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Know Your Worth: Are Librarians "Highly-Paid Clerks?"
by Socorro Maria Pelayo
More than once in my new career as a librarian, I have overheard comments referring to my position as that of a "highly-paid clerk." When I hear this, my immediate thought is, "How can anyone believe that? Do people even know the qualifications and skills required of their local librarian?"
As librarians, often we find ourselves in positions where our professionalism is questioned. Altering people's perceptions about a librarian's worth begins with us. Anyone browsing the coursework of a given SLIS web site (e.g., http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/classes/coursedesc.htm ) soon realizes that librarians are highly trained professionals whose intellectual competency is gained through difficult coursework. Working toward the coveted master's, many library students spend their final semester researching and reviewing scholarly and professional LIS literature on their selected topics, critically examining the literature, and producing lengthy scholarly papers about the field and related emerging issues. The process, beginning with topic selection and research, moving through organizing material, and finally writing the paper, is designed to test our ability to think, write critically, and communicate knowledge.
Are these the skills and accomplishments of a "clerk?"
When our professionalism and worth is questioned, this is a reminder that one of the greatest challenges we have as librarians is to know, value, and convey our worth to employers and the public. How do we communicate our worth to present and future employers, using it to negotiate for jobs, promotions, higher salaries, and benefits? Do you know your worth? The first step is to review and assess your skills and accomplishments.
Inventorying Skills
A skills inventory requires patience, focus and a thorough review of all experience. At a local job club, I discovered "skills clustering," a practical way to inventory skills. It involves assessing and evaluating skills acquired through education, present and past employers, and volunteer activities, skills which are used in performing our duties and responsibilities. To get started, I followed a useful exercise, which requires preparation time up- front, but is easy to maintain through career or job responsibility changes.
Steps to identifying skills:
- Brainstorm about past education, training, and work, including
both paid and volunteer.
- Create a written list of each item.
- Organize main categories of skills and insert samples of relevant items under each category.
After assessing all my demonstrated skills and creating my list, I ended up with many categories. For example, research is one of my main categories. Organized under research are samples of my research subjects, like immigration, human rights, medicine, law, social science, business, and employment. Clustering skills is a handy tool for me. As time passes I am able to add other skills to the cluster.
It is easy to select among the various categories when I am customizing resumes and writing letters of application, or when I am preparing for job interviews. I select from the list relevant skills for each circumstance. When potential employers list research as a desired skill in job announcements, I insert relevant research experience into my resume and cover letter - customizing it to their requirements. Most importantly, inventorying my skills into clusters has helped me to recognize and value all the knowledge I have acquired, an intangible asset at the root of my intellectual and human capital.
Identifying Accomplishments
At the local job club, a former training and development manager, Gene Nealon,* liked to point out that people are reluctant to talk about their achievements because they think of it as "bragging." Gene reminded us to focus on our accomplishments and past successes in order to help us to express them clearly to employers. Employers want to know what you have already done, and hence what you can do for them. After examining, revising and developing several years of training material, Gene was able to share with us the following four-step approach.
- Identify and list your accomplishments before writing a resume.
- Write your accomplishments using action verbs. Describe what you
did, show the result of the action, and quantify the result. What
resulted from your action? Did the employer benefit from the action?
Did patrons benefit from the action? For example, did you initiate,
participate, and successfully conclude a project in your library
that encouraged more patrons to use your facility? Quantify the
result. Don't say, "local attendance increased." DO say, "local
attendance was increased by seventeen percent within six months."
- List your accomplishments chronologically as a way of ferreting
out some valuable past achievements. What did you do in the past
three months? The three months before that? What did you do in the
three months prior to that?
- Identify key talents. Your list of accomplishments will help you to identify key talents that you have used in achieving goals. Some talents will appear more frequently than others, so choose ten or twelve from your list. Then, select seven or eight key talents which reflect your inimitable gifts, add them to your resume, and refer to them in your interview.
Continue to update your inventory of accomplishments and skills. Knowledge of your accomplishments prepares you to discuss your value to present and future employers. As librarians, if we do not know and appreciate our worth, there is no way we can negotiate a salary increase, convince an employer that we are best qualified for a position, or push for a promotion.
Create your list. Review your skills and accomplishments. It will not be the list of a clerk, but maybe you can get the first part of that overheard comment in there - highly-paid. Well deserved pay that comes from hard work, research, and knowing your worth.
Always Running
Gene Nealon always remarked that employers look for valuable people whose demonstrated skills and accomplishments are indicators of competence. Also, they look for intangible assets such as: a warm and welcoming attitude, excellent client relations and customer service skills, loyalty, enthusiasm, intellectual curiosity, creativity, and someone who is a team player. Gene knew this firsthand, since he owned several companies.
Gene's parting words for job searchers: "Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you had better be RUNNING."
* Gene Nealon, my dear friend and mentor, passed away in December 2004.
Socorro Maria Pelayo was an attorney before going to library school. Recently, she completed an assignment as a reference librarian at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, CA. Currently she works as an independent researcher for attorneys, and is designing and developing a database on Spanish and Mexican land grants in California. Next, she will be creating a database on national and international human rights resources.