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The job market: a collateral view



I very much appreciated Richard Cox's comments on this topic. I'd like to
share both a cynical view and then a positive suggestion.

As I tell my students when they ask why some positions require so much and
pay so poorly, search committees often sit around and cobble together
requirements that may have too little to do with what the job is really
about (e.g., content, complexity, skills really needed). It's what they
think it's about or should be about. (The incumbent is usually gone and is
hardly ever consulted.) Then, we see "those ads": "three modern foreign
languages, working knowledge of Latin and Greek, doctorate, 10 years of
progressively responsible experience, $28,000 a year . . ." Then, because
no one on the planet has all of those qualifications--or, if they do, will
not come to that place, do that work, for that salary--the search is
"re-opened." This is just one more way in which the profession shoots
itself in the foot.

In a more positive vein, I'm absolutely convinced that the disciplines are
converging, that doing more with less will also mean knowing more than the
lore and tradition of one information field, and that librarians,
archivists, records managers, and our cognate cousins would do well to
look around and note that the "better" jobs expect a greater breadth and
higher level of understanding vs. a narrow discipline-specific world view.
Some may recall Teilhard's concept: "Everything that rises converges." If
we look at finding aids development and book cataloging, we *could* stress
how different they are at a lower level of technical details--or we could
see that at a level *above* each we're talking about document surrogation
and at a still level higher information representation (not everything is
a document). Today, I would rather hire someone who understands the
principles of all rather than the craft of but one field.

If this really is a knowledge society, those that know more, have more
know-how, and so more to offer a hiring organization will fare better than
those with only one piece of the puzzle.

My daughter recently accepted a two-year post-MLS fellowship at the North
Carolina State University Library (interviews with 3 other ARL libraries).
Here's a 25-year-old woman, just finishing her professional degree
program, and making $36,000. (It took me a *long* time to reach that
level.) She was not chosen just because she can do a bunch of IT tricks or
can recite the MARC record fields and what goes in them; they found her
breadth of understanding and vision remarkable in one so young. It's not
just technical skills any more.

Thought for the day,

Mike

__________________________________________________________________________
*                                                                        *
*                  J. Michael Pemberton, Ph.D., CRM, FAI                 *
*                                                                        *
* Professor                      | Voice: 865-974-6509 Sch. of Inf. Sci. *
* School of Information Sciences | Fax:   865-974-4967 Sch. of Inf. Sci. *
* University of Tennessee,       |                                       *
*   Knoxville                    | E-Mail: jpembert@utkux.utcc.utk.edu   *
* 804 Volunteer Blvd.            |                                       *
* Knoxville, TN 37996-4330       | Alternate phone/fax: 865-693-8907     *
*                                                                        *
*    Executive Editor, _The Information Management Journal_              *
*    See our "Author Guidelines" at:                                     *
*    http://www.arma.org/publications/journal/author_guidelines.htm      *
*________________________________________________________________________*

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