerful, positive change agent we have in the world, and the more effective I am at using it, the better I can serve my community and the world at large to effect positive change at every level. I learned that in my MLIS program.

Bottom line: this is a time of upheaval for the profession, and it’s easy to focus on the jobs that are contracting, the challenges in finding entry-level jobs, and the poor pay in traditional libraries. But by taking a broader view of the career possibilities, including traditional librarianship, it’s easy to make the case that an MLIS is truly an investment in a future of opportunities and solid income.

And for those who think you’re too old to go to graduate school, or you’re wasting money, or you should be at home taking care of them (like you always have), understand that they’re probably not going to change their minds until you bring in those first paychecks. That doesn’t make them bad people, it just means that you’re going to have to have the confidence and commitment to pursue your studies without their support. Easier to do if you keep in mind that you’ve got the support of all the rest of us who’ve been there and done that. Trust me: your dreams are worth the effort you’re making.

Recently I had an opportunity to work with a young woman who had just graduated from an MLIS program. She was unsure of how to proceed with her job search given the precarious job market for librarians (and everybody else).

This young woman had never worked in a library before, and, like many of us when we complete our degrees, wanted to get a job in the same town where her university was located. But the reality is that with little or no library experience and facing the stiff competition that comes in an area flooded with fellow MLIS graduates, this young woman’s job prospects would be dim at best.

In fact, probably her best opportunities lie in a direction often avoided if not dismissed by recent grads: working for a library in Smalltown, USA.

The Starter MLIS Job
A starter job is the one you take when you’ve got little or no experience, so need to build up this aspect of your professional value. It may offer few of the elements you’re might want to go after in subsequent jobs throughout your career (high salary, cutting-edge projects, flexible hours, etc.), but it provides something else of high value: the opportunity to establish for yourself and others who you are as a professional.

A starter job can be of fairly short duration, which can be one of its attractions – if you find you really don’t like the place you’ve landed, you can comfort yourself that most of us can put up with anything for two years. (On the other hand, you may be surprised to find that the job and town you thought would bore you to death turned out to be a delightful community with a wonderful library, and you’d like to build a career there.)

Regardless, when you take a starter job, consider it a terrific opportunity to identify and practice those professional behaviors and attitudes that will help you succeed in the coming years.

Put together an agenda for what you want to accomplish/learn/practice over a given period of time – say two years. Then, if you love your job, you’ll have positioned yourself to continue to grow in value to your employer – and if you don’t love your job, you’ll have prepared yourself to move on to a better position.

The Starter Job Agenda
Here are some ideas for what you might want to consider as action items:

• Try out as many roles as you can, and then note what you enjoy and what you do not. What do you enjoy enough that it might be an area you’d like to explore further?

• Establish your professional persona, for yourself – establish and practice positive habits, expectations of yourself, and “best practices” for how you handle your career. This is a wonderful opportunity for you to watch and learn from others, good and bad.

• Focus on the lessons you learn about yourself and how you respond to circumstance around you – if you don’t like what you’re discovering about yourself, determine better responses and practice them.

• Learn everything you can about management by observing the managers around you, and how their actions are or are not successful and effective. (Trust me here – you may start out your career wanting to avoid any management responsibilities, but they tend to sneak up on you when you’re least anticipating them.)

• Start building your professional brand by writing, presenting, researching, and collaborating on topics that interest you, and for which you’d like to become known.

• Start building your community of colleagues. Establish positive, supportive relationships with the people you work with, but also consider joining regional and national professional groups in your area of interest. When you volunteer, no one cares how much experience you have – they’re just thrilled to have you on board!

• Become known as a great person to work with – focus on building rather than burning bridges.

• Start bulking up your portfolio of professional capabilities and accomplishments – on the job if possible, outside the job if not.

• Learn to work with all types of personalities, a skill that will be critical to you over a decades-long career. Anyone who’s played team sports knows that you don’t have to like a team-mate to win a game with her; it’s the same thing with work. If you’ve got a problem co-worker, disengage emotionally, stop taking it personally, and embrace it as an opportunity to practice a very important job skill.

• Learn how to work with a boss. In general, this means (besides just generally doing a good job) 1) learning how to provide the information he or she needs in the preferred manner, and the preferred frequency; 2) making sure your boss is always up to date on any situations that may come up with his or her boss; and 3) whenever possible, making your boss look good. (Corollary here: try never to make your boss look bad….)

• Learn self-management. Be honest with yourself regarding your professional strengths and weaknesses, and practice how to manage your weaknesses and play to your strengths. If in doubt about these, ask a trusted colleague, mentor, or boss.

• Develop an attitude of respect for the knowledge of everyone you work with. No matter how smart you were in grad school, you’ve still got a lot to learn. People will always be much more willing to respect the new knowledge you may bring with you if you first bend over backward to make it clear that you respect their hard-won knowledge.

• Learn how to collaborate within and across teams. Being seen as a strong and positive contributor willing to share information, experience, and credit will cause people to trust you and seek out your participation.

Bottom line: understand that paying dues is an honorable and wise activity. Your job is to learn, to establish your professional persona, to contribute to the best of your ability, and to become known as a strong, valuable contributor who employers will hate to lose.

Then when you’re ready to move on from that starter job, you will have built a solid career base from which to launch, and will have a folder-full of people eager to write letters of recommendation for you, the now-experienced information professional.

In fifteen chapters, the authors provide detailed, practical career advice that comes across as a cross between coaching, mentoring, and okay, (in the nicest possible way), a bit of nagging. But it’s clear that their goal is to help readers avoid career potholes if possible. To that end, the tone and format is strongly prescriptive, letting readers know in no uncertain terms how certain situations should be handled in order to help ensure career success.

Numerous insights about the profession are interwoven throughout, for example:

When you choose a profession that isn’t instantly and universally recognized for its work and value (the way, say, veterinarians’ and engineers’ professions are), you set yourself up for a fair amount of future work some professionals don’t typically have to do – justifying your value and making the case why you should be hired or your department’s budget sustained or increased.

Chapter topics include overviews of the profession (including its challenges and opportunities), self-assessment and career fit, professional branding, job-hunting, navigating workplace politics, becoming a manager, salary issues, and mentoring, among other topics. “Career snapshots” for 15 practitioners provide real-life career stories (and advice), and the final chapter features the two authors’ individual career stories.

Reading The Information and Knowledge Professional’s Handbook is like hanging out with two really smart, experienced, and wise mentors who aren’t going to sugarcoat any of their advice – because they know you really need the real deal. The information they provide is practical, actionable, and from this professional’s experience, spot on. A recommended addition to the literature of LIS career development.

The Information and Knowledge Professional’s Career Handbook: Define and Create Your Success. By Ulla de Stricker and Jill Hurst-Wahl. Chandos Information Professional Series, 2011. 283p. ISBN 978-1-84334-608-1.

What should you look for when considering potential mentors?

Are they interested in you? Choose a mentor who has at some previous point expressed an interest in you, and in your career. This may seem like a no-brainer, but often the person who may be most strategically valuable in terms of knowledge or connections simply doesn’t possess the people skills – or interest – to mentor you effectively. You need to work with someone with whom you can build a trusting relationship, so you feel safe asking questions and exposing areas of “weakness” or lack of knowledge.

Can they cheer for your successes? Choose a mentor who has enough confidence in himself or herself not to be jealous of your growth and success. Some people enjoying being mentors because it feeds their egos to have someone (often younger) asking them for advice and counsel, but then lose interest as their protégé begins to mature and succeed. If the mentoring relationship is based on egos or competition, it destroys trust and honesty.

Are they strong in the right places? Choose a mentor who has strengths in the areas where you feel you need to grow. For example, if you want to learn more about navigating corporate politics, choose someone who has spent years successfully building collaborative relationships and projects in a corporation rather than someone known as a brilliant entrepreneur but with less-than-effective communication skills.

Do they think you’re cool, rather than weird? Choose a mentor who gets you. In his series of books leading off with First, Break All the Rules, co-author Marcus Buckingham makes the point that most managers are taught to help you fix your weaknesses rather than focus on and provide an environment for enhancing your strengths.

As a variation on this theme, a mentor’s job is not to change who you are, but to understand who you are and help you learn or devise ways to minimize the impact of your weaknesses and maximize that of your strengths. But this, of course, means it’s up to you to identify those potential mentors who will support both who you are and who you’re trying to become.

Are they open to lots of possibilities? Choose a mentor who won’t have preconceived ideas about what path your career should take. The mentoring relationship should be one of exploration and possibility rather than one where your mentor “shoehorns” you into his or her idea of your perfect career path.

Do they match up with your growth interests? Decide what kind of counsel you’d like from your mentor. Do you need someone to help you understand how to most effectively deal with a specific workplace issue, for example, how to transition into a new role within the company, or someone to help you grow your leadership skills? Or perhaps you need someone who has had a diverse career to help you think through your various career options? Once you have clearly in mind what your interests and goals are, your potential mentor will have a much better idea of whether he or she is the best person to help.

Also, consider whether several mentors might serve your needs better than just one. For example, you may have one co-worker who is especially adept at gender communication issues, a higher-up who is known for his project management skills, or someone not in your organization who is an effective leader in multiple environments. Each of these individuals can be mentors to you in specific areas if they are willing and interested, and each will be able to address a different area of expertise and professional growth with you.

Perfect timing for a New Year’s resolution to be a more diligent blogger, yes? Maybe, maybe not.

In thinking about New Year’s resolutions, I realized that rather than focus on getting exceedingly good at doing things I already know how to do, I’d rather focus my energies on trying to create new opportunities and ideas and solutions.

This approach was reconfirmed for me recently by friend and colleague Scott Brown, who was a guest speaker for my class. When asked what advice he had for those about to embark on their LIS careers, he mentioned many wise points, but then in conclusion suggested that students just “say yes” to opportunity.

Basically, don’t worry about being perfect, or perfectly prepared – just take a deep breath and make the leap when you’re presented with (or have created) an opportunity to contribute at a new level.

So although I’d love to say 2011 is the year I’m going to consistently post a weekly piece, I know better. It’s just way too likely that, if it’s a great year, I’ll get distracted by a cool new project, or a friend who needs some brainstorming time, or a new teaching opportunity, or an idea for a new book I could write or service I could offer.

But from my perspective, that’s what makes being an information professional so terrific – the opportunities, though often unforeseen and unanticipated as we plan the coming year, are also unlimited and exciting.

So here’s to a coming year for all of us that is filled with unlimited and exciting professional opportunity. Or, barring that, job security and even possibly a raise! (Oh, and regular blog posts….)

Get Visible
One of the biggest challenges in growing your career is getting people to be aware of you – to know who you are and what you can contribute. The best way to overcome anonymity is to get yourself on people’s radar before you want to approach them for a job or a project. You want to become visible to them in a neutral setting (i.e., one where they’re not being asked to make a decision about your value) so they have a chance to be impressed without you having to tell them how terrific you are. Remember that line from your creative writing class, “Don’t tell me, show me?” Well it’s a similar concept here.

How to accomplish this? First, volunteer. Every time you have a chance to demonstrate your information expertise, people skills, and willingness to go the extra mile, you’ve just registered with your fellow volunteers (and the project leaders) as someone of distinction. In addition, if you’re volunteering your information skills in a non-LIS environment, you’ll usually be the only person the rest of the team knows who can figure out how to research/gather/organize/deploy information.

This not only makes you a very valuable addition to the volunteer group, it also means you’ll be the person your fellow volunteers think to call if they need an information person in their work environment.

Second, consider creating an online resume for one of the professional social networking sites, for example, LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). Although they’re intended to support power networking activities, many of us use it instead as a place to post a publicly available, beefed-up resume.

Although I have a website for my book (www.rethinkinginformationwork.com) that includes a bio for me, my LinkedIn profile is easier to get to, more specific about the kinds of work/projects I’m interested in, and allows me to highlight key professional themes and interests. Then if I meet someone who would like to know more about me, my LinkedIn profile will showcase the strengths I’d like to be known without me having to bend their ear with a snarky elevator speech.

Third, create opportunities to write or speak or otherwise contribute meaningful information to the LIS community. Write or present about something that interests you and about which you’ve made the effort to become informed; readers will associate your name with that topic, and with an expertise in that area. It builds both credibility and visibility for you – and you never know who’s going to be in the audience, looking for someone with just the expertise you’re demonstrating….

Monitor Your Environment
In order to be standing in the path of opportunity, you have to have at least some idea of where it might be coming from. The best way to do this is to engage in an ongoing environmental scan, or monitoring of print and online resources, as well as paying attention to what people are talking about at conferences and around the water cooler or circ desk. Think magazines and journals; blogs, listservs, e-newsletters, and podcasts; and, if you can’t make it to the conferences, the conference programs posted on the web.

Whether print or online, it helps to read not just LIS resources, but also material from such areas as business, marketing, technology, demographics, science, psychology, social issues, etc. These resources offer two benefits: first, no matter what sort of LIS work you do, it’s likely that changes and/or trends in one or more of these areas will sooner or later impact your career, and second, sometimes an idea that comes out of, say, the business world may have resonance in a non-business setting – perhaps it will be an idea that you can apply to create an innovative solution or new opportunity.

As you do your environmental scan, keep in mind that opportunities are almost always the result of some sort of change. So as you read, keep an eye out for changes that may seem small at the time but will grow to have a larger impact. To quote management guru Peter Drucker: “I never predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible – but not yet seen.”

Be Prepared to Act
Just as chance favors the prepared mind (thank you, Louis Pasteur), opportunity favors the prepared LIS professional.

Train yourself to deal positively with change, so that you’re able to put your energy into responding to opportunity rather than into resisting changes headed your way. Consider experimenting with changes now that you create in order to get used to your change process. That way you’ll be in a much better position to shift your energy from a negative to a positive response when change opens up new opportunities.

Make sure you’ve created a personal brand that showcases you as a positive professional who is energized by new challenges. You want to be the person who springs to mind when a new initiative is being considered, because you have demonstrated through your actions and attitudes that you are capable, responsible, and thrive on challenge.

Last, if your environmental scanning has identified some potential emerging opportunities that you’d like to pursue, do a skills analysis to see if you need to pick up more education in order to meet the requirements for the position you might seek. If needed, go get it.

Take the Initiative
Opportunity may be driven by change, but change also drives other less positive outcomes – like our duck-and-cover response. But this is no time to duck; as Alan Watts pointed out, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

What the heck, why not step forward and offer to lead the dance? Pull together a team, develop innovative solutions, chart a new path. Don’t wait to be asked to participate – take the initiative to meet the opportunity. And if none seem to be looming on the horizon? Don’t be afraid to create your own.

Sometimes it happens just by accident. You start out doing one job, and then you end up being the person who just happens to be good at that new thing that needed to be done, and your career takes off heading in a new direction. Or you volunteer for a project and then realize that you not only love the new work you’re doing, you’re also pretty darn good at it – so you keep doing it. Or you’re promoted into a position that at first feels way over your head but then ends up being a perfect match for your growing professional skills. In each instance, you’re reinventing your career.

Other times, however, reinventing yourself – creating that next act – becomes a purposeful choice. Perhaps you’ve simply outgrown the job you’ve been in for years, and are ready to explore the question of what type of work or work environment might re-engage you. Or perhaps a change in your job (new boss? new leadership? new expectations? new mission?) has left you feeling like it’s time to consider other, more rewarding, options. Or perhaps your personal circumstances have changed, so that what worked for you previously no longer meets your requirements.

For whatever reason, you’re ready to reinvent your career.

The question then becomes not so much can you reinvent yourself, but rather in what direction you’d like to reinvent yourself. The great news is that the LIS profession offers so many possible directions, you’ll have plenty of options to choose from. It’s simply a matter of figuring out what you’d like that second (or third, fourth, or fifth) act to look like, then plotting your strategy for getting from here to there.

Start Asking Questions

For starters, you need to ask yourself some questions, along the lines of:

You’ll probably be stumped by a number of these questions when you first start exploring them, so consider breaking them down into three parts: what am I trying to determine or learn more about, how will I find that out, and what actions will I take to do the “finding out” part.

For example, if one of your questions is “would I like to try something different with my LIS skills,” you might find out by reading about other types of LIS work. The actions you might take would be to read A Day in the Life: Career Options in Library and Information Science by Priscilla K. Shontz and Richard A. Murray (2007, Libraries Unlimited) and back issues of Rachel Singer Gordon’s monthly e-newsletter Info Career Trends , which has great archives of articles that feature people talking about their jobs.

So far you’ve focused on questions that consider job direction. But it also helps to ask yourself some questions that focus on who you are, and what brings you happiness. Some of those questions might include:

Exploring these and other similar questions will help you get at the key issue of reinventing your LIS career – how to make a change that’s built on positive knowledge. Often when you feel driven to reinvent your career, it’s to get away from an awful situation; no surprise, we’ve all been there. But a better solution is to take responsibility for your current circumstances, learn the lessons it offers, and then shift your emotional energy into creating a second act, your reinvented career, that’s more closely aligned with who you are and what you need.

Second acts? Absolutely, especially since most of us will probably be working for forty or fifty years. Learning how to reinvent our careers as we (and our profession) continue to change may be the most effective skill we have for staying engaged and effective, regardless of how many acts we’ve seen.

However, I think a more valid (and useful) way of framing this is that we may, in fact, be much likelier to have at least seven career extensions throughout our working lives. With that frame, I’ve had at least seven so far, and have friends and colleagues who’ve had even more as new opportunities have opened up (or been created by them).

Career Change versus Career Extension
A career change means starting over from scratch in a career unrelated to the one you’ve been engaged in previously – think going from neurosurgeon to organic peach farmer. You’ve got to learn new skills, understand a new operating universe or profession, and essentially build your brand and visibility again from scratch.

A career extension, however, is a much likelier scenario for many of us given the, ah, iffy economy – an economy as devastating for librarians as it has been for auto workers, journalists, and mortgage brokers. A career extension involves identifying your current career strengths – what you know, who you know, what you are known for – and extending that “professional equity” into a related field where those strengths will still be recognized and respected.

Think Transferable Skills
The basis of career extension is transferable skills – those skills you possess that can be equally valuable in environments, organizations, or situations other than traditional or special librarianship. The closer those environments, organizations, and/or situations are to your home base (i.e., traditional or special librarianship), the more likely that your strengths will be valued, and that you will be compensated commensurately. Essentially, in a career change, you’re starting from scratch and paying dues all over again; in a career extension, you’re making a lateral move that keeps you at least somewhere in the same spot in terms of recognized expertise.

In my career, more by blind luck than any strategic thinking on my part, I’ve had the following career extensions based on my core ability to find, create, and/or organize information:

Publishing – magazines and books.

Corporate – information advisor to a cable telecom CEO, who originally hired me to set up a publishing group for him.

Special librarianship – started an information center for a cable telecom museum, based on my knowledge of both librarianship and the cable telecom industry.

Academia – designed and now teach a course in alternative career paths, based on my alternative career paths.

Academia – recruited to run the MLIS program for University of Denver on an interim basis, based on being an advisory board member and teaching the Alternative Careers course, which meant I could understand both the administrative and student perspectives.

Creator of first virtual academic library – recruited to conceptualize, design, and implement first virtual library based on my knowledge of academic libraries, academic programs, and corporate business strategy (this was for a private-sector university).

Independent creator of online content – based on knowledge gained on virtual library project, began working as an independent consultant for companies doing online content projects.

Became head of online information portal for people with disabilities – took my online content development skills into a new experience universe, i.e., disability, and had to quickly learn all aspects of this world, including information resources, information gaps and needs, key players and thought leaders (for collaboration), and relevant government agencies and resources; in addition, had to quickly learn social media/marketing, community building, and search engine optimization techniques.

Started working part-time for a PR firm based on my content development skills and the social-media/marketing, community building, and SEO techniques I had learned in previous position.

Okay, if we count my two academias as one, that’s eight career extensions in about 25 years (I was 12 when I started….). Also, based on the course that I started teaching at DU on Alternative LIS Careers, I wrote a book and am now under contract for a second one and have given workshops around the country for conferences and LIS grad students on alternative LIS careers and career design topics.

But most interesting from the perspective of “career topic” extension, I’ve now been asked to give webinars on career topics to students at a really cool career college, because they felt that the basics of the message – how to create a resilient career – would be the same for everyone. Turns out they’re right. So now I’m in the process of deciding whether I should consider this as another career extension, and create content relevant to the needs and interests of all students, not just LIS ones.

Bottom line: if you feel like you’d like to explore career paths outside of librarianship, whether traditional or special, think about related disciplines if possible. These are likely to recognize the value of what you do, and won’t cause you to have to begin building your career all over again from scratch. Career extension allows you to build on the professional equity you’ve already created, and allows you to keep contributing at a level that reflects your true worth.