Faculty make-up. There are a number of elements to consider here. In the academic universe, scholarly/research credentials signify accomplishment and value. However, if a program has mostly full-time tenured faculty who focus primarily on scholarly work (which undoubtedly has value), they’ll be unlikely to have many professional connections or experience outside academia, which means they’ll not be able to help much when it comes to helping you find great internships and/or jobs. Another consideration is who teaches in the subject area that interest you? Are they publishing interesting papers, exploring new applications, leading interesting projects (that you could participate in)?

A third consideration is how many adjunct faculty teach in the program, and the quality of their teaching. Adjunct faculty are usually practitioners who have had successful experience in the topic they’re teaching, and can bring real-life insights (and a practitioner’s network of connections) to the subject at hand. On the other hand, some adjuncts can have poor teaching skills, poor communication skills, and little understanding of how to help students master the material. So if you’re getting serious about a program, you’ll want to learn more about the faculty, and perhaps research them online to see if their strengths align with what you’ll be looking for.

Career services. The level (and effectiveness) of career support for students differs radically from school to school. Some MLIS programs have dedicated career-services counselors, others share one of the main campus’s career-center staffers. Some schools provide a tremendous amount of career information and support resources online (see, for example, San Jose State University’s Career Development section on its website), others almost none. So when talking with a program representative about their strengths, be sure to ask about what resources and support they provide for career counseling and job placement.

Internships. Internships are a dynamite way to 1) gain job experience, 2) test out potential career paths, and 3) build professional connections. Does the program have internships set up with organizations that reflect your career-path interests? Are the internships paid or unpaid, virtual or onsite or a blend of both? If possible, ask to speak to someone who’s done an internship in your area of interest. If the school doesn’t help with internships or practicum placements, it’s sending a pretty clear signal that you’re going to be on your own when it comes to finding a job when you graduate.

Corporate relations. Related to the internship question, does the program have any relationships established with key employers? If so, how will those relationships benefit you as a student? That might be internships, opportunities to participate in real-life business projects, working with professional mentors, willingness to do information interviews with you, or even job placement for top students. Your job is to see if these relationships are in place, and how they benefit program students and graduates.

Professional associations. Does the program have active student chapters of the professional associations relevant to your interests? If not, this can either signify a great opportunity for you to step into a leadership role and create the chapter or it can indicate that no one else in the program shares your professional interests, which might mean it’s not the right school for you.

Alumni network. A great alumni network can be a major career asset for students. Alumni can mentor students, be available for informational interviews, make wonderful guest speakers, and connect you to their professional network for job contacts. They can also show you career directions and paths you might not have considered. So you’ll want to ask about the program’s alumni network – what is it, how does it work, and would it be possible to speak with some alumni in your potential field.

Employment statistics. Where do students go to work once they’ve graduated (what organizations or types of organizations, what roles or job titles)? How long on average did it take them to get a job? Some schools don’t have this information, but if they can discuss even anecdotal data with you, it means that they realize how important it is for students (and prospective students) to find decent jobs as quickly as possible when they graduate.

Advisory board make-up. Who’s on the advisory board for the program? Is it mostly people from industry, mostly from traditional libraries, a mix? Any non-LIS folks? The make-up of the advisory board can often signal what types of LIS paths are most highly emphasized in the program.

Technology focus. This is two questions. First, how much is technology is used in the program? Organizations today are looking for employees who are adept at using a wide range of collaborative and communications technologies, and it’s a lot easier to master these tools in grad school where there is faculty and IT-department support. Second, how many courses in the program focus on technology-based LIS skills? If few, you have to assume that you’ll be graduating without the most in-demand professional knowledge and skill set, and will be competing for jobs against other new grads who do have those skills.

The question is – between classes, internships, possible family commitments, and other obligations, who’s got the time?!

Grab Every Opportunity to Build Your Portfolio
If possible, see if you can turn some of your course assignments or school activities into portfolio fodder. Some ideas:

• Volunteer to organization a campus-based or virtual career day. This offers you multiple benefits. First, it demonstrates those in-demand professional skills of leadership, project management, and personal initiative. Second, it gives you a terrific excuse to reach out to local LIS professionals who will then get to see you demonstrate those skills firsthand. You’ve just added great contacts to your budding professional network and contributed to your professional brand as a high-value contributor.

• Get active in the local (or student) chapter of one of the profession’s associations. ALA? SLA? ASIST? MLA? AALL? Contact the programming person and offer to give a presentation on the topic of your best student paper. Or revise it for a professional audience (rather than academic), and submit it for publication in a student newsletter or the association’s magazine as the voice of the new generation of students. From a portfolio-building perspective, this allows you to point to public speaking skills and/or professional-level writing and communication skills.

• Look for cool projects to work on. If one of your teachers talks about an innovative project he or she is working on, see if you can wrangle a spot on the team. Although you may not have a lot of spare time you can volunteer, offer to do some level of work that’s manageable for you. Or, look around your community to see what new initiatives might be going on that you could lend your skills to at a modest time-commitment level. Being able to point to participation in innovative projects in your portfolio documents your interest in and willingness to engage in new ideas and opportunities, while demonstrating that you can apply what you’re learning.

• Repurpose your assignments. Think up variations on your assignments that let you demonstrate a certain type of expertise, then sell the idea to your instructor (making sure that you’re staying faithful to what he or she is trying to make sure you learn!). Do you want your career direction to focus on research, or community outreach, or technology innovation, or new approaches to information literacy programs for immigrant communities? Then see if any of your assignments lend themselves to this type of work or engagement, so your portfolio will demonstrate that you’ve already been developing an expertise in this area.

These ideas are examples of how to think about creating a portfolio of accomplishment that will demonstrate to a prospective employer just how much of a contributor you can be, and have been. It’s the difference between saying “I learned how to do XYZ” in college and “let me show/tell you what I can do with XYZ.”

I asked Kelly to do a bit of “virtual career coaching” for students by providing some practical advice on how to make the most of a program’s career services.

In Kelly’s words:

You’re sitting in the lobby waiting for your name to be called. Your hands are sweaty, your heart is racing. Will you know the answers to their questions? Will you be a good fit for the position? You are nervous. Of course, you’ve spent a considerable amount of time preparing for this interview. You’ll be great in this situation. However, the one “interview” that you may not have spent enough time preparing for is your first meeting with your career counselor – and it never even crossed your mind to be nervous. You may not consider it an interview, but this really is your chance to be interviewed by – and interview – a professional who can make your future job search much more successful. And, just like an interview, both parties should get to ask question. The employer asks you questions about your qualifications; you ask questions to determine if it’s an ideal situation for you to work.

I’ve been a career counselor for nine years. In those nine years, I’ve met with a multitude of students, some prepared and eager to meet with me, and some merely in my office because their parents told them to see me or they saw me speak at orientation and wanted to see what I can do to help them. I can do a lot for you; I’m a wealth of information regarding job search strategies, negotiation tips, networking contacts, and resources to make your search easier. However, if I don’t get the opportunity to ask you some questions and you don’t ask me the right questions, I can’t answer help you as best I can. I’ll try my best to anticipate what it is that I think you need to know, but that’s not always effective depending on your personality, experience, or the depth of our relationship.

Therefore, you should prepare for your “interview” with your career counselor. A good career counselor will start the session off with questions to get to know you, sometimes asking “Tell me about yourself,” just as an interview commonly starts. Other questions will include, “What’s your experience job searching?”, “Why are you at this school?”, “What do you want to do when you graduate?”, and “What can I help you with?” Having thought about your answers to these questions before you arrive will help me best provide you with assistance and for you to maximize our time together – and if I don’t ask you these questions, offer the information anyway as it will be helpful in our meeting. Know that a career counselor can help you with everything from general career exploration questions, resources for finding internship and job leads, resume and cover letter writing, portfolio preparation (paper and electronic), interview preparation, networking tips, salary negotiation, and preparation for your next career move. You should utilize your career counselor for every step of your job search process; another set of eyes and ears will never hurt as you work through the sometimes anxiety-ridden and unfamiliar territory of the job search.

Now what about what you should be asking me? To maximize your time with your career counselor, make sure to ask these three question:

What are my strengths and how can I best articulate them?
I find that even at the graduate level, the population I work with now, students do not know their strengths. As a mid-career professional, sometimes even I feel like I’m just figuring out exactly what makes me tick. People know functional what they are good at – they can code script like no one else, they can work through accounting principles like a whiz, or they are an amazing writer – because someone gave them a good grade in these areas. These are hard skills that have been taught through coursework. However, you also need to know your inherent strengths, sometimes also known as soft skills, which are not commonly graded or overtly recognized. These include things such as attention to detail, being a good negotiator, the ability to analyze complex information, and many others. You’ll find that as you progress through you career, after an organization has done a review of your hard/functional skills in an initial interview – sometimes much more minimally than you expect – they really want to get to know your strengths and find out if you are a good employee. Being able to clearly articulate your strengths will impress an employer in an interview and allow for you to show your worth beyond the fact that you can write really nice PowerPoint presentations. A career counselor can introduce to you assessments to help you identify your strengths and then can coach you through exercises that will help you be able to articulate the value of these strengths in any situation, from an elevator pitch, at a career fair, in a cover letter, and finally in an interview.

How can I make my interviewing better?
Time and time again, in my appointments with students, I nit-pick over their resume and cover letter. This is good, but these materials will only get you the interview, not the job. After the resume is perfect, it’s common for students to stop visiting me until I hear that they’ve had several interviews but no offers, a situation that can be disheartening and frustrating and can cause unnecessary plummeting of self-confidence. In this situation, the student missed out on a key step of preparation: interview practice. Preparation for interviewing is not something that should be done solo. Get someone to help you; even if you spend hours researching and practicing, if you don’t share with someone the answers that you plan to say, then you might just say the wrong thing. Bring your resume, cover letter, and a copy of the job description to your career counselor and let them ask you questions and help you prepare solid answers. In my experiences, people often undersell themselves, or don’t articulate their skills and strengths in alignment with the position and organization well enough. A career counselor will guide you through this experience to ensure that you are well prepared to impress.

When can I see you again?
Studies show that the number of job offers a student receives is in direct relation to the number of times they visited there career office. Therefore, make it a point that your career counselor knows you. This doesn’t mean that you need to stop by their office every day; however, they should know your resume/experiences well and also have a strong sense of your desired internship and career outcomes. During peak season, I see five students a day, and up to 25 per week, not including the 20 to 50 that I see in workshops. Therefore, if you visit my office once during that peak time, I probably won’t remember you. In fact, I’ll probably remember your resume, but not your face. I have students that see me often, with new versions of their resume or cover letter to review, general questions to ask about which classes to take that align with their career goals, or to just touch base about their evolving interests. It doesn’t have to be a long meeting, but these check-ins allow me to get to know you beyond an initial meeting in which I give you general advice and tips. The benefit of this is that I can make personal recommendations for you and also point out resources and networking opportunities to you that are tailored to your interests. For example, one student who I’ve met with regularly over the past year has had a difficult internship search. At a conference I was at recently, I ran into a person that I had been on a committee with at my university and he mentioned that he had a project that needed to be completed that was right in this student’s field of interest. I was able to put the two in touch and voila! an internship resulted.

When you are in college, a portion of your tuition pays for the career center to exist, whether you use it or not. Most offices have a variety of staff that you can meet with, so if you don’t click with the career counselor that you meet with the first time, try another. Just don’t not visit, as you are missing out on valuable information and just visiting once won’t usually do the trick to allowing you to maximize this service. Being sure to ask these three questions over the time that you meet with your career counselor will ensure that you will have a successful job search.

The Web is our Campus.

This is an invitation to participate in the redefinitions of library school using the web as a collaborative space outside of any specific university or organization. Imagine standards and foundations of the profession that we will create, decided upon by us, outside of the institutional framework. Ideas like the democratization of the semantic web, crowdsourcing, and folksonomies allow projects like this to exist and we should be taking advantage of it. What will the information professions be next year if we define it for ourselves today? If we had a voice in the development of curriculum, what would that degree entail? This is our challenge to you; participate or come up with a better idea. How would you hack library school?

I’ve found the blog posts to be thoughtful, smart, and on topics that should resonate with every LIS student trying to determine just how his or her coursework is going to translate into opportunity in an information landscape changing at warp speed.

A good introduction to and background on this important blog can be found in Micah’s guest post on In the Library with the Leadpipe, another great group blog. Micah further notes that “HackLibSchool can also be a conceptual way to approach the curriculum, to engage with it for the purpose of adapting it to the needs and desires of the students.”

Recently Micah responded to my request for more information about the blog as follows:

What inspired you to create HackLibSchool? I was inspired by the way that people were collaborating on the web, especially in the digital humanities community. After following Profhacker, Hacking the Academy and other similar projects, I realized that this could work to get students together talking about and discussing issues in LIS. Really it was a “do what you know” sort of thought process – I wanted to be involved and so I took it upon myself to create the space where involvement could exist.

Who’s involved in blogging? Right now we have 8 LIS students who serve as “Editors” and regular contributors to the blog. We represent 8 different schools from across the US, and all have different foci and interests in the field. You can read the bios of our Editors here.

What outcomes would you like HackLibSchool to drive? Primarily, I’d like to create a community of LIS students, allowing for discourse on a variety of topics that relate to us as we transition from the classroom to the field. Tangentially, I’d love to see HLS and its community develop to bring real change to the library, archive, museum world as we continue to talk, discuss and share new ideas for how our institutions will function and remain relevant in the information economy. I really believe that fostering a space for open communication and sharing, and learning those habits as students, has the potential to have profound effects on our profession as we move into positions of leadership in institutions and organizations.

What kind of feedback are you getting from 1) students, 2) faculty, and 3) school administrators (e.g., deans, directors, etc.)? That’s a question I actually hadn’t thought about yet. Thus far, feedback from students has been excitement and desire to participate. We have an ever growing list of students and recent graduates interested in writing guest posts. Interestingly, I am not sure we’ve had very much feedback at all from faculty or administrators. My professors are very encouraging, but outside of that, I haven’t heard from many others.

Are you looking for more bloggers? We are always looking for more bloggers! The more voices the better!

Looks like you’re about to graduate soon, will you continue your involvement with HLS? The way I’d imagined it, is that I would serve as the Editor in Chief at least for the first year, and then I am hoping to be able to pass it on to a current student who is invested in the ideals and goals of HackLibSchool. I am really enjoying leading this project, often to the detriment of my schoolwork (oops!), but I know at some point I’ll have to step out and let an idealistic upstart take it over.

Any advice you’d give students regarding important take-aways from grad school? Advice? Do it yourself. I think coursework and lectures will only get you so far, and if you have really specific interests, as I did, you have to create those opportunities for yourself, in your program or outside of it. That’s the reason I moved to New York and really worked hard to develop my online presence. The most valuable thing I’ve learned is that information and access to it is fundamental to a productive society. And I intend to pursue that as a goal in whatever capacity of work I end up in.

Kim comment: Although ALA’s Committee on Accreditation (COA) has a central role in determining what curriculum is taught in MLIS programs, it’s increasingly clear that our LIS schools must have the flexibility to become more opportunistic and responsive to a swiftly changing LIS profession. It would be great to see some deans and faculty members jumping in to contribute to the Hack Library School conversation, and partnering with students to create transformative change in the curriculum.

I ran this question by several friends who are public and/or academic librarians, and the consensus seemed to be that while being able to pay your bills pretty much takes precedence over anything else, there are some strategies that will help you position yourself for an eventual transition to the type of work you seek should if you need to make this choice. Those strategies were:

Stay connected. Maintain your library association memberships, stay current with library issues, continue to hang out with your friends in the library community. Assume your current job is a temporary one, and that you need to remain engaged with issues of concern to you chosen professional community even if you’re not presently working within it.

Stay visible. If possible, maintain a blog on LIS topics that interest you, comment on others’ blogs, use social media to maintain an “LIS” presence. Find ways to work with your state library association on committees and roundtables, and participate in professional events.

Volunteer. A great way to demonstrate your continued interest in an LIS opportunity is to volunteer in the type of library you’d like to work in, even if only for a couple of hours a week. This will keep your skills up to date, provide you with an opportunity to build your LIS professional network, and also give you a group of practitioners who (assuming you are a terrific volunteer!) will be happy to 1) keep an eye out for possible openings in the district for you, 2) provide you with glowing references, and 3) grab you in a heartbeat for any openings their own library may have.

Focus on transferable skills. I thought this strategy was particularly smart (and can take no credit for it – it came from friend and colleague Scott Brown). Basically, it involves looking at your non-LIS/pay-the-bills job as an opportunity to develop some transferable skills that will then enable you to stand out to potential employers because of your combination of LIS-applicable skills and a fresh viewpoint.

For example, say your job involves customer service, training, presenting, web development, or perhaps project management. Even though your current use of these skills may not be focused on library patrons, they will certainly be valuable to library employers, especially when you can offer additional insights into how to most effectively use them, based on your previous experience. Your job will be to “sell” the transferability of those skills to potential LIS employers, but this should be fairly easy to do.

Given the outlook for library jobs for the foreseeable future, it’s likely that, at least in the interim, many new grads are going to end up in jobs not in traditional library fields. If work in a public or academic library is your career goal, the tactics outlined above should help keep you headed in that direction.

However, you might also keep in mind that some jobs can open up unforeseen opportunities for you to grow and contribute professionally, and reward you handsomely for doing so. You may want to be open to that possibility as well. In the meantime, I’d love to hear any other ideas others may have for how to handle this decision!

Although the long-promised “graying of the profession” is in fact underway, the equally long-awaited results – thousands of professional-level jobs opening up and tons of great, entry-level opportunities for new grads – are simply not happening. Nor are they likely ever to do so again.

Welcome to Library Profession 2.0
Current MLIS students and graduates need to assume that although they may, indeed, find jobs in the traditional-library fields they desire, those jobs are likely to:
• take months to find
• require previous experience
• offer less-than-stellar salaries
• require relocating
• possibly require starting at a paraprofessional level

In addition, there are no guarantees that the jobs that do exist won’t get knocked out by even more budget cuts, or automation, or outsourcing. Although it would be great for all of us (as well as for society) if this were a temporary situation, the smart betting is that it is not. Welcome to Library Profession 2.0.

So If This is the New Normal, Why Should I Get My MLIS?
Despite this, why is it worth getting an MLIS? Because what you get from that degree is an incredibly valuable skill set: you know important stuff about information.

Our LIS grad schools can’t guarantee you a job – in fact, no professional school would even attempt to make such a promise. But what they should be able to guarantee you is a killer skill set that can be deployed in many different ways. Students just need to make sure that they approach their programs with an open mind as to how they will use their degrees.

If you have your heart set on being a public, school, or academic librarian, there will always be good opportunities in these fields, but you will need to be increasingly “outstanding” in order to distinguish yourself from the large pool of applicants also contending for these jobs. And you will have to be willing to deal with the above-mentioned challenges – no whining allowed.

If, on the other hand, you’re open to other career paths and ways to deploy your information skills, you have a nearly limitless number of ways to do so. Your job in grad school is to explore those options to see which ones might be good alternative paths for you if the traditional-library job you have your heart set on fails to materialize…or materializes but then goes away.

Catching a Job – And a Career
There’s a great quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it for yourselves.”

So it is with an MLIS degree – the grad schools only guarantee you the ticket you need to start pursuing a job; you have to catch it for yourself. It’s up to you to be realistic about the types of jobs you intend to go after, the dues you will have to pay to successfully land them, and the likelihood that you may need to rethink your career course should the nature of those jobs change.

It’s the same for every profession – many of the old opportunities are simply going away. But at the same time, many other opportunities based on specific skill sets are opening up.

The smart move? Make like a Boy Scout and be prepared: do your homework, be realistic about what may happen tomorrow, learn what you need to learn, and take charge of your career.

The following tactics will help you jumpstart your career:

1. Set your personal career growth agenda. Focus on growth, not grades, because your ability to grow professionally (that means stretching beyond your comfort zone, trying new challenges, recovering from failures and moving on to successes) lasts a lot longer – and will do you more good – than an A in cataloging.

2. Multipurpose your assignments. Use them as an opportunity to connect with potential employers, clients, and colleagues through assignment interviews, and turn assignments into presentations, articles, and online content contributions that start building your visibility within the profession.

3. Create your own learning assignments. At the very least, focus on:

• Learning how to write – for the real world
• Learning how to present – to colleagues, to decision-makers, to non-LIS audiences
• Learning how to analyze and synthesize information
• Learning how to make decisions, commit to them, and take responsibility for them
• Learning how to create a basic website – understand the tools, the language, the possibilities
• Learning how you most effectively learn

4. Start building your professional network. Build relationships with student colleagues, faculty, guest speakers, and assignment contacts by sharing your knowledge and expressing your appreciation when others share theirs with you. Many of these relationships will be the source of future career opportunities.

5. Practice self leadership. Understand and use the concept of internal locus of control, which basically says that you are responsible for the outcomes of your life (and career). All the choices and decisions are up to you, if you are willing to become the hero of your own life.

6 Grab every opportunity to build your portfolio. Volunteer, take initiative, look for cool projects to be a part of. If you’re thinking of traditional librarianship – school, public, academic – volunteer in the type of library you hope to work in. The broader and deeper your experience, the greater your job opportunities.

7. If you’re considering academic librarianship, get published as much as you can. If possible, participate in research projects and look for opportunities to turn assignments into articles, preferably in peer-reviewed journals (easier to do if you are co-writing with a tenured academic!)

8. Get visible on topics that interest you. Building your professional brand is especially easy to do in the online environment – consider blogging and/or guest blogging, creating a special-interest website for a topic in which you have unique expertise, presenting at conferences and then posting your presentations online, etc.

9. Practice doing scary stuff. Graduate school is a great place to practice skills you’d like to improve before you need to deploy them in a professional setting, where the consequences of messing up may be more serious. Also, this will allow you to become more comfortable with pushing beyond your “competency zone” on a regular basis.

10. Explore how many different ways your LIS skills can be played. Start monitoring resources (blogs, e-newsletters, organization newsletters, listservs, etc.) in all of the areas that might be of interest to you, to develop a familiarity with the opportunities, issues, and resources of potentially interesting career paths.

You will be spending a lot of time and money to complete your MLIS degree. It just makes sense to double the return on your investment by getting started on a great career at the same time!