There are a multitude of career options for those with an MLIS. John DiGilio, the Librarian Relations Manager with Thomson-West, stressed that with an MLIS/MLS, “the sky is the limit.” His presentation was one of six given at the spring seminar of the Special Library Association San Diego chapter (SLA-SD) on Friday, April 8, 2005. The seminar titled “MLIS: The Key to Unlocking Your Unlimited Potential,” was about alternative career choices for those holding an MLIS, MLS, GLIS, or MSLS degree. Working in vendor relations with library or information center librarians is one option, as library science degree holders have a common jargon and inside knowledge on the concerns of librarians.

Each presenter had about an hour and followed certain talk guidelines. The guidelines suggested that they tell us some of their background and how they got to where they are in their career. This was very useful, as knowing something about experiences and training that led to their current career choice helped to understand the personality fit and attraction to their particular alternative to working as a librarian in a library.

Aimee Fitzgerald, Director of Prospect Research at Pepperdine University, spoke to us about Advancement Research. This is fundraising. Universities and non-profit organizations need fundraisers. Public libraries need to do fundraising. There is a lot of online research involved. People in this career research people and organizations. The organization associated with this career is the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement (APRA), whose members follow a code of ethics ensuring privacy and confidentiality of entities they research. She provided us with fictitious examples of the kind of reports she provides to her employer.

Paula Koehler used to do knowledge management (KM), so she talked to us about that. She gave us an overview of KM models and talked about the project life-cycle. The background she suggested for this career option is a good understanding of how people seek and use information. You need to understand how information is organized and should be user-focused. In an organization, you should be able to see cross-departmentally. Basically, you need to know what everyone is doing so that you can connect the dots and bring them together. Though librarians in organizations are generally politically neutral, you need to be politically savvy about your organization.

Paul Morton does Competitive Intelligence (CI). Morton gave us a big packet with an example of a report. He gets up at 4 a.m. to put together daily briefing reports that he emails to his clients so that it is in their in-box by 8 a.m. He does value-added analysis, which is his own view based on his years of daily research in the field. He stressed that executives are very busy, so you need to learn how to put together a useful report that can be processed by the reader in less than ten minutes. He covered the kinds of things you need to find out before you know what kind of information you need to gather, such as “who is the ultimate customer” and “what are the time constraints?” He does his job with a telephone and accounts at Dialog and Factiva. You can do this from your home office. He mentioned several times that you cannot be late with a report, as it is useless if it doesn’t meet the time constraints.

CI is a hot field right now. The April 2005 issue of the SLA publication Information Outlook, which I received after the talk, focuses on CI. One of the topics on the cumulative experience for the Spring 2005 semester at SJSU SLIS, was about CI.

Linda Rudell-Betts, an information science consultant, works from home. Her specialty is taxonomies, ontologies, thesauri construction, and indexing terms. She gave us a great list of thesauri and subject vocabularies that are Web accessible. People in this field often belong to the American Society of Indexers. If she interviews someone, she asks if they like to do crossword puzzles. She also recommends a background in Romance or Classic languages. This field requires someone who can concentrate on the task for long periods of time without interruption and who is persistent. She believes that you should learn as many databases as you can.

Cynthia L. Shamel founded Shamel Information Services. She works mostly in her home office. She is a past president of the Association of Independent Professionals (AIIP), an organization she strongly recommends joining if you are interested in this career option. She recommends Mary Ellen Bates book Building and Running a Successful Research Business. Though she does a lot of CI work, she talked to us about being an independent professional, about always carrying business cards in our pockets, and about developing a really good elevator speech (this is your 15-30 second presentation about who you are and what service you can provide). Shamel says that you need people, entrepreneurial, business and information skills. As for all business startups, you need a good level of risk tolerance, the ability to hang in there and sufficient funds to survive for up to two years. Of course, the time you take to build up the business so that it is profitable is very individual. A couple of challenges are having to be your own cheerleader and figuring out how to price your services.

I didn’t win anything in the drawing at the end, but I won all day in new knowledge about alternative career options.

Networking For Professionals - Article - Elevator Speech