Rethinking Information Careers

I love my job. Until recently, I was the Vice President of Content for a start-up called Disaboom.com, an online resource and community for people with disabilities. I love my boss, the CEO. He’s the smartest, fairest, least ego, most supportive leader I’ve ever worked for, and I trust his judgment — business and otherwise — completely. I love my career, which has provided many opportunities to work on cool projects with teams of knowledgeable individuals to create innovative solutions.

And, quite frankly, I’m old enough to know better.

But none of this kept me from experiencing a raging case of imposter syndrome (IS) when my boss stopped by my office last week to tell me he was changing my title from VP of Content to VP of Content and Strategy. Instead, I smiled, gulped, sputtered some inane comments like “Wow, thank you, that’s wonderful,” and then promptly adjourned to the restroom — where I tried not to throw up.

What is imposter syndrome?

Basically, imposter syndrome is the sense that you’ve been promoted beyond your abilities, that you’re in over your head, that through some combination of luck and others’ misperceptions, you’ve landed in a position for which your skills are wildly inadequate.

It’s the career version of performance anxiety, aggravated by a dread that you might be “found out” at any moment. It may not be rational, it may fly in the face of years’ worth of accomplishments, but it’s estimated that some 70 percent of successful men and women experience this chronic and often crippling self-doubt.

And that’s exactly what hit me when my boss gave me what he thought was terrific news about my promotion. His rationale was that he’d worked with me for 18 months, knew my strengths and weaknesses, and thought this was something I’d be good at. My reaction was that he’d completely overestimated my strengths, underestimated my weaknesses, and we were all about to find out in the most awful way possible… In essence, I was going to be “found out.” Classic imposter syndrome.

Sound familiar?

Imposter feelings, or a sense of being in over your head, of feeling “undeserving” of success, may manifest themselves as:

• Feeling like a fraud who has somehow managed, intentionally or unintentionally, to deceive others as to your capabilities;

• Assuming that your career achievements are due to luck, or being in the right place at the right time, or other external factors not based on your actual skills or value as a contributor;

• Dismissing, discounting, or downplaying your successes to yourself and others with statements like “anyone could have done it,” “it wasn’t that important,” or “I really got lucky on that one.”

IS expert Valerie Young points out that “self-doubt and negative feedback weigh heavily on the mind, but praise barely registers. You attribute your failures to a stable, inner core of ineptness. Meanwhile, you discount your successes as accidental or, worse, as just so many confidence jobs. Every positive is a false positive…..”

IS is most prevalent among perfectionists, academics, and others whose careers are based on performing intellectually. This anxiety can be accompanied by fear of success, a pressure not to fail, or unrealistic expectations in yourself in new situations.

Coping — or masking — mechanisms may include being overly diligent (read: working really, really hard), figuring out what behavior influential people in your career want from you and “mirroring” that, no matter how inauthentic that behavior is to the real you, or studiously avoiding drawing any attention to your strengths or accomplishments to avoid being seen as overly confident.

The IS checklist: Where do you fall?

Wondering if you’re suffering from IS? Some of the questions experts use when assessing the presence of IS include:

• Do you secretly worry that people will discover you’re not as smart or competent as they thought you were?

• Do you have a difficult time accepting praise?

• Do you hesitate to take on challenging opportunities because you’re afraid your lack of ability will be exposed?

• Do you avoid presenting your ideas or opinions in meetings in order to avoid exposing your self-perceived lack of knowledge?

• Do you have a hard time taking credit for your accomplishments, instead attributing them to good luck or others’ efforts?

• Do you see making mistakes as a personal failure, and not being perfect as a weakness?

• Do you feel like everyone you compare yourself to is smarter, more capable, more deserving of success than you?

• Do you worry with every new responsibility that this will be the one that unmasks you as a fraud?

If you’ve got mostly “yes” answers here, join the club! Almost every friend I spoke with (mostly librarians) who had achieved any level of career success felt exactly the same way.

Getting beyond imposter syndrome

If it causes you enough anxiety, IS can limit your life in many ways: it can stop you from taking a great new job, limit your earning power, constrain your ability to contribute all that your skills qualify you for, and quite frankly, make working much less fun than it might be.

So what are some ways to get beyond the self-doubts and anxiety that IS lands on (and in) our heads? Here are some tips from the experts, all of which I tried and am happy to report actually do work pretty well:

• Recognize when IS may be driving your reactions, for example, when you’re feeling panic rather than elation at a job promotion, and work to short-circuit your emotions with a strong does of reality-check. Feeling incompetent does not equate to being incompetent.

• Realize that what you are experiencing is not a sign of weakness or incompetence, but rather an indicator of a conscientious nature, and a sense of seriousness about responsibility – any idiot can be overconfident, so pat yourself on the back for your thoughtfulness.

• Accept that just about everyone else you know, in a similar circumstance, would probably experience the exact same self-doubt reaction (based on the fact that almost every librarian I know is an overachiever); what’s important is whether you allow that anxiety to hold you back.

• Be willing to discuss your feelings with trusted friends and colleagues, to get those feelings out of your head and into the reality light of day.

• Learn to recognize when you are discounting yourself and your accomplishments with statements like “I was just lucky,” and try instead statements like “I worked really hard/was really on top of my game/did some great writing, etc.” Let yourself (or rather insist that you) OWN your accomplishments.

• Check your self-doubt against reality by revisiting those accomplishments; my guess is you have, in fact, faced unfamiliar situations or roles or responsibilities and managed to figure them out just fine.

• Develop a healthy respect for the limits of your abilities, knowing that these aren’t weaknesses, these are simply areas that you haven’t yet chosen to develop into strengths. Then be honest about those areas when a promotion possibility is under discussion so you won’t feel like you have to “hide” those areas; instead, you can ask questions openly and learn from those who have those strengths.

• Lighten up, and unload the burden of perfectionism. Any new opportunity involves a certain amount of tap-dancing, and that necessarily entails learning new things, making mistakes, and having to ask lots of questions. This is called growth, not incompetence.

• Trust that the people who’ve worked with you and promoted you are not idiots. In my case, my CEO (whom, as already stated, is one of the smartest guys I know) had seen me work for 18 months and decided that I would do a good job coordinating strategy for the company. I may doubt myself, but I don’t doubt him, so his confidence in me boosts my confidence in me.

• Pay attention to whether you’re feeling IS anxiety or a true mismatch between a job and your real self. If the latter, then make a change to a position that aligns more closely with who you are and what you enjoy. But be sure this change is based on positive growth rather than damaging fear.

In my case, I resorted to a large glass of wine, an evening of soul searching, and finally a determination that I really wanted to take on the strategy role to help drive Disaboom’s impact on the lives of people with disabilities. Then I took out my laptop, and started making my to-do list.

Tags: disaboom.com, imposter syndrome

First it was the Feb. 11, 2009 article in the New York Times about what to call people of (ahem) a certain age. In “Goodbye, Spry Codgers, So Long, Feisty Crones,” writer Jane Gross noted that The International Longevity Center has suggested in their new stylebook that we avoid the terms elderly, senior citizen, golden years, feisty, spry, feeble, eccentric, senile, and grandmotherly, among others. The age demarcation at which some of these terms might apply felt just a bit too close to home.

Then it was a request from my VP of Technology that I accompany his team to a cutting-edge tech conference in Las Vegas. I’m not a big fan of Las Vegas, didn’t want to have to be away from the office for a week, and doubted that I’d learn much from a week focused on emerging technologies, since my area of responsibility at Disaboom (my employer) is to head up content development.

Next came the all-day workshop on social media, e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, et al, and the role these media are now playing in digital marketing and PR. Familiar with LinkedIn as a career-building tool, I nevertheless couldn’t quite connect something like Twitter to serious work. It just didn’t seem, well, professional (read: grown up!).

So there I was, feeling dissed, cranky, and somewhat resentful about the fact that although my job was supposed to be about creating online content, I was also going to have to learn how to use these silly social media tools… and then I had a birthday. Not a decade-type birthday, but close enough. And I could feel myself sliding down that slippery slope from engaged, curious, enthusiastic professional to defensive, change-resistant, entitled old broad.

So I decided it was time for an attitude reset.

Act Two: From Closed Mind to Open Ideas

In order to “ace Act Two” of my career, I realized that I had to completely reframe how I respond to my professional universe. Instead of thinking of myself as someone at the top of my game, I realized it made more sense to think of myself as someone just starting out in my career, because in fact the LIS world I trained for was now 25 years in the distance.

Because I (as well as pretty much all of my friends) love to work and thrive on its challenges, here’s how I’m going to ensure that I can continue to contribute at a high level for the next 25 years:

Understand the strategic benefit of change. Yeah, yeah, I know that change equals opportunity. But the older I get, the more I feel like I’m ready to slow down the rate of change a bit, thank you very much. The comfort of familiarity seems to be a lot more appealing to me than it used to be. So I’m decided to instead focus on creating that familiarity and stability in other areas of my life so I can more easily embrace change in my career.

Know that my initial reaction’s likely to be “no,” then put it aside and move on to “yes.” It’s pretty much human nature to resist change, and I’ve observed that this tendency tends to rise in sync with your age. So, just as we can “feel the fear but do it anyway,” I’m going to go with “know you’ll be ticked off, then get over it and get moving.” That way I don’t waste time or energy on trying to change my initial responses, and can instead focus or improving my subsequent actions.

Seek out opportunities to learn and use new technologies. As part of the generation that didn’t grow up with technology, every new communication or IT tech seems to be a new foreign language for me. But letting myself avoid using these tools means that I won’t understand what they can do. As a result, I won’t be able to contribute ideas, strategies, or solutions. And what fun would that be?

Look for mentors in all the right places. That’s probably going to be your younger staffers, or people in other departments, or possibly someone you heard speak at a recent conference. When I was young and just starting out, my mentors were people older and more experienced than I. Now that I myself am the older and more experienced person, I seek out anyone who knows about the stuff I want to learn more about: technology, social media, popular culture, social entrepreneurship, organic gardening… More often than not, these mentors are at least 20 years my junior. Feels a bit strange, but it’s also highly entertaining.

Keep a sense of humor. Okay, I’ve socially humiliated myself on LinkedIn and Twitter a number of times as I attempt to master these tools, and I’m guessing I’m going to do it several more times (at least) in the foreseeable future. I can either be mortified (which will cause me to avoid trying again) or entertain my colleagues with stories of my social faux pas and keep at it. I find a sense of humor is a great tool for keeping both humiliation and one’s ego at bay.

Avoid being known as Ms./Mr. Cranky. The other great thing about hanging on to your sense of humor is that it allows you to avoid being known as The Cranky One. I never realized quite how easy it is to move into this persona as we get older and more set in our ways. But it’s important to be positive and optimistic if you want people to look forward to working with you instead of dismissing you as a negative and obstructionist old geezer.

Focus on energy and resilience. If you can engage with enthusiasm, bring energy to your work, and model a resilient mind and body, then it doesn’t matter how old you are — your spirit is still young, and people will want to work with you. So as I get ready for Act Two of my career, I’ve given up the flat-abs challenge to instead focus on energy — physical and intellectual — and resilience. Whether you’re stretching your mind or your muscles, doing so will keep you active.

Will these new attitudes enable me to continue to enjoy my career, contribute at a high level, and remain gainfully employed over the next twenty-five years of my career Act Two? No guarantees. But I’m pretty sure that if I don’t actively seek to avoid the pitfalls of “aging into obsolescence,” my value will diminish like yesterday’s hot stock. So I might as well get with the program!

Tags: act 2, aging, careers, learning, resilience

Recently I had an opportunity to work with a young woman who had just graduated from an MLIS program. She was unsure how to proceed with her job search given the precarious job market for librarians (and everybody else!).

This young woman had never worked in a library before, and, like many of us when we complete our degrees, wanted to get a job in the town where her university was located. But the reality is this: With little or no library experience, and facing stiff competition in an area flooded with fellow MLIS graduates, this young woman’s job prospects would be dim at best.

In fact, her best opportunities probably lie in a direction often avoided, if not dismissed, by recent grads: working for a public library in Smalltown, USA.

The Starter MLIS Job

A starter job is the one you take when you have little or no experience, and need to build up this aspect of your professional value. It may offer few of the elements you want in subsequent jobs throughout your career (high salary, cutting-edge projects, flexible hours), but it provides something else of high value: the opportunity to establish (for yourself and others) who you are as a professional.

A starter job can be of fairly short duration, which can be one of its attractions — if you find you really don’t like the place you’ve landed, you can comfort yourself with the fact that most of us can put up with anything for two years. (On the other hand, you may be surprised to find that the job and town you thought would bore you to death turn out to be a wonderful library and a delightful community, and you’d like to build a career there.)

Regardless, when you take a starter job, consider it a terrific opportunity to identify and practice those professional behaviors and attitudes that will help you succeed in the coming years.

Put together an agenda for what you want to accomplish/learn/practice over a given period of time — say, two years. Then, if you love your job, you’ll have positioned yourself to continue to grow in value to your employer — and if you don’t love your job, you’ll have prepared yourself to move on to a better position.

The Starter Job Agenda

Here are some ideas for action items to consider:

• Try out as many roles as you can, noting what you enjoy, and what you do not. What do you enjoy enough that it might be an area you’d like to explore further?
• Establish your professional persona, for yourself. Establish and practice positive habits, expectations of yourself, and “best practices” for how you handle your career. This is a wonderful opportunity for you to watch and learn from others, good and bad.
• Focus on the lessons you learn about yourself and how you respond to circumstances around you. If you don’t like what you’re discovering about yourself, determine better responses and practice them.
• Learn everything you can about management by observing the managers around you, and how their actions are or are not successful and effective. (Trust me here — you may start out your career wanting to avoid any management responsibilities, but they tend to sneak up on you when you least anticipate them.)
• Start building your professional brand by writing, presenting, researching, and collaborating on topics that interest you, and for which you’d like to become known.
• Start building your community of colleagues. Establish positive, supportive relationships with the people you work with, but also consider joining regional and national professional groups in your area of interest. When you volunteer, no one cares how much experience you have — they’re just thrilled to have you on board!
• Become known as a great person to work with; focus on building rather than burning bridges.
• Start bulking up your portfolio of professional capabilities and accomplishments — on the job if possible, outside the job if not.
• Learn to work with all types of personalities, a skill that will be critical over a decades-long career. Anyone who’s played team sports knows that you don’t have to like a teammate to win a game with her; it’s the same thing with work. If you’ve got a problem co-worker, disengage emotionally, stop taking it personally, and embrace this as an opportunity to practice a very important job skill.
• Learn how to work with a boss. In general, this means (besides just generally doing a good job) 1) learning how to provide the information he or she needs in the preferred manner, and with the preferred frequency; 2) making sure your boss is always up to date on any situations that may come up with his or her boss; and, 3) whenever possible, making your boss look good. (Corollary here: try never to make your boss look bad…)
• Learn self-management. Be honest with yourself regarding your professional strengths and weaknesses, and practice how to manage your weaknesses and play to your strengths. If in doubt about these, ask a trusted colleague, mentor, or boss.
• Develop an attitude of respect for the knowledge of everyone you work with. No matter how smart you were in grad school, you still have a lot to learn. People will be much more willing to respect the new knowledge you may bring with you if you first bend over backward to make it clear that you respect their hard-won knowledge.
• Learn how to collaborate within and across teams. Being seen as a strong and positive contributor willing to share information, experience, and credit will cause people to trust you and seek out your participation.

The bottom line: understand that paying dues is both honorable and wise. Your job is to learn, to establish your professional persona, to contribute to the best of your ability, and to become known as a strong, valuable contributor who employers will hate to lose.

Then, when you’re ready to move on from that starter job, you will have built a solid career base from which to launch, and will have a folder-full of people eager to write letters of recommendation for you: the now-experienced information professional.

Tags: entry level, getting started, jobs, rural

This has been a great year for conversations about “equity” –- political equity, financial equity (or not), social equity.

From a conceptual standpoint, equity refers to how much investment you’ve built in a given asset, which might be your political reputation and influence, the value of your home relative to your mortgage, or the amount of standing and influence you have in your community of choice.

This last example especially interests me, because my delightful (and oh-so-patient) twenty-something colleagues have recently been coaching me in the nuances of building social equity on sites like Reddit, Twitter, and Stumbleupon. Essentially, the focus is on investing time and energy in “engaging,” and on building community trust in who you are based on the value of your contributions to the community.

As I struggled to connect with my inner social marketer (and my coworkers tried not to laugh), I realized that the same concepts apply equally well to building what I would call “professional equity.”

Invest in Relationships

Every day in our careers we have an opportunity to build positive long-term relationships with coworkers we’ve identified as people we enjoy, admire, respect, and/or can learn from. While working with them, we have an opportunity to see very clearly who they are, how their values align with ours, and what professional skills they bring.

We also have an opportunity to help these individuals build their careers. In so doing, we build long-term and mutual respect, trust, and goodwill. By being a positive player in your coworkers’ lives and careers, you signal that you care as much about their success as you do your own. And, you build the professional relationships –- and equity –- that will sustain your own career for years to come.

Build Your Professional Equity

There are all sorts of ways to build positive connections with your coworkers and the other people with whom you come into contact professionally. Here are some of the basics to get you started:

Support others’ success. Despite author and playwright Gore Vidal’s oft-quoted statement that “it is not enough to succeed; others must fail,” your career will be a lot richer (in every way) if you find ways to help others succeed. They will appreciate it, remember it, and recognize that you are someone they can trust.

Share knowledge and experience. Assuming we’ve been paying attention, the longer we work, the more we learn. Understand that your knowledge and experience can be invaluable to someone who’s just starting out or may not have experienced what you’ve been through (and learned from). Share that knowledge and experience in a supportive, non-critical manner, while also recognizing that others have much to teach you, regardless of age or background.

Find opportunities to give credit –- in public. A powerful way to build authentic trust is to make sure that you publicly recognize (in meetings, team emails, company newsletters, casual conversations) coworkers for their good work. This could be a smart idea, an innovative process, a resolved issue, or a great team effort.

Model collaboration. Work environments can be competitive, or collaborative. Sometimes all it takes to move a group from the former to the latter is to take a leadership role and model collaboration. That means you, going visible with sharing knowledge, soliciting feedback, offering help and constructive recommendations, being a sounding board, and finding ways to support and promote a team mindset. People will value you as a colleague rather than distrust you as a competitor, and will feel safe seeking out future opportunities to work with you.

Find ways to help others. Ways to help others are limited only by your imagination –- most of us need lots of help, every day! But here are some possibilities:

• Passing along information about a job opening
• Brainstorming ideas with a colleague needing to develop new solutions for a work issue
• Providing introductions and connections between colleagues with similar interests
• Recommending someone for a job
• Bringing someone in on a committee
• Pinch-hitting for someone on a professional commitment
• Sharing information of value you’ve come across
• Contributing your expertise to a colleague’s social cause
• Mentoring younger (or older!) colleagues

Add building professional connections to your new-job agenda. One of the benefits of moving around professionally (AKA, job-hopping) is that you get to join a lot of new professional communities, and build connections to a lot of new colleagues. In fact, if you’re looking to create a sustainable career, the breadth and depth of your connections is a key asset — but only if the people you’re connecting with trust and respect your professional skills and integrity.

So, make it a point with every new job to establish high-value relationships with key individuals (the ones you like and respect), and to demonstrate to them your commitment to collaboration, trust, and mutual success.

Recognize the difference between networking and building professional equity. LinkedIn and other social networking tools are excellent for building links to other people, but true professional equity gets created by working with individuals in a positive manner. That work can be virtual or face-to-face, business-oriented or volunteer, peer-to-peer or boss-to-staffer, or any other myriad variations. But the goal is always to find a way to establish a positive working relationship that will carry forward once you’ve moved on to other jobs or projects.

Professional Equity and Your Career

Over the past twenty years, I’ve worked in seven different organizations and led or been a team member for at least ten different information projects. During that time, I’ve also given workshops, served on professional committees, worked with book editors and marketing directors for my four books, and been part of a number of advisory boards. In each on of these situations, I’ve had an opportunity to establish positive working relationships with each of the individuals I came into contact with. Essentially, I’ve had an opportunity to build professional equity.

Happily, I tend to enjoy the work I do, and by extension, the people with whom I do it. I’ve tried to be enjoyable to work with, collaborative, supportive, and appreciative of others’ efforts and achievements and I tend to gravitate to others who mirror those same values. The result: during the process of working with a large number of really cool information professionals, I’ve had the good fortune to build long-lasting, extremely rewarding professional relationships built on mutual respect and trust. How has this turned out?

Last week I was able to provide two job references for former co-workers, connected a former colleague (now working as a contract employee) with a new client, helped a current colleague draft a conference proposal, and coached another staffer on how to talk so the CEO will listen.

Also last week, a guy I’d had the pleasure of presenting with at a conference put me in touch with an individual my company has been trying to connect with for months, a former student sent me information about a nonprofit with whom my company may now partner, and a fellow member of my local AIIP group recommended an intern who has just the digital media expertise we’ve been looking for.

Bottom line: think of building your professional equity as an updated version of karma: what goes around, comes around. And, if what you’re sending around is trust, collaboration, mutual support, and a genuine interest in others’ success, it’s pretty likely that all of those gifts are going to come back to you as well.

Multiplied over years of work engagements, the professional equity you build will be the greatest asset you have for creating a sustainable career.

Tags: career development, professional equity

One of the great things about being an information professional, librarian or otherwise, is the wide range of things you can do to (as they say in the corporate world) “create multiple revenue streams.”

For example, in addition to — or instead of — your current job, you might consider using your information skills to do freelance work such as writing or research. Or, you may want to explore becoming an information entrepreneur, someone who creates an information-based product to sell to others.

Product vs. Service

What’s the difference between a product and a service? A service is generally provided to a client, and is tailored to the needs of that client. It’s generally provided “on demand” — in other words, a client asks you to provide a service, which you do in response to that request.

A product, on the other hand, is some type of predefined “package” of information that you offer for sale or license to customers. Your goal is to create your information product once, then sell it multiple times (as opposed to a service, which you offer one-on-one to a specific client). Essentially, you’re “productizing” some aspect of your information expertise.

Additionally, if you’re currently working as an independent, creating an information product allows you to:

• create passive revenue, which allows you to ‘”scale up” your business without having to add more staff
• create multiple revenue streams from one initial effort (ask yourself: how many ways can I sell this information?)
• have less client dependency — if you are selling a product, you are less tied to client ups and downs for all of your income
• separate dollars earned from hours worked — you can be bringing in revenue even if you aren’t working billable hours
• identify potential market niches for which you can create additional, related products

Characteristics of a Product

Think about a product as something that you create once, then sell many times. Some standard characteristics of a product include:

• pre-packaged — you’ve created a standard format for the product that is used for/by all customers
• pre-established pricing — you have a set price for your product, although tiering is a possibility (you can offer more info/features/functionality for more money)
• minimal personal engagement — your goal is to create passive revenue, with minimal “labor” costs
• minimum customization — your goal is to have a single version that you create once, sell multiple times with as little involvement/intervention by you as possible
• focus is on market size (a group of customers) rather than on individual clients
• sale is of an existing, tangible item with immediate benefits that customer either needs or doesn’t; not about relationship-building (as is the case with a service business)

Info-Product Examples

Depending on your area of expertise and your interests, there’s a wide range of information products that you might want to consider. These include, among others:

• market research reports
• workbooks and training guides
• syndicated columns
• podcasts
• self-directed online tutorials
• industry or personal-interest newsletters
• training CDs
• annual market trend analyses and/or forecasts
• weekly/monthly environmental scans
• e-books
• databases
• revenue-producing website

Real-life examples that grew up to be major-market products include the wonderful reader’s advisory database NoveList, which started life as founder and then-public-librarian Duncan Smith’s personal card file, and Trip Hawkins’s Special Issues subscription product.

Mary Ellen Bates, independent info pro extraordinaire, says that the question to ask is “what do I have hanging around my office that I could turn into a product that someone would pay money for?” Or, another approach: what information do I have/know how to assemble that is unique, not overly time-consuming, and has potential interest for a group of purchasers?

Evaluating a Potential Product Opportunity

Okay, you think you may have a cool idea for a product. Now you need to ask some questions, both of yourself and of your potential customers, in order to determine, quite frankly, if it’s worth your effort. Here’s how to get started:

Consider the opportunity. Have others indicated an interest in your potential product? Is this a recurring request or need, or just occasional? Is the information that will make up your product difficult for you to find/update? (If so, are there ways to make your information gathering less problematic?) Does your product fall in the nice-to-have or need-to-have category? (You want to be in the latter, if possible.) If your information product will take a major effort (for example, writing a book), consider whether the return on your investment (ROI) will be worth the opportunity costs (lost evenings, weekends, and holidays for months!).

Consider the market. Who will buy your product? At what price? How big is the market? Can you product possibly be reshaped for another, additional market?

Consider your product. Is it automatable — in other words, can you produce it using technology-based, automatic processing? This will save you time. Is it scalable — can you produce and sell your product to 1,000 customers as easily as to 100? The less manual labor involved, the more scalable a product is. Is your product standardized, so that everyone is buying the same version? (A variation here is that you may want to offer customization for a high price premium, an attractive option if the customization can be done automatically.) If this is a technology-mediated product, how much customer support will you need/be willing to offer?

Consider your infrastructure. Will you be able to fill orders automatically via your website? How will you market and or sell your product? Are there regulatory, licensing, or other legal issues you need to consider?

Consider the impact on your existing work and life. Creating an information product that you then (we hope!) sell for additional income is a great way to add a bit of financial security in these uncertain times, and might also possibly end up becoming a significant part of your career.

But it’s important to realize that you need to be realistic about how much time you have to devote to your info-sideline, so that it doesn’t hijack all of your professional energies, time, and often, budget! When I made a decision to write a book, I naively assumed I could knock it out in about, oh, three months. Eighteen months (and countless broken social engagements) later, I finally delivered the Rethinking Information Work manuscript to my Libraries Unlimited editor. Now, when I consider doing another information product, I’m more realistic about both the amount of time it will take and what I will be giving up during that time.

A Path to Independence?

One of the reasons I decided to create my own information product — write a book in an area where I had expertise — was that I was working in a job in which all of my intellectual efforts focused on supporting my boss’s goals. Nothing unusual about that, and I really adored the CEO I was working with, but I got to a point where I wanted something in my professional life that I controlled.

My “information product” gave me visibility separate from my work as an information advisor to the CEO, and allowed me to begin developing a separate, independent career path while I still had the security of a steady paycheck. (I was, of course, diligent about doing all of my writing outside of my work hours.)

This sort of info-product sideline may offer you the same sort of opportunities.  Whether it’s creating an additional revenue stream to support current financial needs or future goals; building visibility for an expertise that may not be part of your regular job but that you’d like to pursue at some point; or just providing an opportunity for you to exercise your information skills in a way that allows you to be in charge — creating information products can be an enjoyable and potentially profitable option to consider.

Keep in mind that being an information entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily mean ramping up a major business undertaking; it can just as easily mean starting a small sideline that engages you and brings rewards, financial and otherwise.

Tags: alternative careers, entrepreneur, information entrepreneurship, multiple streams of income, products

Last week I had an opportunity to chat with a young colleague who is exceptionally bright, but inexperienced in workplace dynamics. He asked for advice about supervising people, which he had recently been asked to do, in a way that met the company’s expectations for their work.

Like so many of our young “best and brightest,” he has been put into a role that requires him to supervise others, work at a high level of success with colleagues, and meet executives’ expectations –- all with little or no training in how organizations work.

My advice to him? Coach down, collaborate across, manage up.

Coach down. Supervising others is about helping them deliver their best stuff to the organization, whether a library, a nonprofit, or a company. You need to hold people accountable for doing their work successfully, but that’s a lot easier to do consistently when you understand and support their motivations, goals, and concerns.

An example of this type of coaching is how you approach annual reviews. Instead of simply evaluating each of your direct reports and letting them know where and how they have or haven’t met expectations, consider also asking them to prepare their own assessment of their job, their career goals, and the ways they would like to grow in their jobs. Are there other projects they’d like to take on, teams they’d like to volunteer for, additional skills they’d like to develop?

Obviously you may not be able to accommodate all of their goals, but making the effort to create an environment where people can learn and grow will keep them much more engaged than if you maintain an environment where employees are simply told what to do. Although most of us, when first thrust into a supervisory or management role, feel most comfortable micromanaging, this approach is pretty much guaranteed to bring out the worst in the people reporting to us. Instead, consider working with your people to help them succeed in their jobs.

Collaborate across. An awful lot of organizational culture is about competition –- between departments, managers/executives, and budget priorities. You can see it in meetings where people vie for attention and credit rather than supporting anyone else’s ideas or solutions. But life -– and work -– is not a zero sum game, where your win is my loss.

How much better instead to build bridges to others, to find ways to support good ideas whether yours or your colleagues’. You can demonstrate support in many ways, but one of the most basic is simply publicly acknowledging someone’s contribution. This is as simple as saying something like “I think Bill’s idea is a good starting point for us.” Making the effort to value others’ participation is not only the smart thing to do personally, it’s also how teams become creative and innovative, instead of being mired in infighting and disarray.

It’s also how you begin building your impact within (and eventually, outside of) your organization. When you’ve been willing to acknowledge and support others’ good ideas, it’s much likelier that they’ll be willing to do the same for you. And when your colleagues move on to other jobs, they will take with them the knowledge that you’re a great team player, and someone with whom they can collaborate – rather than compete.

Manage up. “Managing up” means different things to different people (for one take, see “What it Means to ‘Manage Up,’” a recent post by columnist Elizabeth Garone to the Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal.) But from my perspective, it means doing those things that enable your boss to have confidence in your performance.

That means finding out what level of communication your boss needs from you, what issues/concerns are important to him or her, and, quite frankly, how you can help your boss succeed in his or her job.

Quoting from Ms. Garone’s post:

When someone tells you that you need to “manage up,” what he or she is really saying is that you need to stretch yourself. You need to go above and beyond the tasks assigned to you so that you can enhance your manager’s work…

She also quotes executive coach Mariette Edwards, who says:

… there are numerous strategies her clients often overlook when it comes to managing up. For example, getting to know one’s manager – and his or her style. “If you and your manager seem to be speaking two different languages, then the problem may be that you are not leaning into that person’s style,” says Ms. Edwards. “An analytical [type boss] will take exception to someone who presents an idea without data to support it. A people person will be offended in the absence of regular communication.” Knowing your manager’s style — and adjusting your own to meet it — will help you manage up, she says.

Other pointers? Pay attention; jump in when needed; maintain a good attitude no matter what; do quality work; keep your boss informed; build relationships, trust and an information network; stay out of politics; learn the art of selling and negotiation as well as the company’s rules; and be a good follower when the situation dictates it.

Coach down, collaborate across, manage up. It builds trust, support, and long-term career growth –- not to mention a much more effective organizational team effort.

Further reading:

Badowski, Rosanne and Roger Gittines. Managing Up: How to Forge an Effective Relationship With Those Above You. Doubleday Business, 2004. 240p. ISBN 0385507739.

Goleman, Daniel. Working with Emotional Intelligence. Bantam, 2000. 400p. ISBN 0553378589.

Gordon, Rachel Singer. The Accidental Library Manager. Information Today, inc., 2004. 362p. ISBN 1573872105.

Tags: management, managing

Recently I was asked how to go about getting started with LIS work in a new industry — a timely question, given how quickly industries emerge (and contract) these days.

Although there are considerations specific to each industry (for our purposes here, I consider “academia” to be an industry), there are some basic principles that apply across all industries and over a lifetime of career changes. These principles fall into the areas of: identifying transferable business skills, developing an in-depth understanding of your target industry, and building professional connections/bridges to potential employers/opportunities.

Identifying Transferable Business Skills

When you look at the professional skills you bring to your current position, you’ll probably find a number of basic business skills that will readily transfer to other business settings. For example, project management skills, team leadership expertise, the ability to be a budget whiz with an Excel spreadsheet… these are the sorts of things that you can point to as professional strengths in any organization, regardless of industry.

Start by looking at your resume to see what you’d want to highlight for a potential new employer. If you don’t feel you have transferable skills, now is the time to start working on them: Ask for new assignments; volunteer for cool projects; pick up some classes on key business skills. Another alternative is to ask for coaching from co-workers who have important skills that you lack.

Developing an In-Depth Understanding of Your Target Industry

This involves understanding:

• What aspect of a new industry you want to work in (for example, in the healthcare industry, do you want to work for a hospital library, pharmaceutical company, or nonprofit healthcare organization?)
• What type of work you want to do within your target area, and where the job openings are/might be
• The key information resources for your target area — print and online, mainstream (New England Journal of Medicine, CableWorld, The Chronicle of Higher Education) and alternative (key blogs), government and association
• What types of skills and expertise are required by the type of work you’d like to be doing
• What professional organizations exist for the type of work you’d like to do (the Medical Libraries Association, the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, the Art Libraries Society of North America…)

Your goal in doing this is both to understand what the opportunities may look like (and how your current skill set aligns with potential job openings) and how you will quickly develop the professional knowledge base you need to hit the ground running in a new position. This means understanding the industry, its issues, opportunities, and threats; understanding the company and its market/constituency; and understanding what skills you’ll need to bring to potential healthcare information jobs.

Building Professional Bridges to Potential Opportunities

After many years in one industry, you undoubtedly have tons of connections among other LIS colleagues in that industry. Now, your goal is to develop a similar set of connections in your new industry (or the part of it within which you want to work).

For a switch to the healthcare industry, for example, this could involve volunteering for work in a hospital library, joining MLA, and networking with the medical/healthcare librarians in your local SLA chapter. These contacts will not only be able to help you identify where the jobs are but also coach you on expectations and requirements for various types of jobs, and possibly pass along “insider tips” about various employers and company environments.

After you have completed the above three steps, you’re ready to check to see how your skills line up with the job requirements of various positions, and identify what, if any, further education or training you’ll need to be competitive.

In our healthcare industry example, that may mean taking a course in bioinformatics, studying medical terminology and the MeSH system, or learning how to search PubMed effectively. Assume that you’ll need to pick up at least some industry-related knowledge before you start applying for your new jobs; the more you have, the more confidence potential employers will have in your ability to transition into a new industry (theirs!).

Making the Leap

Consider these the basics for undertaking an industry switch/transition. Yes, this takes some work. But, it can be a very wise investment of your time if your employer is in an industry beginning to contract. Similarly, if an early career opportunity took you in one direction and now you’re ready to switch to a potentially more rewarding path, doing just this basic “due diligence” will raise the odds of making that leap successfully.

Tags: getting started, industries, networking, professional devleopment, transferable skills

Becoming an independent information pro can be a terrific career path –- or a quick route to ulcers, insanity, and ongoing fantasies about how great it would be to work at the local dry cleaner’s.

In fact, as someone who goes in and out of working as an independent depending on what cool project is being offered, I can personally attest to an ongoing relationship with those ulcers, insanity, and dry-cleaner fantasies. Nevertheless, working on your own under the right circumstances can also be incredibly rewarding, and a heck of a lot of fun.

What Does the Independent Path Entail?

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 product or service business — alone or with colleagues — based on expertise you’ve gained along the way as an LIS professional.

In addition, there are many different approaches to working as an independent. You might work with a single client, for example, as a contract substitute librarian for one library district. Or you might become a solo, a one-person shop offering your services, for example, as a freelance indexer to publishers around the country.

On the other hand, you might want to build a business that includes several employees, thereby extending your company’s ability to handle multiple clients and projects simultaneously. Or you might decide you’d rather not take on the management and overhead of employees, so as an alternative you decide instead to join a loose network of information pros who come together on a project basis, participating based on the expertise needed on specific projects.

Alternatively, you might prefer to sign up with a temp agency that specializes in information work. This strategy lets someone else worry about the marketing, management and client relationships, while you simply show up and do the work (performing at the highest level of excellence, of course!).

The bottom line is, all the choices are completely up to you: what work you do, how you do it, what markets or clients you go after (as well as, occasionally, what clients you fire), what you charge, how you grow and expand your business (if this is a goal for you). These are but some of the major choices you’ll make as an independent.

What Work Might You Do?

Consider all the things that traditional librarians do, from cataloging to reference to indexing to bibliographic instruction to research. All of these can be –- and have been -– done on a contract basis, either for traditional libraries or special libraries. (Remember, in an era of downsizing, outsourcing key activities to competent LIS contractors is one of the best ways for organizations to continue to get the necessary work done.)

Then consider those activities that make up nontraditional LIS paths; these are all candidates for freelance or contract work as well. The emphasis on strategic management of knowledge assets means that businesses increasingly need people who know meta-tagging, know how to build taxonomies, know how to research international market opportunities, know how to research and write white papers, know how to do competitive intelligence, and know how to analyze and summarize key information. A lot of this work is done on a project basis by outside contractors… such as you.

Or, think about doing these same sorts of activities within a broader context. For example, your expertise in marketing libraries might turn into a consulting business developing marketing plans for nonprofits and cultural institutions. The years you spent designing and implementing your academic library’s web portal could translate into a business developing websites for alumni associations or career colleges. A successful track record as a bibliographic instruction librarian might launch you on an independent path as a corporate or association trainer, an online teacher, or a freelance creator of online tutorials for businesses.

Other examples might include freelance cataloging; creating and maintaining research guides and online tutorials for virtual libraries; developing web portals and online communities for clients; launching an information brokerage or freelance research company; providing current awareness services for start-ups in emerging industries; being a consulting editor for one of the library-focused publishing companies; or doing freelance prospect (i.e., donor) research for a nonprofit.

Independents have pursued careers as freelance booktalkers and/or storytellers, manuscript evaluators and consulting acquisitions editors, adjunct faculty (classroom-based or online), library building consultants, organizational development consultants, writers (books, articles, and online content), workshop and seminar presenters, and grant writers. Colleagues have set up and maintained technical libraries for local tech firms, cataloged personal libraries for wealthy clients, specialized in market research or patent searching, taken on systems and networking projects, built reputations as freelance legal researchers, provided research training to specialized groups, done trend analysis for marketing companies, written position papers for nonprofits, worked as freelance genealogists, edited manuscripts for LIS publishers, put together research guides for virtual libraries, and done contract cataloging -– all based on skills they’ve developed as LIS professionals.

Other Questions to Consider

Before considering the independent path, you’ll also want to thoroughly explore and answer the following questions:

How would you work? For example, would you work from home or in a leased office space? Would you work a regular 9-5 day five days a week, or do four 10-hour days so you could have regular three-day weekends? Would you prefer to work for national clients (which entails business travel) or local companies (who often have smaller budgets, but are easier to build a relationship with).

What market would you target? Will you focus on the library market, or on clients outside the library world? Specialize in nonprofits, or work only with the telecommunications or healthcare or education industries? Will you specialize in working with government agencies, and develop an expertise in navigating the red tape necessary to secure large and lucrative government contracts?

Another decision: will your product or service be applicable across a broad range of organizations (larger market opportunity) or will you be targeting a small niche market (easier to market to and make a name for yourself, but susceptible to market downturns)?

What would you charge? Again, many variables: do your prices need to respond to a competitive environment? Are you working in a geographic location where fees are generally higher or lower than the national average? Will you charge nonprofits less than you charge for-profits?

Will you base your fees on what you need to earn to cover your monthly overhead, or on what the market will bear, or on an hourly-charge basis that includes your invisible costs such as training/professional development, association memberships, marketing time, etc.? Will you charge by the hour (often the default for new independents who haven’t gained sufficient experience to confidently estimate project hours) or by the project (usually allows you to price at a higher rate)?

How would you get clients? This is the really challenging one. Most of us feel fairly confident that we can do the work a client asks of us –- once we have that client. But actually getting that client is a whole different matter.

Services marketing is, to quote a recent book title, “selling the invisible.” As is the case for all independents regardless of profession, assume marketing efforts will generally take up a substantial amount of your work week (at least 40%), especially when you’re just starting out. And assume you’ll be trying all sorts of things to get your message out, establish your brand, and increase your visibility within your target market.

What kinds of things might that include? You’ll network mercilessly, attending business luncheons, speaking at professional group meetings, presenting at conferences, and volunteering in the community or with organizations relevant to your market. Some independents find cold-calling effective, while others avoid it at all costs.

An informative, polished, and professional-looking website is imperative, as are business cards and at least minimal print collateral (for example, a tri-fold 8½x11 brochure. You may want to consider a quarterly e-newsletter with content relevant to your target audience as a way of staying in their conscientiousness. Another option is to find pro bono work that allows you to demonstrate your skills to your target audience (and connect with their key issues) in a way that showcases your value to potential clients before you’re ready to ask them for paying projects.

Not Done Yet!

And those are just the starter questions! Here are some more, just in case you were running out of things to consider:

• What management structure will your business have?
• How will you describe your product/service to others in 50 words or less? Make sure you’ve got a great “elevator speech” that clearly identifies your value proposition
• Who/what is your competition, and how will you compete against them?
• How will you get your first project, and then convert that project into an ongoing client?
• How will you pay your bills if you don’t land any clients for 12 months?
• How will you stay connected to others in your profession regionally and nationally?
• How will you establish and maintain your brand?
• How will you obtain payment from a non-paying client?
• How will you handle technology crises?
• How will you continue to expand your knowledge base? This includes your knowledge as a business owner whose goal is to expand your business and earn a profit; as a researcher with specialized topic knowledge and knowledge of information resources; as a marketer who needs to understand both who else might need your skills and how to connect with them; and as a business manager who needs to master key performance tools
• How will you handle vacations and illness?
• How will you handle too many projects?
• How will you fund your start-up costs?
• How will you handle family and friends’ disruptions and expectations?
• What contracts do you need, and how will you deal with a client’s contract that has unacceptable terms?
• What will your project proposals include, and how will they be formatted?

The good news is that there are several excellent books available to help you work through each of these issues. The reality-check news is that until you’ve thought all of these through and are confident that you’ve addressed each one, you’re probably not ready to launch.

Recommended Resources

Associations

Association of Independent Information Professionals
www.aiip.org
The must-join organization for anyone contemplating launching as an independent. Not only do the members throw an annual conference that feels more like a terrific family reunion where everyone’s sharing information, best practices, and hard-learned lessons, the AIIP list provides a daily clearinghouse of strategy and insider tips on how to succeed as an independent information pro.

Special Libraries Association
www.sla.org
SLA is a target-rich environment if you are planning to market your services to corporations. Think about joining committees, presenting at conferences, and networking like crazy to showcase your skills among potential clients.

Books

Bates, Mary Ellen. Building & Running a Successful Research Business: A Guide for the Independent Information Professional. Cyberage Books/Information Today, 2003. 472p. ISBN 0910965625.
Don’t even consider becoming an information broker without reading this book first. Those who have heard Bates speak at LIS conferences will recognize her voice here: smart, funny, realistic, and supportive. Bates walks readers through the entire range of issues related to starting, running, and growing the business, plus takes you through a “day in the life” scenario that provides a realistic view of what this career choice really looks like.

de Stricker, Ulla. Is Consulting for You? A Primer for Information Professionals. ALA Editions, 2008. 101p. ISBN 0838909477.
This slim volume covers, in the author’s words, “my experience in an effort to assist those considering a move into consulting. Covering the basics of setting up shop as well as typical project events and realities, I offer answers to questions I have often been asked: So what is it really like to be a consultant? What does it take? Is my personality suited?” de Stricker is well-known (and respected) among information professionals in Canada and the U.S. for her writings and seminars.

Sabroski, Suzanne. Super Searchers Make It On Their Own: Top Independent Information Professionals Share Their Secrets for Starting and Running a Research Business. Cyberage Books/Information Today, 2002. 336p. ISBN 0910965595.
One of the popular “Super Searchers” series, Make It on Their Own is a collection of interviews with 11 independent information professionals. The individuals profiled represent different industries and areas of expertise, and among them touch on such issues as client relations, starting up, day-to-day business realities, balancing personal and professional responsibilities, time management, and similarly useful topics. Each profile concludes with a hit list of “Super Searcher Power Tips,” and the book concludes with a listing of the more than 200 resources mentioned throughout the text. Like sitting down with a group of really successful mentors and listening to them share war stories, best practices, and their best tips.

Weiss, Alan. Million Dollar Consulting: The Professional’s Guide to Growing a Practice. McGraw-Hill, 2002. 292p. ISBN 007138703X.
Weiss’s books are legendary among independents for their practical, hands-on advice and counsel. Million Dollar Consulting is useful even for those who would be happy billing out substantially less than that, as it addresses so many questions that independents of all sizes deal with every day. Topics include landing clients, pricing, growing the business, building sustainable client relationships, and many other strategic topics. Other equally valuable books by Weiss include How to Establish a Unique Brand in the Consulting Profession (Pfeiffer, 2001) Value-Based Fees (Pfeiffer, 2002), and Getting Started in Consulting, 2nd ed. (Wiley, 2004).

Online

Info-Entrepreneurship: A Resource Guide for the Independent Information Professional
www.aiip.org/Content/Documents/Document.ashx?DocId=6799
Contains selected resources pertaining to running an independent information business, with a goal of showing the current state of the profession.

Information Broker FAQ
www.marketingbase.com/faqs.html
A quick overview of the market for info brokers, skills and attitudes needed, typical services offered, working as a part-time info broker, etc. Useful and practical information for those considering the profession.

The Independent Info Pro Business (a.k.a. “Information Brokering”)
www.batesinfo.com/info-brokering.html
Links to a number of resources Bates has compiled on life as an information broker. At the website see also her archived “tips of the month,” which provide an ongoing “heads-up” about new search tools, research tips, and emerging issues of interest to IIPs.

Sologig
www.sologig.com
From Careerbuilder.com, this site was launched in 2002 to “bring together talented freelancers, consultants and independent professionals (Soloists) with the most qualified employers from across the United States.” You post your professional profile, they post their projects, and you both get to search for a match. See the resource center for useful “how to succeed as a solo” articles.

Steps in Starting Your Own Business
www.rileyguide.com/steps.html
A useful collection of resources (business plans, tutorials, advice, government agencies, etc.) under the headings of “Steps in Starting Up,” “Finding Help,” “Funding for Your Business,” “A Little Legalese,” and “Setting Up the Office.” From the Riley Guide people.

Tags: freelance, iip, independent, solo, transferable skills

Change happens.

Your company is talking merger with another firm, which means your job may be in play. Your wonderful boss got promoted, only to be replaced with someone who flunked her anger management training… and she’s got her eye on you. Or you’ve heard rumors that the exciting startup you signed on with has burned through its cash at warp speed and now job cuts may be in the works.

It’s not clear that any of these absolutely signal that your job may be in jeopardy, but the smart money is on those odds. What do you do? My advice: hope for the best, plan for the worst, and get your exit strategy in place.

What’s an exit strategy? It’s an action plan built around your “what next” questions: after this job, what kind of work would you like to be doing, for whom (and, possibly, where) would you like to be doing it, and what actions do you need to take over the next several weeks/month/quarters in order to be positioned to have those choices?

Benefits of an Exit Strategy

Going through an exit-strategy process provides a number of benefits when you’re in the midst of a work environment where you have no idea about – and little or no influence over – the outcomes.

First, it allows you to detach emotionally and move your energy from obsessing about “what’s going to happen/what if I lose my job” to “I’m in control of my future, and I need to invest my energy and attention into determining what my next job options will be.”

Essentially, you simply assume that your current situation is most likely going to end, mourn its loss if you need/want to, and prepare yourself to move on. That way you’re not waiting for someone to give you the bad news; you’ve already started moving beyond that inevitability into a better future. You have taken charge of your career and your choices, which places you in the power position. You’ve moved from a passive stance (waiting for someone else to decide what happens) to an active one (you’re deciding what you want your next phase to look like).

Second, an exit strategy allows you to hit the ground running if a layoff happens. You’ve already mapped out what you need to do and who you need to contact, so you don’t need to waste time trying to figure all this out when you’re in a funk from losing your job. All you need to do is follow the action plan you’ve already lined out when you’re ready to engage.

Third, having an exit strategy in place before you need it means you have time to start doing the prep work now to be solidly positioned for your next opportunity. For example, if you’ve been reading about web producer positions in job postings but realize your XML skills are lacking, now is the time to start taking classes or reading books on XML. Then, by the time you’re applying for those jobs, you already have the knowledge you need — and (best case) you’ve found ways to practice and hone those skills.

The Questions to Ask Yourself

Creating an exit strategy starts with asking yourself some basic questions, specifically:

1. What type of work might you like to do next? This might be working in a specific industry, for a particular company, or doing a certain kind of work. You may have several ideas in mind, but your starting point is to identify a preferred path (or paths) that you’d like to have open to you if you leave your current situation.
2. What information do you need to know about that industry, company, or type of work in order to better understand 1) what opportunities might exist, and 2) how to find jobs in your area of interest (job lists, conferences, networking, other?).
3. What skills and/or knowledge might you need in order to be of value in the position you seek? One of the most effective ways to do this is by undertaking a SWOT analysis – an assessment of your professional strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to a potential career opportunity. Your goal here is to identify where you need to “bulk up” in the areas where you may have knowledge or skill gaps. Then take it one step further and determine when and how you will gain that knowledge.
4. Consider your professional network – who will you want to notify, when the time comes, that you’re going to be “on the market?” Start putting this list together now, as well as drafting a brief, upbeat letter that lets people know how much you’ve enjoyed your current job, but also how excited you are to explore new opportunities. Also, what relationships would it be helpful to have in place when you’re ready to move on to your next career opportunity, and how might you go about establishing those? For example, will you join a professional organization and get active in the local chapter in order to meet more people in a specific industry or profession? Volunteer with a local nonprofit to contribute your skills in a non-LIS environment? What else?
5. What professional “administrivia” do you need to take care of before a change is likely to happen? This may include updating your resume (and possibly working with a coach to do so), making copies of any of your office files that contain information you’d like to have available to you in the future, and creating documentation for how you perform your job responsibilities to ensure as smooth a transition as possibly if there is staff turnover. (No matter the circumstances surrounding your leaving, it’s always a smart idea to leave on a positive note if possible.)
6. Lastly, what do you need to do in your personal life to be ready for the disruption of change? It helps to get things like medical checkups, car maintenance, and house repairs taken care of to the best extent possible so that when a change arrives, there is still order in other aspects of your life.

Create Your Timeline

Once you’ve identified what actions you’ll undertake and information you’ll gather, it’s time to establish your execution timeline.

As someone who’s gone through this drill way more times than any sane person should, I tend to put together my exit strategies in three-month chunks, with the most critical actions done first in case it turns out I only have two months (or, in one case, two weeks!) before things head south.

So a way to approach this would be to look at, say, a three-month period, and line out on a week-by-week basis which of your actions you will do when. For example, you might decide that the most critical items are doing a SWOT analysis and updating your resume. The first month, then, you might spend your lunch hours and Sunday afternoons working on these action items. The second month might be dedicated to researching potential employers and positions as well as broadening your community of contacts. So your lunch hours might be spent cruising job sites and doing industry/company research, and you might also identify and join a professional organization related to your future job interests.

Your third month might focus on connecting with those individuals in your professional community or network who you might want to alert to your potential availability. So perhaps you’d schedule several “catch-up” lunches each week, or coffee after work with a number of former colleagues. Month by month, week by week, you would continue working through your priority list. You would essentially be preparing yourself for your next career opportunity, until you felt confident that if a job change, a.k.a., layoff, were to happen, you’d be ready to move forward toward your new opportunities.

Your Exit Strategy Puts You in Control

You may find that you want to put all these actions in a very different order (or undertake different actions). But the idea is to immediately begin to take an active role in what your future is going to look like.

This will make you less anxious about outcomes over which you have very little influence, and give you confidence because you’re investing your time and energy in outcomes you can shape through your own efforts. That confidence is important to a potential employer, because you want that person to see you not as an employee who’s holding onto a job for dear life, but as a professional who understands he or she has value to contribute, and is more than happy to leave for a new opportunity if it’s the right one.

It’s important to keep in mind that you can do everything right, and still be out of a job. Companies make these sorts of decisions for all sorts of reasons that may have nothing to do with intelligent thinking (or your extraordinary value). So the only thing you can do is put as little time and energy into being unhappy about that as possible, and instead invest all of your best efforts into creating the next phase of your professional life.

Tags: Add new tag, changing jobs, downsizing, getting laid off, layoffs

At this year’s SLA conference one of the hot topics was “embedded librarianship” — that is, working as an information pro for an organization, but not necessarily being attached to or affiliated with a corporate library or business information center.

Sometimes info pros end up as embedded librarians because their organization did away with their library, but were smart enough to realize the brain power of the library’s staffers was too valuable to lose. Other times this is because people were recruited out of the library to work directly, “on the ground,” with an operational team (for example, the product development team). Or it might be that an ops team was simply savvy enough to realize how much they’d benefit from the research/writing/information organization skills of an info pro, and hired directly for that skill set.

Regardless of the path taken to get there, embedded librarianship offers an interesting and potentially growing career opportunity for info pros, one that allows them to contribute directly to team and organizational goals (and make visible their value to the bottom line).

However, when discussing this with students recently, it became clear that unless you’re pretty familiar with how organizations operate, it can be a challenge to figure out exactly where your skills can add value. Within an organization, who needs what information, and how do they use it? Knowing this basic information will be critical to being able to plug in and add value, so here is a very rudimentary overview of how most organizations organize themselves, what departments do what work, and the information they need to do it. Keep in mind that every organization is different, so this should be considered simply a guide rather than a roadmap to any specific company’s organizational layout.

Human Resources. Works with: department heads, legal department, contract trainers, benefits providers and vendors. Accountable for: aligning workforce abilities with company needs; recruitment and retention; providing appropriate learning opportunities to grow the workforce; creating and managing competitive benefits and compensation programs; establishing contract and outsourced/off-shored employee relationships. Key issues: legal issues related to personnel matters; staying current with HR, T&D, benefits, and compensation best practices; advances in recruiting, hiring, and compensation practices. Information needs: best practices, benchmarks; vendor/provider background research, evaluations, comparisons; training and development resources.

Information Systems (”IT”). Works with: department heads; legal department (compliance); contract programmers. Accountable for: aligning enterprise IT infrastructure with company needs and strategy; allocating budget to reflect often-competing strategic priorities; evaluating new technologies in terms of long-term enterprise needs; creating new product IT, managing contractors responsible for creating new product IT, or managing relationship with vendor partner responsible for creating new product IT; supporting legal requirements (records retention policies). Key issues: managing unrealistic executive expectations; staying current on emerging technologies, bugs, and applications; understanding enterprise goals in order to support them via IT; getting other departments to understand and support IT roles and activities. Information needs: staying apprised of emerging information technologies; vendor/provider background research, evaluations, comparisons.

Sales and Marketing. Works with: product developers; engineering and development; finance (for product pricing issues); corporate communications (press releases). Accountable for: performing market research, market segmentation; creating and executing marketing and sales campaigns; documenting return-on-investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns; setting and meeting sales goals. Key issues: understanding characteristics of market opportunity; understanding customers’ purchase drivers, segments; understanding competitive landscape; organizing and managing a high-quality customer care program. Information needs: market, customer, and competitor information (includes demographics, purchase drivers, product response, trends and changing patterns); sales data; effective sales channels and approaches; statistical information; market research/characteristics of potential opportunities; call center and customer service best practices, benchmarking

Finance. Works with: department heads and key company strategists and decision-makers; legal dept (Sarbanes-Oxley, compliance issues); outside and internal auditors; investors and industry analysts; SEC (if public). Accountable for: integrity of company’s financial reporting; integrity of company’s financial operations; budget data; industry comparisons and ratios. Key issues: legal issues related to financial requirements; financial strength of organization relative to similar companies; competitive intelligence regarding potential joint ventures partners, acquisitions, or hostile takeovers. Information needs: internal financial performance data; budget data; industry comparisons and ratios; competitive intelligence of a financial nature; market trends (for financial forecasting); regulatory or market developments that may impact revenues.

Engineering and Production. Works with: product managers; sales and marketing; suppliers. Accountable for: creating products within technical and budget specifications; delivering products on time; using best practices and processes to maximize product’s consumer benefit while minimizing product production costs; supply-chain management; creative and managing competitive benefits and compensation programs; establishing contract & outsourced/off-shored employee relationships. Key issues: maximum-efficiency, minimum-cost production processes; optimizing supply-chain management processes (vendor relations and specifications). Information needs: best practices, benchmarks; vendor/provider/supplier background research, evaluations, comparisons; advances in engineering and materials sciences.

Legal. Works with: department heads, especially on contractual agreements; finance; HR; corporate communications (press releases). Accountable for: ensuring company compliance with all legal/regulatory restrictions; ensuring legality of hr policies; ensuring that contracts are appropriate and not damaging to the organization; working with outside counsel in the event of a lawsuit. Key issues: legal issues related to personnel matters; regulatory requirements and proposed regulations; keeping the company out of lawsuits. Information needs: ongoing updating regarding legal and regulatory changes; legal decisions and proceedings, current and background; any pending SEC issues.

Corporate Communications. Works with: department heads; legal dept; sales & marketing; “visible” executives making public statements. Accountable for: creating and placing external messages to “brand and position” the company, rather than the product (which is sales & marketing); communicating with the organization’s various constituencies, including investors, the media, and competitors; building and protecting the company’s reputation in the marketplace; managing public-relations crises. Key issues: controlling messages and communication processes; avoiding public-relations disasters; creating positive views about the company and its products; positioning the company and its leadership as capable, innovative, and expert. Information needs: quotable statistics, background information, competitive intelligence; media research; issues research; speech/article backgrounders.

Keep in mind that every organization has information needs specific to its business and the products and services it delivers. Just consider this a starter “map” to get you thinking about where and how your information skills could add value within your current organization — or one you’d like to work for.

Tags: corporate information, embedded librarianship