 Hello there, this is Kim Doherty and I am your iSchool student and alumni career advisor and what I'd like to do today is give you a brief tour through the resources that are available to you to support you in your career growth while you are going through the program. So I'm going to sort of bang you over the head with the message of use these resources early and often. If you do by the time you graduate you're going to be ready to rock and roll. You are going to have contacts, you're going to have people who know what great skills you have, you're going to have all sorts of options and opportunities. So my pitch is yes these are really terrific resources. I'm updating them for you constantly and in addition I will be available to you as you're going through the program and also as an alumni of this program. So any questions that you have I am here to answer them. I will give you my bias straightforward. I've been an LIS professional for decades now. I've had an absolute blast with my career. I love what I do. I love the projects I get to work on. I love the cool things we all know. So my message to you is you guys are really really smart to start this program. Okay so let's talk about the career resources that are available to you and where they are. So if you're on the homepage there's going to be on the right hand side a title that says career assistance and when you click on career assistance it will bring you to a ton of really cool and valuable resources. So you will see this page on your left you will see all of sort of the category options which again I'm contributing to and updating and revising on a regular basis. So one if you're looking for that something there and you don't see it send me an email and let me know and I'll make sure we add it to our contact content and two if you're looking at something and say it's dated 2017 and this is several years down the road one of the reasons might be because that information is still the same it's what we would call classic information or I am in the process of revising it. So again let me know if you have any questions as you're going through these materials. I wanted to point out one other resource here that I consider to be a core critical resource not only for our program but for anybody who's considering going into information work and that is the annual MILS skills at work report. What this shows you as you go through these slides is what people are hiring for what titles are these jobs being listed as what kinds of skills are they looking for what knowledge what are the responsibilities it's an incredible resource and I would encourage you to look at it very carefully every year when it comes out because it's a great way to evaluate what you want to do against what are the requirements of those kinds of opportunities. Okay as we go through this I am also going to do what's known in the content development world a listicle. So that means I'm going to give you the top five reasons why what we're going through today is important for you. The first one is that the career center information will help you identify possible career directions. Now if you're just starting out in your program you haven't been hit yet with the onslaught of holy cow there are hundreds of things I could do with this skill set with all of these different skills that as an LIS professional I'm going to have. So that's the good news is you've got like tons of career options for you. On the other hand as you're getting closer to graduation it can be highly anxiety producing because there are hundreds of things that you could do and you may be feeling overwhelmed you may be feeling like oh my gosh I'm not sure what I want to do and and should I take that job or should I look at that or whatever that the resources that we have for you will help you narrow things down a bit and let me show you where to find that information two spots. The first one is in the career direction section we have lots of information about how to think about different careers how to think about school librarianship versus records management versus working for a government information agency as a researcher versus academic librarianship or public librarianship doing outreach or being a special librarian or even an independent information professional. All of that information is pulled together for you under the career direction section but there's also another piece of that that I'd like to point out for you which is down the road a little bit there the career podcasts we started these not too long ago and what happens with the career podcasts is that I find people who I think are doing interesting things with their LIS skills in their careers and I interview them about what is their job like how did they get their jobs what skills do they think you guys should have if you're looking at that kind of work and any other advice they might have to offer so when you're thinking about career opportunities I would encourage you to start with these two resources. All right top five reason number two we are going to encourage you to build your network while you're in grad school you are in what I would call a target rich environment and that means you're going to have all sorts of really terrific opportunities to build relationships with people and and that's how a network is it is a a community of professional relationships that you build over the course of your career so while you're in grad school you're going to have an opportunity to build relationships with your faculty members with your classmates with people like me with guest speakers with people with whom you do informational interviews you are as I said in a target rich environment and so you want to take as much advantage of this as you possibly can while you're in grad school because most jobs are hidden most jobs are become visible to you because someone has let you know oh by the way there's a job opening over here that hasn't been advertised yet hasn't gone public yet the more people the more relationships you have in your network the likelihood is that you will have the opportunity to hear about those and apply for those jobs I think it's some bizarre number like 75 percent or 80 percent of the jobs that people land have been through their their professional network so really important to pay attention to this while you're in grad school and it's easy for you to do really it's just kind of sending out an email and saying I'd like to ask you more questions or I'd like to connect with you on LinkedIn or in some way starting that relationship but to make that easier for you we have a whole section on networking now just to clarify there are two concepts here and we go through them here in this section but networking and network your network is your community of colleagues and you're going to take every opportunity while you're in grad school to expand that community networking is the process of reaching out to people or responding to people when they say do you know somebody who's really terrific at XYZ and maybe you can put those people together someone in your community that you can connect with someone else so so networking is not about taking advantage of people it's not about exploiting people it's about people being able to help each other succeed so that's where you'll find the networking information again you are in networking nirvana as you go through grad school don't miss the opportunity to take advantage of it top reason number three how to use social media to help build your career visibility and your career opportunities or for those of you who are perhaps you had a very adventurous youth and some of that is on social media at this point what we're going to look at in the social media section is how do you use social media to build your career rather than derail it and i'm guessing most of you guys are pretty savvy about keeping positive information front and center to offset anything else that you might have in your background but under social media for the job search and you can see where that section is in our career development page here we talk about how to create your profile what kind of a platform makes the most sense for you if you're trying to build a social media presence how to think about social media strategy because there are lots of different ways to have social media working for you even when you're not paying attention to it for example linked in is an incredibly valuable tool for you because once you get the thing set up it's sort of working for you when you're off studying or doing your assignments important information again we're updating it on a regular basis but i would encourage you to as you get started going through your program read this information so that you can be thinking about oh okay this is something cool that i'm working on and it would be great for me to put out on my social media platform think about building your visibility using social media again as you are going through your studies we're assuming that you all are professionals in training and what we want to do is help you get ready to launch your career as you go through the program rather than the day before you graduate okay uh reason number five is creating or updating your resume and again assuming you are a professional in training and you are going to be building your social media visibility you're going to be building your community of colleagues you have to assume that somebody may come looking for you they may say i heard about the work that you did on xyz would you consider doing an internship with us would you consider being a contractor on this process this project for us uh i was at dinner last night with one of your faculty members and they mentioned that you really were outstanding doing this kind of work could you send us your resume and then we'd like to talk further so one of the things you want to think about is always be ready for opportunities if someone contacts you and wants to know more about you and it takes you three weeks to get your resume nailed away they will lose interest so we're here to help here's where our information is on resumes and cvs and cover letters and in addition i am always available to you to help you craft your resumes and your cvs and your cover letters with your resumes and cvs we are very very fortunate to have some contacts at the san jose uh campus career center who are extremely skilled at resume reviews and so we'll probably tag team it together where they're looking at your resume overall and i'm looking at your resume from the perspective of an lis professional so if you're thinking about your resume now is a great time to get started on it as you start working through the program so you can be refining it with new knowledge that you are developing but don't feel like you have to do it on your own we're here to help reason number five interview like a pro the best opportunities in the world aren't going to help you if we can't enable you to ace your interviews so one of the areas that we are working on developing content and coaching and best practices and and currently have a ton of information is on interviewing this is a difficult thing for all of us but now it's getting even more challenging because there are so many different ways that people interview the good news is san jose has a tool called big interview which enables you to do mock interviews and that's a great way to become more confident more comfortable with the process but then we've also got a lot of information about best practices how and when to follow up um how to to what to expect great questions to ask all of those sorts of things that's all here for you and as well I'm here for you if you are going into an interview situation and you're not sure about some aspect of it let me know and we will brainstorm it together all right so those were your top five reasons for going through the content development material and as I said at the beginning uh using it early and often but in addition I'm going to leave you with my top 10 questions for you to be exploring as you are going through your grad program because you don't want to just learn lis skills you also want to learn about yourself so from a career perspective as you take all of these different classes as you're exposed to all of this new information I would encourage you to maybe crack open a journal and start tracking this information what interests you what doesn't interest you I have to tell you data science not my bag um what are you discovering about yourself what are you discovering about the profession frequently what happens is that people who start the program get about halfway through it and have this epiphany of whoa this is way bigger than I realized I had no idea that the profession was this expansive and that there were this many cool things that I could do with this along those lines what are you finding that is surprising you are you discovering that you love something that you didn't even know existed what challenges you but in a good way where you look at it and you think I don't think I have a clue how to do that but that like looks so cool I can't wait to jump in and then what career pathways do you want to learn more about lots of different ways to do that some are through the career center the resources in the career center but others are through informational interviews others are through me connecting you with people who are doing that kind of work or interviewing someone for our podcasts who is doing that kind of work if you're interested in a given career pathway how do you do that how will you prepare for that opportunity what reputation do you want to build while you are going through the program as a professional in training and then lastly what actions will help you do that I'm here to help you answer any of those questions but I would encourage you to keep them at top of mind as you're going through the program because again you don't want to have just learned new knowledge and skills you want to have learned more about yourself and where your passions and your values lie so with that I would say let me know how I can help although my San Jose email is Gail Dority I'm actually Kim Dority I have my MLIS so I and my entire career has been in information work I'm actually the author of a book on rethinking information work that talks about all the different things that you can do with your information skills so I will wish you the very very best in your program I'm right here as soon as you need me but trust me when I tell you you are going to love this you are going to have a blast and you are going to be so glad you got this degree