The Book's Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Rethinking Information Work
Reframing your skill set from "librarianship" to the broader and more encompassing "information work" provides you with choices that can respond to changes in job markets, personal financial requirements, living arrangements, and other professional and life circumstances. You may be an information professional who happily chooses to spend your entire career in the library field, in traditional libraries. But if budgets continue to be cut, staffs continue to be downsized, and jobs become scarce in times of economic crisis, as an information professional you can always deploy your skill sets in new directions should you need or want to.
Bottom line: the more broadly you consider your career and professional skills, the more numerous - and rewarding - your career opportunities. Here's where to start!
Chapter 2 - Self Knowledge: Your Career Starting Point
Who are you and what do you want to do when you grow up? Most of us are still wrestling with these daunting questions well into our careers. And, given the state of the economy, we're likely to be asking them again and again as we change jobs, career paths, and even life goals over the coming decades.
Your challenge, as you position yourself to meet those opportunities, is to start getting a better handle on who you are, and what you want to be while you grow up...over the next ten or twenty or thirty years. And the best way to do that is to start working through the questions lined out for you in Chapter Two.
Chapter 3 - The Traditional Path
Although it's debatable whether any of today's libraries can be described as "traditional," this is how the professional generally describes the three major types of facilities-based libraries: public, school, and academic. Careers in these types of libraries are as subject to change (and opportunity) as any other type of information work, which sometimes comes as a surprise to those new to the profession.
Find out more about the pros and cons of a traditional library career path, and what to expect should you choose public, school, or academic librarianship here.
Chapter 4 - The Nontraditional Path
Traditional career paths can offer substantial rewards for those who pursue them. So, too, can nontraditional ones. Because there are so many different ways to approach nontraditional work, it can sometimes be challenging to figure out where to start.
The seven nontraditional "frameworks" (and more than 100 nontraditional job titles) described in Chapter Four will help you focus on the nontraditional paths that might make the most sense for you, either now or in your future career goals.
Chapter 5 - The Independent Path
Almost any aspect of information work can be done as an independent. This path can be as simple as doing the work you've previously done as an employee, but doing it instead as a newly minted contractor. Or it can mean starting a new information-based product or service business - alone or with colleagues - based on expertise you've gained along the way as an LIS professional.
Before you start down the independent path, you'll want to ask yourself some questions. What work would you do? How would you work? What market would you target? What would you charge? How would you get clients? Explore the answers to these questions and more in Chapter Five.
Chapter 6 - Creating Your Professional Portfolio
You've explored your unique interests, aptitudes, and preferences. You've looked at traditional, nontraditional, and independent career options that build on your LIS professional skills. In Chapter Six, it's time to consider how those skills match up with the career opportunities you may want to pursue. To do that, you'll need to rethink, reframe, and rephrase how you interpret (and present) those skills.
Enter the professional portfolio. Think of your career portfolio as an inventory of projects, achievements, contributions, innovations, initiatives, and other cool things you've done along the way. Or all those things you will do to start building the portfolio that's going to catch the eye of that potential employer or client....
Chapter 7 - Growing Your Career
Working on your professional portfolio can help you identify areas of interest that you might want to pursue further, or directions in which you may want to extend your professional "reach." This process will also help highlight 1) gaps in your knowledge base, 2) areas where you may want to actively reframe how the world perceives those skills and what they can do, and/or 3) a need to more actively build your professional support community.
Find out how to continually expand your knowledge and expertise, shape your professional "brand," and build a rich and supportive professional network here.
Chapter 8 - Thriving on Change
According to Charles Darwin, "It's not the strongest of the species who survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." Needless to say, these days the LIS profession is all about change.
In Chapter Eight, you learn ways to position for the positive aspects - and opportunity - change brings, without being derailed by anxiety or disorientation or fear. By taking control, and creating the change strategies that work best for you personally, you'll be ready to move quickly beyond surviving to actually thriving on change.
Chapter 9 - Creating Your Career Map
How do you get from where your career is today to where you want it to be in the future? You create a strategy, or a plan you put together that aligns your goals with the realities of your life. It's where you change the question from "can I?" to "how will I?"
Your strategy is what puts you in charge of outcomes, and your tactics are the action items you undertake to execute that strategy. Pulling them together into your own actionable career map is what turns your goals, strategies and tactics into the career of your dreams.
Chapter 10 - Taking Charge of Your Career
Making smart choices, positioning for opportunity, investing in your career - these are all critical to creating a resilient and rewarding career as an information professional. However, there's one additional aspect of career-building that amplifies the effect of all these actions, and that is your ability to practice self-leadership.
How do you take charge of the decisions in your life? Do you assume responsibility for the outcomes, whether good or bad? Do you know how to get "unstuck" from those jobs - and career choices - that seem to have you trapped? Chapter Ten will help you understand how to use self-leadership practices to embrace both your freedom to chose and the professional independence that comes with it.