 Hello everyone and welcome to the San Jose State University School of Information Career Colloquia session. My name is Jill Cleese and I am the iSchools Career Center Liaison. Thank you for joining me tonight. We have the great pleasure of having two LIS professionals with us who are experts on the most sought after library and information skills. They are also authors and one of you tonight will be the lucky winner of their latest book, The Librarian's Skillbook, 51 Essential Skills for Information Professionals. The session tonight is one hour and will be recorded. I ask that you hold your questions until the end of the presentation when we open it up for Q and A. At that time, you may talk your questions in the chat box. And during the presentation, please do keep the dialogue in the chat box to a minimum. And I think we are ready to go so I'm going to hand it off to Deb and you can take it away. All right, and thanks Jill. So I'm great, I'm so grateful that you're all here tonight and David and I are really excited to share with you some of the tips that we've learned over the years in our careers. So we're going to start out by telling you a little bit about each one of us. I just, I've had a very interesting career and I probably in the last 16 of the last 20 plus years I have been outside of libraries working in parallel careers where there are a lot of opportunities and a lot of budget money. And I've been working in digital asset management, document management, enterprise content management in places as diverse as global landscape architectural firms and science museums and just about everything in between. So what we're hoping to do tonight is to open your eyes to the possibilities of the careers that are out there both within libraries and maybe even more importantly outside of libraries and I'm going to hand it over to David. Okay, thanks Deb. So I just want to add my hello and welcome to everybody. Thanks for attending. My career I've had also a lot of different jobs. I total up I've got more than 25 jobs in my career working in a wide variety of libraries as well as outside of libraries and marketing, selling and building online databases and retrieval systems. The common thread among all the jobs that I've had though is that they all involve the creation, organization, management or manipulation of information. And as I move from job to job I learned how to acquire new skills that paved the way for each successive position and I also learned how to successfully transfer my skills from one job to another. So what we're going to tell you in the next hour reinforces the importance of acquiring the right skills and using those skills throughout your career. Deb? Okay, so in the next half hour we're going to talk about the importance of skills and how having the right skills is critical for landing that first job out of school and for every job you will seek after that. So even if you're still in school maybe you recently graduated or you've been in the field for a while we've got ideas for all of you. And we're going to tell you about our recently published book that you see the cover of here on the slide, The Librarian Skill Book, 51 Essential Skills for Information Professionals, which will help you assess your current skill set and guide you in developing a plan to acquire the skills you need to land that first job or your next job. So I'm going to tell you a little story about how we came to write this book. Since David and I have been doing a lot of different things in a lot of different places, we were very gainfully employed all during the recession. And many of our colleagues back in 2008, 2009 said, how come you guys have work? And we're struggling, we're being laid off, budgets are being cut, libraries are closing, especially true in the corporate world. And we were able to share with them, well this is what we're doing, we're working in parallel careers where there is a lot of money. There aren't being budget cuts and using transferrable skills that we have. And our colleagues said, you guys need to share how you do this with us. So that is how we cooked up our wildly successful expanding your career potential workshops, which then became webinars. And we've presented them internationally to folks from as far away as Australia. And then we did evaluations at the end of all our webinars. And our students said, you guys need to write a book. And so that was kind of the impetus to do this. And our book has been really successful. And what's been really interesting, one of the reasons that we're here doing this tonight, is because we were very surprised to discover that more than 30% of those who attended the expanding your career potential workshop or webinars were current students or recent graduates of a library or iSchool or a library technology program. So we began to realize that our workshop and our book may actually be more important and beneficial to students and recent grads than maybe even more experienced librarians and information professionals interested in retooling and advancing their careers. So just a quick note about the book. We describe 51 skills and we'll bet that you didn't realize how many skills there are. And we guarantee you haven't thought of most of them as skills. We define each skill and we tell you why the skill is so important. And then we give you illustrations or stories from real life on how to apply these skills, kind of a this skill and action type of thing. And then we also give you lots of references for further reading about each skill we define. So I'm going to turn it back over to David. Okay, thanks Deb. So, yes, it's all about skills tonight. And when we talk about skills we think of six, there are six words, six important words or concepts that describe skills. The first is critical, skills are critical for career advancement. And having the right skills is essential for every new job or promotion that you seek. The second is need, which skills do you need? You may be very surprised when we tell you which skills are the most important. The third is evaluate, you will need to evaluate the skills you already have to determine what additional skills you need to acquire. Then we're going to talk about transferability and introduce you to this concept and tell you why it's so important to you in your career. Then next is acquire, we're going to share some ideas and how to acquire new skills or improve those skills that you already have. And then finally, marketing, having the right skills is not enough. You need to know how to mark up the skills you have to any prospective employer so they will clearly understand what you offer them. Deb? So on this next slide, we have a great quote by one of my favorite people, Naomi House. I'm sure you probably all know about, I need a library job, but if you don't, you need to know and go there. So she said this quote, should many librarians think that the reason they aren't getting jobs is that their resumes need formatting, but what they really need are better skill sets. So skills are critical for any type of career advancement. Employers look for skills. This is the most important factor in how they differentiate one candidate from another. The better and more dynamic your skill set, the more likely you will be hired or promoted. So I want to talk a little bit about skills versus experience. So experience is really important, but it's passive, and we tend to want to put experience on our resumes and in our cover letters, but it's really what you've already done. It's in the past, it's really more, well it is important to have experience, but knowing only about your experience, a prospective employer can only surmise what you might be able to do for that employer in the future. In contrast, skills describe what you know how to do, they're proactive. Describing your skills tells a prospective employer exactly what you can do for that employer if they hire you, and there is no doubt or possibility for misinterpretation as can happen with experience. Where experience might be a more of a prerequisite that's listed on most job descriptions, skills are where you can differentiate yourself from other job candidates, so keep that in mind. David. Okay, Deb, thanks so much. So to talk more specifically about the difference between experience and skills, we've listed three examples here. So the first one, let's say a reference librarian, you know, you can say reference librarian is your experience on your job description, but what just, what does that mean? You know what a reference librarian does, and we may know what a reference librarian does, but the hiring manager may not. In my job, current job as a reference librarian, I often do research for my customers, I definitely solve problems for my clients. I teach people how to find information or how to use certain programs on the computer, and the best reference librarians are also excellent listeners and also provide exceptional customer service. So these are examples of the skills that a reference librarian has, and it's just a few. The list could go on and on here, and it's so much more, so much better to say, you know, here are the skills that I have, and really spell it out and leave no doubt about it, whether that person knows what a reference librarian does or not. Second example is a web designer. You're sure web designers create websites, right? But they also may have and use lots of other skills, and some examples might be, they're change implementers, they change things in organizations. They're usually working on a team, being a team player. They do things perhaps with social media, and you know, they're constantly thinking outside the box, so those are examples of skills that a web designer might have, and again, there's many more. The last example I'm going to give you is a job I recently held as a history and librarian and archivist, and yes, I was a librarian, but I also performed digital archiving. I managed a team of people. I managed projects from beginning to end, and was called upon to make important decisions and give presentations, and a list of skills I utilized for that job could go on and on and on. So you can see the experience, while important, is really only one dimensional, while skills are so much more descriptive and specific. The skills make the experience come alive, and provide so much more meaning than the experience itself. Skills allow you to talk about what you can do for each prospective employer, based on the skills you previously acquired in previous jobs. So don't assume, again, don't assume that the person interviewing you knows what a reference librarian or whatever your title is and does can do. Spell it out, leave them no doubt, list all the things that you did and what you know how to do based on your skills. And additionally, you should also be tailoring your skills, the skills that you tout for that particular employer, based on the job description. You know, your experience is your experience. These are the jobs that you had, but the skills that you want to emphasize are the ones that are going to be most important to that employer. So again, looking at the job description is a good way to do that. Okay, so which skills are more most important? And here's a quote from Jill Hearst-Wall, who is a professor at Syracuse University School, one of Deb and my favorite, favorite people. Jill helps employers to help students get hired, and so hiring managers assumes someone with an MLIS degree has learned the requisite library skills. What differentiates job candidates are the other skills that managers want. And this may come as a surprise to you. The skills that differentiate you from other qualified candidates for a job are not the skills that you learned in high school. According to Jill, most hiring managers assume that everybody that's graduated from high school or from library school are all taught the same skills in that program. So they already assume that everyone with that degree starts out even with the same skill sets. So to differentiate yourself from all of your fellow students and others with the same degree, hiring managers are looking for what other skills you might possess. And those are the skills that we talked about in the previous slide, things like customer service, problem solving, listening, being a team player, et cetera. And that's why we discussed so many skills in the library and skill book. Deb? Okay, so by now you might be wondering, what skills could I already have that might be useful in performing my next job? Well, the good news is, is that you likely have some or even many marketable skills but you don't already know it. And this is where our book comes in handy because we describe those 51 skills. And not only do we describe and discuss what the hottest skills are that are unique to the library and information professional world, but we also discuss many additional skills like the ones mentioned in the previous slides. They fall into categories like business skills, interpersonal skills and more. And these are universally critical for success and working for any organization or operating your own information business. Our book provides you with a template and methodology to inventory and assess your current skill set, and then determine your strengths as well as where you need to augment or improve your skill set. So next slide please, David. So I want to talk a little bit about transferability of skills. Now transferable skills are ones that we've acquired through jobs, volunteering, hobbies and other life experiences that we can use as we move into new areas of our career. They are invaluable as we experience layoffs, are newly graduated, want to move up or out of our current job, or are re-entering the workforce. These are the skills we've developed in one part of our life that are transferable to another. They empower us to break into a career area where we may not have any direct skills or experience. So for example, if you know about Mark Fields, which is terminology in the library world, right, machine readable cataloging, you understand what metadata is. Or if you use Library of Congress Subject Headings, that's a type of taxonomy. It is extremely important to parlay your existing skills in a new job in any environment. So using those terms, and we're going to talk more about that, it's really important to get away from jargon. So how do you assess your transferable skills? You look at sites like Michelle Mock's real job titles, and the link is right here under our little funny colored people and puzzle piece. She has got a list of over 200 job titles, many of which do not have the L or library or librarian word in them. A lot of great ideas for when you're searching for work or you're searching about areas that you think you might like to go into and you want to see what skills are required as you search for jobs using those terms or those phrases or job titles. What parallel careers are out there? Well, dam, digital asset management and document management are making and organizations assets accessible. So it's doing the same thing we do for more traditional library materials, but you could be doing it for images, for documents, for all sorts of things, drawings, many different things. So the same principles of indexing and using taxonomy are used instead of library terms like cataloging and subject headings. You must not only recognize the value of your existing skills, you must be able to articulate why the skills you have acquired elsewhere are useful in that new job. And our book is filled with examples of the transferability of skills. We give you the fundamentals of how to do this. Your library skills are useful in many other areas. Some of them you probably know about like records management and research, but there's archiving. There's so many other ways that we can go, many different alternative careers that use our transferable skills and education. So I'm going to tell you a quick story about a consulting gig that actually started in 2008. It was with a global landscape architectural firm located here in Northern California. And they were just struggling. They had hundreds of thousands of images. And one of the challenges with digital cameras today is that when a photographer goes out on a photo shoot, no longer do they take maybe 20 or 40 photos, they might take 500 photos. Then they come back to the firm and they ingest them into their system. But there's no metadata except maybe when the photo was taken, the type of camera, the type of image, that sort of thing. So they've got hundreds of thousands of images. And in this firm, they were really having trouble because a lot of their younger staff members were so frustrated at not being able to find drawings or images to put into proposals or environmental impact reports that they were going out on Google. And they weren't using Google images to find images to put into their reports. Most of these images, they did not own the copyright to. And they weren't as good as the images that they owned, that the firm owned. But they just had no way to find those. And they had given up. They'd thrown up their hands and went out to the open web to find them. So I was called in as a consultant to help them get a handle on this. And when I do consulting, I tend to come in at about the 50,000 foot level. And I worked with them to help them to think about what the solutions would be, what the pain points were, where all the obstacles were. And we worked on the project. And at the end of all of this, we looked at some software. We began to settle on the internet was going to be better. But the most important thing I can tell you is I suggested they hire a librarian full-time to come in and work on this project and head it up. And you know what the CEO said to me? He said a librarian could not possibly do this work. Well, I was floored when he said that because he knew I had a library degree but he had forgotten that because I wasn't talking about libraries. I was talking about making their assets accessible and findable and reusable. And that was a positive contribution to their bottom line. This was for a for-profit organization. So it's important for us to remember that we have skill sets that are transferable that can be used in many different industries, for-profit, not for-profit. And there are people who meet us. IT folks are being asked to do this work. And they are not equipped nor educated to do it. When they see me coming now and I go out on consulting jobs, you know what they say? They say we're so glad you're here because we're being asked to do this and we don't know how. So these are using transferable skills. And what's interesting is two years ago, this firm called me back and said, okay, we're ready now, we've got our internet organized, we want to buy software. So then I went back and worked with them to come up with their business requirements to pick a digital asset management software that would work for them. And right now, that librarian and others at the firm are getting all of those assets, well, not all of them. They're getting rid of some of the bad ones, but they're taking the ones they want to keep and they're putting them into the digital asset management system. So now that staff can find these images and use them instead of going out to the web. So David's going to tell a story to a short one about somebody who went into a totally different area. Yeah, thanks, Deb. Yeah, just really briefly, one of the librarians that I work at, and excuse me, one of the librarians who works at a library where I'm working at currently, recently decided to move her career into another direction. She decided that she wants to become the lead investigator at a local law enforcement agency. And I bet you didn't know that you could do that with a library or information degree. And I bet the law enforcement agency didn't know that they needed a librarian for this job, but I think she is actually the perfect candidate. Who else but a librarian knows how to find information and do effective and comprehensive research and solve problems or crimes for that matter. So it's a prime example of skills being transferable from one job to another job that is completely different from the first job. So let's go on to the next. So our book is full about stories like this of transferability of skills. Great. Okay, so here's another surprising quote from Jill Hearst-Wall at Syracuse University. Everything hiring managers want cannot be taught in a graduate program. Students need to learn some of these skills on their own outside of class. Now, again, if we come back to the concept that most hiring managers automatically assume that everyone graduating from my school has already acquired all the subject-specific and technical skills that make all of us librarians or information professionals, then to differentiate yourself from other job candidates, you've got to look at other skills, like the ones we discussed in our book like marketing, project management, communications, et cetera, skills that are not directly taught in high school. And so you do need to look outside to find some of these skills. And you may be wondering at this point, you know, well, how am I going to do that? Where am I going to look? And again, we give you multiple solutions to this area. We give you lots of ideas on how to acquire new skills. So I'm just going to go into one particular skill, or excuse me, one particular method of acquiring new skills. And the example I'm going to give is I think a lot of students and information professionals have a misconception. They feel that, you know, you need to go back to school and get another degree to acquire new skills or bolster the ones you already possess. But the six ways that we give you to acquire new skills or improve your skill set or all tried and true methods that will give you the missing skills that you need very easily and quickly without spending years and lots of money to go back to school again. So the one example I'm going to talk about is one of my favorites, it's volunteering and internships. When I worked as a history librarian at the Mill Valley Public Library, I often heard students as well as many veteran librarians say something like, well, I want to apply for this job, but they want someone with the following list of skills and I don't have most of those skills. But how can I acquire these skills if no one will give me a job where I can learn those skills? And so they felt stuck. Many people felt that way. And so, you know, what can a stuck librarian do to break out of this vicious cycle? Well, while no one might want to pay you to work at a job where you don't have the skills, there are plenty of organizations who might take you on as an unpaid intern. For many years in Mill Valley, I brought in interns from San Jose State and lots of other places and I taught them how to digitize photographs, oral histories, maps, and many other documents. They also gained practical experience in cataloging and constructing databases. And these are all very valuable, hot skills right now. So they learned a whole host of skills and gave a lot of practical experience that gave them the edge over the competition when it came time to find that first paying job. And these students worked on live tangible projects. So when they approached an employer, they could say, well, I worked on this database or helped design this, you know, this website or whatever, and digitized these types of documents. And yes, they weren't paid, but it doesn't much matter because they could now list the experience and those skills on their resume and really push the skills that they acquired when working in Mill Valley. And I'm sure you know that there are hundreds of internship listings on the San Jose State iSchool website and you should really explore it. Also, I know that some organizations will only take someone who's an intern if they're enrolled in 294, but I think that they're missing out. I took people who were not enrolled in the class. I thought, why should I limit myself and pass up really good people just because they're not taking that class right now? You know, perhaps that student had already performed an internship and taken 294. Previously, or I got people who graduated already from San Jose State and were still out there looking for a job, and so they took on an internship. I took on all volunteers because it helped me get my databases built for free. I had one semester where I had 14 students and librarians who already would already earn their master's degree working for me as interns. So volunteering gives you an in, volunteering or an internship gives you a free education and experience very quickly to learn new skills that are immediately transferable to many other situations. And it's just one example of the surefire methods that we present in the librarian's skill book. Deb? Okay. I have to remember to press that talk button. Okay. So it's really important to remember that you have to market yourself and describing your skills as part of the marketing that you do. Never, ever assume that a recruiter or HR person will be able to figure out if you have the right skills for the position. You need to tell them. So next slide, please. So don't use library words such as cataloging, taxonomy or mark. Instead, use things like indexing or metadata and always, always make sure that you market your skills to each employer using the employer's vocabulary or vernacular to describe your skills, not library speak that outsiders don't understand. And even if it's in a library, think about the terms that you're going to use to show that you've thought outside the box, that you're not just looking at the library stuff, but the other things that you bring to the table. Remember Jill Hirst-Wall's quote about that employers assume everybody's on the same level when they come out of school? You want to be above that. So you need to focus on skills, which is something that everyone understands. And then you need to market your skills and yourself to land that job. So our book gives you the confidence to be able to approach your prospective employer knowing that you can do the job. And we give you the ammunition you need to be able to communicate why you should be the one who is chosen to do that job. Okay, so just to wrap up here, what we see is the winning formula to land. Your first job or your dream job and every job after that, they're really four steps. First, recognize the skills that you already possess. Second, identify the skills that you need to acquire or hone for your existing skills. Third, acquire the skills you need to outpace the competition. And fourth, package yourself by marketing your skills to your prospective employer and telling that employer how your skills will make you successful in that job. So coming back to those six words that we talked about at the beginning, this is really, you know, really these are the words that you need to remember when it comes to skills. Remember that skills are critical for career advancement. You need to figure out which skills you need. You need to evaluate and inventory the skills you already have, including any skills you acquire outside of high school. Remember that skills that you often, that you have often are transferable from one job to another, even if that job is completely different than the job that or the skills that you acquired, those, excuse me, the job that you acquired those skills in initially, then go out and acquire the skills that you need and finally don't forget to market yourself and those skills to every prospective employer. Skills are everything at hiring time and our book tells you how to apply these principles to land that first job out of school and every job you seek after that. Okay. So we've come to the end here. You can certainly, if you'd like to buy the book, it's available on Amazon, both in print and Kindle. And we hope to have some upcoming workshops on the topics, more expanded workshops where we actually spend a couple of hours really teaching you how to do all the things that we've talked about in much more detail. If you want to go to the next slide, David, we've got, here was where you can contact us and we also, we have a website and I also encourage you, I started a LinkedIn group some time ago called Career Sustainability that I encourage you to go check out. There's about 300 and plus, I know there's almost 350 folks on their information professionals and librarians, lots of great conversations going on. You can post questions, you can answer questions and it's a great place to practice and show your skill set so that others may look for you there. You know, employers do look to see what you're up to. So it's your turn to ask questions. We are going to stick around until there's, you know, at least till half past the hour unless there's no questions. And we are going to give away a book. So for all those who have stuck it out so far, I think Jill, are you going to announce that because you, we had picked a number before the webinar for and then that person who logged on at that number, I believe, is going to get the book and Jill has been tracking that. And then if you want to check in the moderator box, I put a name in there if you want to do the announcing. Okay. Okay, wait a minute. Okay, so it looks like it is Courtney H. who has won the book. Courtney, are you there? You can chat in the box. We can see. I'm here, she says. Good. Okay, so Courtney, if you see that info at librarianskillbook.com, email, go ahead and send us your mailing address and we will get one to you. Okay? Congratulations. Okay. All right. So now we'll have questions. So please fire away. And I, Jill, are we going to do these through the chat box? Yes. So at this time, go ahead and type your questions in the chat box. And myself and Leah, our tech assistant, will kind of help try to moderate it and make sure that Deb and David can get to all your questions. So go for it and go ahead and type them in. Deb and David, there is one question from Jane. Jane Fisher asked if you could talk a bit about the difference between skills and knowledge. That's a hard one for a job seekers to understand. So the difference between skills and knowledge. David, do you want to take a crack at that first? Yeah. I'll talk about it too. Right. I think, I mean, knowledge is, again, you know, experience is important, knowledge is important. But again, skills are really, I mean, it puts it into the active category. It's not passive. It's really telling people what you can do. You know, knowledge is good because it tells people what you know. And definitely, you know, you should include whatever you can tell them about your knowledge with your, along with your experience. But I still think that the skills are just so much more proactive. They, you know, they basically tell a person, ah, you know, this person can do this, you know, basically whereas if it's just knowledge, it's kind of, again, it's passive. I don't know. Debbie, do you have any other insights into that? Okay. Let's see. Can you hear me? I can remember if I muted myself or not. So what I would say is think of knowledge and experience, as David said, passive, but skills are action-oriented. So if you think of a skill, it's transferable across many different industries. So let's say you've worked in something totally unrelated. Maybe you've worked in sales before you came to library school or iSchool. And you were able to provide excellent customer service. And you can tell a story about that and give some quantitative or qualitative information. That's the stuff employers are looking for. What story shows that what you bring to the table? And I have to take a drink of water. Hold on. Sorry about that. So it's really important to be able to express what it is you bring to the table. Because remember, when you're looking for a job, it's not about you. It's about the employer. Yeah, they're going to look at what your skills and experience are. But what they really care about is how you're going to make their life easier. And that's where talking about your skills and what you bring to the table and telling stories is what is going to sell them. Remember your resume and your cover letter? Those are your ticket to an interview. And if you think of them that way, think about what it is that that employer is going to be looking for, not just your knowledge, but your skill set that's going to bring a lot to the table when you come to that organization. And I know it's hard sometimes to ping that because when I came out of consulting work back to the job world, you know, I'm a library director now. And I had to think about, okay, I hadn't given anybody a resume in a long time. And I had to think about how I could parlay all of that parallel career stuff into a skill set that would be attractive to an employer. And that's something you have to do. You look at the words they're looking for, but think about then how your skill set meshes with those, not just your experience. And it's hard to articulate this, but I think just thinking about hard things that you can talk about and don't mean hard isn't difficult, but stuff that sets you apart from the crowd. I don't know, David, I'm not doing a very good job. You're doing a great job. But I thought of one more thing, I guess, that, you know, we come back to the transferability. It's just so important. You know, knowledge can be transferable too. I mean, you could know, you know, you could have a lot of knowledge about your particular subject area and that could be useful, but the skills really can, they can get you into some place where it's totally different. You know, it's the same, it's a skill that you have, but the environment can be totally different. Like that librarian who's going to be in law enforcement. She knows how to do research. I bet she's never done crime research on the reference desk in this library, but she has the skills to be able to know where to look and to understand, you know, and that's something that really is, it is transferable. It's just very transferable. Another example I like to give, you know, like somebody that worked in a bookstore, you know, another client in a library, well, you know, what's transferable there? You know, they have a lot of knowledge of books that may be useful, may not be useful, you know, but they interacted with people. They did customer service. They did sales. They did all these different things at the bookstore. And, you know, in a position, whatever it is, may be very useful. Whatever library they're working in, they may need to be able to use their selling skills to be able to get projects funded and so forth. They may need their customer service skills to deal with the public that they're working with. So that's why I think, you know, skills are just so much more lively and, you know, and transferable than knowledge or experience. But again, don't, I mean, absolutely put your knowledge and experience down, but skills are just, that's what's going to get you to that extra place. So can I, so just to, I'm looking at the book. I've picked up the book here to look. And so for example, under the, let's see, one of our skills, like number, let's see here, 35 is decision making. Well, that's a skill because you can say I've had experience decision making, but that's not what an employer wants to hear. They want to know a story about that skill. How do you demonstrate that skill? And that's the, that's what I'm talking about is that sort of thing. You know, again, storytelling around skills that the employer is looking for that can be transferred from one place to another. It's really important and that most skills can be transferred. So I'll stop babbling, but that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. So I see other questions. I'm sorry, I'm sucking on something. Yeah. So I see Angie has a question. Other than at a library, what are some other places you suggest looking for internship and volunteer experiences for someone interested in archiving? Well, certainly in archives, but, you know, it can be a place where they haven't thought about archiving yet. One example that I like to give a lot of times, I mean a church or, you know, or synagogue or something like that, you know, you could walk into a place like that and say I can organize your records. I'm a librarian. You know, I have archiving skills and you could go to putting the, you know, putting their records basically, you know, organizing them, putting them into a database, making, you know, making information available. They might be very interested in that and they don't have any money to pay you, of course. But when you do something like that, you can walk out of that job saying, yeah, I built an archive. You know, I've created something. So, I mean, it can be any organization that you think of that may not already be doing something like that and, you know, just it's boundless really. Certainly you can walk into a place that's already doing it, but, you know, you could probably, it's just so valuable to go to some place that hasn't even thought about that, you know, create their archive, you know, organize them basically. And I know in that kind of situation you may not have somebody, you know, working for somebody who's going to teach you those skills, but you've learned a lot in library skill and high school. And so, you know, take what you have, you know, talk to other archivists and librarians through the different professional groups and, you know, take the ball and run with it. So, I don't know if that, hopefully that helps. Well, I was going to say Angie Taylor also had a good question or answer, which I agree most cities, counties have a historical society who are dying for help. And they would welcome it. I've had a lot of students who have done that. And then the other thing to remember, I don't know where you are, but like next weekend here in San Francisco at the US Mint at Fifth Admission, we are having the San Francisco History Expo. And there will be about 4,000 people coming through there. It's free, but there will also be about 100 community organizations. And if you can find fairs like that, those organizations are definitely looking for help with people to help them in archiving, to volunteer. So, there's another question out there. How did you go about narrowing it down to 51 skills? How did you do your research, the sideways skills to put in the book? Yeah, that was a pretty tough one. You know, we found lots of, I mean, the more we think about it, the more skills we come up with. And, you know, we had, when we were doing our workshops, we only had time to do like 30 some odd skills in the workshop, 33 it was, yeah. And so, we expanded to 51 for the book. We just thought that was a good number. But, you know, there are plenty more out there, and you might see another book coming along at some point with another 51 skills. These are the ones that we thought were most important based on our knowledge, our experience working with different, you know, working in so many organizations, hearing what people are doing, reading job descriptions, you know, over and over again and seeing what employers are looking for. I think that's how we picked these 51, but, you know, there's another 51 out there, and every time I talk to somebody who, somebody who looks at our book who's not in the library field, they say, gosh, these are, these are skills that, you know, everybody should have, and, you know, there's just so many more skills. So, again, definitely, the more you think about it, you know, I think the 51 gives you an idea of what to use as skills, but you don't have to limit it to the 51 that we put in there. If you think of other things now that you've gone, that can be, you know, translated into skills, absolutely put them in. This is a lot more than 51. Definitely wouldn't think of it. Yeah, I was just going to say, so this book, we don't expect anybody to do all 51. What we recommend is you pick three to five that you really want to work on, and then you, you know, we have a, in the book, we have a template that you can create so that you kind of set up a plan, a personal roadmap to get through how you want to do this, and that was the thing that most people said, wow. Like David was saying earlier, I thought I had to go back to school or take other courses to learn this stuff, and you don't need to do that, but you do need to focus in on what are the ones that you really want to target, and then hone those skills, and then what level do you want to be a novice, intermediate expert, you know, where do you want to go with those? And so there's, you know, it was hard for us to narrow it down, but like David said, those are ones we, people seem to focus on, that we saw a lot in job descriptions, and that we knew that if our fellow, our colleagues could see those things, that they would be, and be able to work on those, that they would be able to get jobs too. So, and I see that Jill also said Sparta Jobs has good part-time positions. Okay, and then we have one more question from T, let's see, public work in school. If I'm Bill, okay, so I think T, you asked about, you know, that you focused on public library work in school, here, here again, I'm going to just emphasize that transferable means just that. If you have a skill set that is going to go, it's going to go across all information types. Yes, you may not be able to be a law librarian because you don't know how to search Lexus, Nexus, or Westlaw, but the underlying skills are ones that you can use in any information environment, and that's the message that we're trying to get across. Did I learn digital asset management in library school? No, it didn't even exist when I was in library school, but every time an opportunity came along and I saw something that I thought, well, there's an interesting thing, I would step up and say, I can do that, and I may not have known how to do it, but I found out how to learn. You know, we know as librarians how to do research, right? We can find out where there are resources to learn how to do this stuff, and we have networks that we can tap into who will help us as well. And I'm David, if you want to add anything to that. Yeah, I just want to add something to that. Yeah, I mean, depending on what you did in the public library, there's a lot of things. I mean, you know, first of all, if you were cataloging and, you know, doing that type of thing, then you are, you have skills already that an archive needs. Yeah, it's going to be a different kind of a catalog record. It may not be marked catalog, it may be something else, but you understand how to catalog something. You understand how to take an item and classify it and add metadata to it and do all the things that, you know, and it's the same thing, whether you're doing it in an archive or a library. Again, the structure, the type of data might be different that you're organizing, but you have the skill of organizing. And so you can, and cataloging, you can basically, you know, we call it cataloging when it's books, but we call it archiving, you know, or basically digital archiving or digitizing, which is for other types of items. If you worked with the public in the public library, if you were a reference librarian, if you were dealing with customers, well, you're going to have the same things in an archive. So, you know, you're going to have people that you're going to be dealing with, you've got constituents, you've got people that you've got to get on board to support you, you've got the public to be, you know, to be advertising and marketing to and using it. So I think a lot, again, a lot of the skills that you might have in a public library are going to be transferable. It just depends on which skills you focused on what you did in the public library. Okay. Let's say Johnny had a question. There's a question from Holly, too, if you want to speak up a little bit. I see it. Let's see, she said, do you have a stance on what skills to include on your resume versus your cover letter, noting that we're still concerned about length of applications? I would think concise skills on resumes and stories on cover letter. Yeah. You want to use those bullet points on your resume, you know, that's the boom, boom, boom, and you're going to use action words and very strong words there that really highlight what you bring to the table. And then in your cover letter, that's where you're going to expand on a couple of those that are really specific to that job to tell the stories that's going to be your ticket to the interview. I hope that answers. I don't know. David, do you want to add anything else? Yeah. No, that sounds like the right thing to me, you know. So, you know, I don't know. Also, I mean, Deb, you're more of an expert on resumes than I am, but I know what I see advising people is that, you know, is it possibly having a longer resume than what some people recommend that it's not a bad thing if you, you know, if you have, if you can flush things out. The more they can learn about you, the more they know about you, you know, the more chance you have of sticking out above the competition. I don't know. Deb, is that, I characterize that correctly or not? It is true. And so, I think the thing is, you want to remember that you are, I mean, I have this motto of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. You have to use it to your own discretion. But what I have found is when I step up to do something and let something else go that nobody else cares about, and then I make sure that my employer or somebody important in the organization knows about that, that is a story you can tell, not that part, but what you did when you gave up the thing nobody else cared about and what it was that you did that you stepped up to and made a difference in the organization. That is exactly what employers are looking for. And I'll tell you, at the beginning of this month, I went to USC and I spent two days with my colleagues from all over the country for a future of library symposium. And it was very interesting because one of the big takeaways from that was that staff can no longer come to work and put in a work day. They need to be vested in the organization and continually innovate. And I think if you take nothing else away from this that you need to remember that innovation is what employers are looking for today. We can't be satisfied just to take a job, to come into work, put in our time, but employers, and this is how I am as a library director, I'm looking to see what my staff is doing and I'm encouraging them and supporting them to go beyond what they've been doing in the past. Okay, so we have a question and that was one thing I, okay, oh, certifications. Okay, so I'll give you an example. Johnny, I think you asked about certifications. So if you look at my credentials, you'll see not only do I have MLS after my name, but I have ECMP and that's an Enterprise Content Management Practitioner because I got certified in that because I was doing that a lot as a consultant. So for me in that arena of Digital Asset Management, Enterprise Content Management, that was a certification that potential clients did look at. So it just depends on where you're going, what sort of certifications you're looking for. I hope that helps. I think in some cases it's going to be very important to certain employers or certain people that are hiring. In other cases, they may not know what the certification is, so it just depends. You know, but again, it's good to have it if you have certifications. And I don't know, Deb, you have more experience on this than I do again, but, you know, because you belong to a lot of different organizations that do different types of certifications as well, not just the ones that have the L-word in their name, basically. Right, that's right. That's true. So I got that certification, came out of AIIM.org, which is a big Enterprise Content Management organization. It's a parallel career and it's interesting that last year they finally had a librarian who spoke at their annual conference, Guy St. Clair, and he is definitely a knowledge management guru, but he, they are getting now that librarians, they need them because it's mostly an organization made up of IT people who are struggling. They're getting an information professional certification to try and figure out what we already know and we're already doing. So we have a space there that we can step into if we don't, IT people are going to take it up. And I'm not saying we all need to go there, but it's a great place to go. If you want me to try parallel careers. We do have a few more hot moments if there's other questions. Yeah, a couple people are still writing. No, there we go. Okay. And Johnny also mentioned LinkedIn. I think that's very, it's very important to have your credentials up on LinkedIn, you know, both from, it's another place to advertise yourself for people to see what you've done and absolutely that really is the professional, you know, it's the professional social media site. Right. Right. And so the career sustainability group that's on the slide, that's a great place to start. If you already have a profile, if you don't have one, you need to have one. That's your homework for me. Can you tell I teach? You really do need to do that and Jane has put up a great link for tips. So I really encourage you, I mean that is a very basic thing because employers are going to go look. In fact, one of the first things I did when I came to the shop 18 months ago, well before I came, of course, before I came to the interview and applied, I looked up everybody I could that was associated with the place, but once I got here, I challenged all of my librarians to make sure that their LinkedIn profiles were up to date because that is part of being a professional and we are a profession. If we want to be seen as one, we need to walk the walk and we need to talk the talk. I'll get off my soapbox. Is there another question we missed? Well, while we're waiting for people to ask questions, I just want to say how grateful I am. Jane's an old friend and I was ecstatic when she asked David and I to do this. And I see that, Leah, go ahead and put in your question while I talk for a bit here. We have, we're just excited to do this. We know I teach part-time in a paraprofessional program and don't have time, unfortunately, to teach at San Jose, but I'm passionate about what students are doing and I admire all of you for hanging in there and being here. I'm not sure what time it is where you are, but appreciate it. I know David does, too, that you came out to listen to us and I hope that we'll hear from you. I hope you'll all link in with me, by the way. I challenge you to all come find me on LinkedIn and I hope that you'll link in with me and you'll notice that it says that I'm a strategic knowledge professional. It doesn't say I'm a librarian. Why? Because when I give a 30-second pitch, I mean, now I do say I'm a library director, but I couch it in slightly other terms. I tend to say not, when people say what do you do, I don't say I'm a librarian because you know what happens, they yawn and all the stereotypes kick in. But when I say I'm a strategic knowledge professional, they go, wow, what's that? And then I tell them and then at the very end and I say, and by the way, I have a library degree and they go, really, I had no idea librarians did that. So it's kind of a different way to go at it. So I encourage you to do that. Let's see, do you have any place with tips for LinkedIn accounts? Angie, Jane just posted a little bit further up the great tips for your LinkedIn profile. So I would look at that and remember, you can always look at other people's profiles to get ideas. Don't have to start from scratch. Just be honest. Another thing, I just want to add one more thing on Lea's question about IT. I think that, you know, if you talk to IT people, they may have lots of technical knowledge, but most of them don't know what to do with it. They don't apply it. They don't, you know, you kind of, as information professionals, we bridge that gap. And there's just so much more that, you know, if you come at it and say, well, you know, I have a lot of technical knowledge, but I also know how to relate to people, how to use it to solve problems and help people and, you know, the things that librarians do without actually having to use the L word, you know, really, we have a lot of skills that the people that think of themselves as IT people don't even have. So I think it gives us an advantage, basically, to get into that. So absolutely, I think it's a good place to look. Yeah, and David, you hit the nail on the head. Absolutely true. All right, well, I think we're just almost there. We don't want to keep you all because we really appreciate you coming out. And I want to thank Leah and Jane and Jill for making this all possible for us technologically and guiding us. This was our first time with Blackboard, and it was very easy because they shepherded us. So thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. This is Jane speaking. I don't know if you can hear me, but I want to say thank you. And thanks to all the attendees and participants. And the thing that's so interesting to me, I got my library degree way back before the information word was even in the degree, is that what you learn is how to translate and how to make things accessible to all different kinds of users. And that is so transferable. Yes. Thank you, Deb, and to Jill. Thank you, Leah, David, everybody. Good night. Good night, everybody. Well, look forward to connecting on LinkedIn.