I am a new librarian and have been at my first professional job for just over a year now. Although I am grateful for landing a job even before graduating, I feel a bit stuck. I struggle with finding ways to expand on my current responsibilities to gain skills that apply to a bricks and mortar public or academic library. This job is quite specialized, I help maintain an electronic library of health and human services resources and provide reference services via phone and e-mail.

I do like my job--enough--but I have no long-term interest in it. I am concerned that this position does not allow for the right kinds of experiences from which to build. I would love to be a director or head of a department some day, so I want to put myself on the track for that. I held full-time jobs in various capacities for 8 years prior to and during grad school. I had leadership and supervisory responsibilities, worked with cataloging standards, and library programming. My current position offers none of these things. I feel like I have to stretch to apply my current tasks to other library jobs. Most of my applicable experience, I attained pre-MLS. I am afraid that if I stay in my current position too long, I will miss my window of opportunity.

Enough background, my questions is: Does it look poorly to hiring committees to see short job stints (1-3 yrs)? I am just starting out professionally and I am trying to find my niche-so to speak.

Thank you for the reassurance.

On a similar note, do you know how hiring committees generally feel about employment experience attained outside of a professional librarian position? Many times, I see job announcements that want "professional experience" or "post-graduate experience". Does this mean paraprofessional experience does not count?

I would add that if you have the experience from outside the listed parameters of a job, you should show how the experience/knowledge can be applied by you to this particular position. If you have cataloging experience, you can address that in the cover letter by stating what systems you have worked with, or that you have strong cataloging skills and look forward to learning the X system that the library uses. Be direct in how your skill applies to that job---otherwise they won't know. Stretch your limits a bit, too, as you will be surprised who wants what from an employee! And, the time span on a first job is less important than--as BC said--jumping jobs for no apparent reason.