Expand Your Career Potential Recap

Last week SLASG hosted a viewing party for the DC/SLA Chapter webinar Expand Your Career Potential. Despite some technical difficulties on both ends, the presentation given by Deb Hunt (current SLA president) and Dave Grossman (SLA-SF chapter member), offered a lot of great advice and tips about acquiring skills to make yourself a better information professional (and one that's more desirable to hiring managers). Not everyone was able to attend our viewing party, but here are some key points from the presentations.

Basic library-related skills you gain by earning an MLS or MIS are usually required for library positions. Because you have an MLS or MIS, hiring managers expect that all applicants have those skills. To stand out in the job market, you need to highlight your skills beyond what you learned in SLIS. These skills discussed in the webinar fall into three basic categories: "beyond reference," business/management, and critical intangible skills. Some of those skill are:

• Beyond Reference skills:
• Research & analysis
• Competitive intelligence
• Results driven problem solving
• Thinking outside the box
  
• Business/Management skills:
•  Marketing & sales
• Mangement & supervisory
•  Project management
• Communications/Public speaking & presentations
• Strategic planning
  
• Critical Intangible skills:
• Effective writing
• Meeting & event planning
• Teaching users not to rely on Google, Wikipedia and other such resources

If you feel you're lacking in any of these skills or other skills you feel are important, it's never to late to strengthen or obtain them. Many of us are lucky enough to have some time left in SLIS to figure out which courses can help reenforce the skills we want to acquire. But it is important (and necessary if you've finished or are in your last semester of the program) to look outside of SLIS to gain these skills.

There are a number of strategies for acquiring or improving your skills. Here are a few suggestions from the webinar:

• Reading professional publications and online articles
• Attending webinars, there are several free ones offered through professional organizations like SLA chapters and from vendor companies. Webinars from vendors might not always be about a product you use, but you might use it someday and having a perfunctory understanding of it could give you an edge in the job market
• Taking classes, in and outside of SLIS
• Attending library and SLIS workshops
• Writing/blogging, on your own or for, I don't know, the SLASG Blog
• Networking in person and online. It's not as hard as it sounds!
• Finding a mentor or colleague to show you or tell you about the ropes
• Volunteering
• Internships. If after you start working you realize there might be another path for you, volunteering and taking internships is a way to quickly learn new skills

The important think about expanding your career potential is to not stop doing it. The information field is particularly dynamic and the importance of continuing education can't be understated. It's never too early to get your skillz on.

Member Spotlight: Alexandra Hauser

Name: Alexandra Hauser

Degree: MLS

Anticipated graduation date: May 2013

I'm originally from southeast Michigan and earned my bachelor's degree in History from Michigan State University in 2010.  I've been trying to gain a variety of experience working libraries so I hold a variety of positions within the IUB Libraries.  I'm a Library Services Team Leader at the Geosciences Library, a Student Supervisor at Media & Reserve Services in the Herman B Wells Library, and I am also an Instruction Assistant within the Teaching & Learning department at the Wells Library.  I'm also currently the Treasurer for the Special Libraries Association Student Group here at Indiana University Bloomington SLIS.

During my time at SLIS I've focused mainly on academic libraries and have only recently discovered special libraries and all that they have to offer. I'm interested in corporate libraries and the idea of really drilling down to focus on a particular market or product and providing research and information to those involved in that field. I am also particularly interested in promoting information literacy, that is providing people with the skills and training to use various information resources confidently to locate accurate, relevant, and quality information and use it effectively.

I have really enjoyed working toward my professional identity here at SLIS. I was able to start achieving this through the publication of two papers "Beyond gatekeepers of knowledge: Scholarly communication practices of academic librarians and archivists at ARL institutions", a product of my Spring 2012 Scholarly Communication class,  was accepted by College and Research Libraries in August 2012 and is awaiting publication.  "Scholarish: Google Scholar and its value for the sciences", written with my Science & Technology information class, was published in the Summer 2012 issue of Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.  Excitingly, we were also asked to write a follow-up blog post based on Scholarish for the London School of Economics' Impact of Social Sciences blog.

I'd love to hold a position where I can continue teaching and promoting information literacy.

You can find me on LinkedIn under Alexandra Hauser or following the link here. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alexandra-hauser/2a/490/a91