In relation to thing21 - job hunting

In relation to thing 21 - job hunting

Introduction
Job-hunting in the electronic age seems so much more difficult than in the era of pen, paper and snailmail. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not in the job market, but have recently been helping no. 1 son with a search for suitable employment. To date, we have been unsuccessful, so whilst some of the observations below might be worth reading, my singular lack of success could well lead you to dismiss my advice!

The job market today is frighteningly similar to that in 1981 when I graduated and found myself looking for a job. The Library Association Record Vacancies Supplement, as it was then, amounted to one side of an A4 sheet, and after six months, during which time I worked as a Christmas cashier in a high street newsagents, volunteered at my local tourist information centre, and ran a pilot community library one day a week in a local secondary school, I eventually found a cataloguing role funded by the Manpower Services Commission.

Job-hunting in the digital age
Given the similarity of our situations, and the fact that I sift through completed application forms as part of my job, I thought I knew what I was doing helping no.1 son hunt out a job, but, so much has changed in the intervening 30-odd years that my skills / knowledge are a bit out-of-date!

Of course, we regularly look in the local newspaper, the local shops, the local job centre, etc., but so much these days is online, which brings its own problems. There really are so many online job sites that it can get a bit overwhelming! Some of these sites are quite clever and have some good search facilities, which, if you take the time to explore properly, can save you a lot of time, and help you target your searches so you’re shown stuff that is mostly timely and relevant. Some of the ways you can refine your search include things like specifying and searching by:

• Geographic location (down to town, area or region, and within a specific radius)
• Salary expectations (quite helpful if you are just starting out on a career and not yet ready for that director position!)
• Newly posted jobs (some even allow you to search for jobs posted in the last hour!!)
• Specific job titles

Also, there are specialist job sites for different industries, so if you know you want to work in a specific trade or profession, or have qualifications for specific areas then searching these sites can be quite fruitful.

Problems with online job sites
But, online job sites can also present problems that can drive you to distraction. So you may find that:

• Same job are posted numerous times on the same website, or on many different websites
• Jobs are still posted even when the closing date has already passed
• Jobs are re-advertised every week
• Unreal jobs are advertised
• Training courses are disguised as jobs
• Jobs are advertised that you have to pay to take
• Commission only jobs are advertised with salaries
• Jobs are posted that are located “anywhere”
• Jobs are posted that are located where you want – as well as dozens of other places – but often turn out to be unreal (meaning there are no specific vacancies available)

Organising your information and records
On top of the difficulties you might encounter with searching online job sites, I believe that in this digital age you have to be even more organised than ever before. In my day, you sent off for, or telephoned for an application form and further details and these arrived in the post some days later. Then, if like me you were not particularly confident, you’d get a sheet of A4 paper and write out and tweak your further information before copying it out for real on the application form. Then you’d file it away with the job details and the ad, all in the envelope that you received. Ok, that’s a bit long-winded, but at least that way you had a copy of what you’d written.

Nowadays, the application process is often online too, so you click on a link to get more details and a separate link to actually apply for the job. You type in your details and your further information and you click apply/send. Great. Job done. However, when you get that email that invites you for interview, you can’t remember what you wrote in the further information section, and you can’t check back to see what the job required because the online details are usually no longer there, as the closing date has passed! There are some sites, however, that do store your details so that you can re-use them when you apply for another job using the same site.

So, you have to be incredibly well-organised to ensure you are able to give of your best in the interview.

We haven’t quite got this right yet, but we’re getting there. At the very least, I’d suggest, that you need to save a copy of:

• The job description
• The person spec
• Whatever information you provided in the further information section and the covering letter
• The contact information, including the website you went through and the company details

Do this by either creating some easily identifiable folders on your pc, or using a USB dedicated to job applications, or even print everything out and store in a filing cabinet or paper folders, just like in the old days!

Another tip is to create your further information in a Word document and then copy and paste it into the application. This way you get the benefit of the automatic spellchecker (although, of course, you should never rely solely on this), you have something to hand that can easily be amended for the next application you do, and it’s easy to scroll up and down to check what you’ve written (so many online forms seem to give you a tiny box to write in that it’s hard to navigate and check). During the recruitment process I have seen many printed copies of online applications where sentences have accidentally been repeated, line breaks are in funny places, and numerous other little things, but now, seeing it from the other side of the fence, I can understand how this happens, and be more sympathetic!

A belt and braces approach to keeping track of where you are at and what you have applied for and written would also see you creating a spreadsheet in which you record details of each job application. We haven’t actually done this, but if we did it would include columns for things like:

• Job title,
• Company name,
• Website where advert was found,
• Date of application,
• Name of file(s) where you have saved the job description, your further information etc.,
• Closing date,
• Published interview date
• Contact details in case of a query
• Outcomes (rejection, interview, job offer)
• Feedback / notes (yours and theirs!)

Conclusion
I recently read of someone who had applied for over 1600 jobs. This makes job-hunting a fulltime occupation in itself. Indeed, if you are as highly organised as I think you need to be to find that elusive job, then you are well on the way to a career in office administration!

Afterword
I don’t know why but rather than use the web browser’s favourites, or bookmarks, we have copied links for useful job searching sites (with our criteria saved) into a Word document and then opened this daily and clicked each link to check for new jobs. This means that we can annotate the list with the latest search date, just in case for some reason we don’t get to check every day.

Below I’ve listed some of the more general job searching sites that we’ve found useful when looking for any job we could possibly do!

• Newspaper ads, e.g. local ones, or national ones

• Council jobs, e.g. individual authority ones, or regional ones

• University jobs, e.g. local ones, or national ones

• Civil service jobs

• NHS jobs

• Jobs through agencies, e.g. Reed

• A selection of other sites, like, Fish4, Monster, Indeed, Total jobs, Jobsite, Randstad, Manpower etc..

Examples of specialist job search sites:

• lisjobnet - for jobs in the information profession

• caterer – for jobs in catering and hospitality

And, finally, don’t forget to search all those local companies in your area, and all those national companies who have offices in your area and the professional press!

Good luck with your own job searching!

Classification - a bit of a rant!

A book classified is a book lost … if no-one understands the classification scheme!

When I started at university one of the first big words I heard was “serendipity”. At the time my understanding was that the lecturer concerned was referring to the joy people experienced on browsing among the bookstacks and happening upon some exciting book they weren’t looking for but were keen to read, now that they'd come across it.

Today we could equally well apply this browsing to the [online] library catalogue. There are so many opportunities for users to happen upon something of interest, through almost any search of the catalogue – author, keyword, related search etc..

I went into librarianship because I wanted to help people, but was bothered by the sight of blood and the smell of hospitals, was not comfortable with the formality of teaching, was ill-prepared for a career in social work, but wanted to do more than work in a shop. I didn’t enter the profession because I loved books! For me, the excitement was always in tracking a book down - and not often about reading it - and seeing library users go away happy!

Do you need to understand Dewey (or whatever classification scheme the library uses) to know where to find your books? I would argue that you don’t. As a cataloguer, however, I do need to understand Dewey so I can assign your books with a number that suitably reflects the subject of the book, so that when you are looking for books on that subject you will be able to find them. And, yes, it would be nice if all the books on your subject and related subjects were on the shelves together, but this is virtually impossible to achieve, whatever classification schedule the library chooses to use. This is because in some way all subjects are related, either through their discipline, their subject, or in your own mind! This is perhaps where the internet has lead us to false expectations: Yes, if you are reading an article on the web about one thing, it will have links to articles on related topics, which you can easily navigate to and read, and then return from whence you came. That’s because computers are built to store and retrieve things in a particular way, which just isn’t possible with tens of thousands of physical items – in this case, books.

So, books are ordered on the shelves according to a specialised classification scheme. This could be a sequence of numbers, or letters, or a combination of both, and to the untrained eye, could be seen to be random. A classification scheme is designed with a couple of things in mind: It helps to a certain degree to collocate related subjects and it helps you to find the one book among the thousands on the subject you are interested in.

But, if books are hidden in some, seemingly, peculiar order on the shelves, how do you unlock the secret of that order? Well, the way in is through the OPAC; OPAC is your finding tool. If the library has it, it will be listed on OPAC and by typing in anything you already know about a specific book, or about a specific subject you can find the location of any book in the library. Library staff at the enquiry desks are always able to help you use OPAC and find what you are looking for.

That’s the easy bit! Once you’ve found your classification number, knowing how the books are arranged on the shelves and being able to find the one you want can be rather difficult, if not daunting. And that’s why we have library staff roving the floors, and who can be called upon to help you find books on the shelves. They are expert at it; this is their job!

We also provide leaflets aimed at explaining to you how to find things on the shelves – written by experts, with you in mind! However, when those experts question the choice of classification scheme, I do begin to despair …

Day in the life, Part 8, Day 3

Day 3 – Wednesday

Finally got to grips with the budget! Looked at it last night at home and made a plan of things to look into this morning. Made some decisions which I hope are right. Spent a welcome 30 mins or so discussing with the boss and making sure he agreed that it was now right, and the figures were as close as they could be!! Emailed my excel guru to let her know and thank her for her help.

Plans for today now include tidying my desk which is completely covered by budget printouts!

However, the best laid plans, as they say …

Had an extra meeting with boss to discuss way forward on a couple of projects. Spent a little while perusing MARC records that we had imported for a specific purpose. On closer scrutiny this leads me to believe I have misinterpreted some of the MARC rules – oooooops!

Had a quick look at the ordering figures to see if these might have had an impact on the size of the cataloguing backlog, which is now running out at about 18 shelves and is the most we’ve had for a couple of years. Sadly, we cannot blame the librarians ordering new books, as orders are actually a little bit down on last year.

Ohhhh, hang on I can hear someone shouting for help! …

Ah, shelf being loaded with new books has just collapsed, nearly on top of someone. Hmmmm, shelf and bracket seem to be bent. Off to search for new ones.

The understairs cupboard has yielded another couple of brackets, but one of those was also defective. With a bit of brute force and ignorance and a little help from my friends, I have now managed to put the shelving back together. These shelves are checked regularly as part of the health and safety inspection but obviously, as they are being continually emptied and re-filled they can be a bit more unreliable than the shelves in the library. How to cure this problem?

Anyway, it’s now time to go home and I still haven’t tidied my desk up. Ah well, Monday is another week! (I only work the beginning of the week.)

Post script

Waiting in car for child to finish band practice, I’ve been thinking about creating some notices to put up above the shelving. If I have different wording on different coloured notices and move them around regularly, there’s a possibility they might be read and that might help to prevent further near-misses or accidents. Will do this at home tonight.

That really is all from me this time round!

Day in the life - Part 8, Day 2

Day 2 – Tuesday

All night-time water drunk. Bad night. Really tired.

Didn’t bother trying to park on campus today. Enjoyed the walk, if a bit chilly!

Straight in to looking at the budget figures again! So engrossed forgot to collect the Duty Manager pager and go to a 10 o’clock meeting! Arrived late to interesting meeting about inter-library loans; much food for thought.

Had many plans for today, but this has turned into a most surreal day! Still fretting over budgets, but I think I may have worked it out.

Today everyone seems to want me to sign their leave card: Is it the sight of the cataloguing backlog that is putting them off, I wonder?

Have sent my congrats and what I consider to be some useful links to a newly promoted member of my team.

Hmmm, as Duty Manager this morning, I failed to resolve a dispute over fines: This is disappointing. Haven’t had to look into such a situation for literally years, so I’m sure I could have dealt with it better than I did. Usually, I get involved in breaches of security, or having to advise people who want to bring children into the building.

Hot on the heels of the fines dispute, I find myself listening to an upset member of the team. Probably didn’t do that justice either, as feeling pre-occupied with unsatisfactory fines discussion, niggling doubts about the budget figures and an overwhelming sense of having too much to do in the time available. Maybe just listening was enough.

Hadn’t realised how difficult it can be to take part in a new staff induction! Numerous emails floating back and forth, but eventually it’s sorted.

Oh, just received a nice floor plan from one of the library offices; apparently they’ve had some move arounds and thought we might like to know where everyone now sits! Bit more sophisticated than our own desk plan!

Oh, someone undertaking NVQ wants to do the cat/class option! It’s great to hear that people are still interested in technical services work!! Better find out what they need from us. Very conscious that the person who used to help people with these units has now retired; hopefully we can find enough time to do this properly.

Have now put all the data back into the budget spreadsheet and it’s looking ok, but will take it home and look at it with a different perspective! Oh dear, having to text child to report I’m running 30 minutes late so he’ll have to stand around in the freezing cold waiting for me!

Day in the life - Part 8, Day 1

Monday.

Before work
Bedside glass of water untouched: Must have been a rare peaceful night – don’t know as didn’t wake up to find out! Unfortunately, news from the scales was not good.

Registered for Day in the life, round 8. Frustrated by not being able to use IE; had to resort to Chrome. Used tiny.url to create url for blog, but not entirely sure that’s what I was supposed to do, and perplexed as the link has come out in bold. Sighhhhhh.

Spent the journey to work listening to Radio 4, planning my work day and thinking about jobs I need to do after work (despite being a #latenightlibrarian).

Must check on the state of the cataloguing throughput. Must catch up with a member of the team. Have put all my revalidation documents onto my USB; they were scattered on my work computer, my home computer and my laptop! Now, didn’t I read about something in #cpd23 that helped with file organisation????!!!! Wondering if the boss has managed to catch up with the person we selected for a promotion last week.

Humph, no space in the work car park: I don’t usually bother trying, but ... Very cold walk to work has resulted in sciatica resurfacing on one side and hip pain returned on the other. You’d think I was 71 not 51. Sometimes resent paying for work car park when I rarely manage to get into it. Often arrive at work stressed and on the verge of tears – over car parking?? Golly, I’ve lost the plot a bit, haven’t I? Oh well, at least it’s been interesting to see the old Allied Carpets/MFI buildings knocked down and the land flattened, but not sure how I’m going to react to yet another supermarket going up in their place. Also interesting to follow the building progress of the university’s sports centre, after the demolition of the Bow String Bridge. Plans to pedestrianise the “main” road that runs through the centre of the “campus”, while a nice idea, will see me (and probably lots of other folk who come from north of the city) having to take a huge detour.


9.35am
Tea made. Long chat with team member who was unexpectedly off last week. Chat with boss about one or two things. Cataloguing shelves checked. 18 ¼ shelves. Possibly partly due to one cataloguer being off on extended leave, one taking annual leave to work on personal course, and one being a bit ill. If I get a chance I’ll do some, but do bear in mind that I shall break all my rules and go for the multiple copies, not the interesting, more difficult stuff!

Going through emails. Amazing how many come through, but I get confused because I look at it at home and answer any that are either urgent, won’t take long to answer, or are quick to answer, which means that I sometimes don’t go back over them properly and so miss some of the others.

Ah, an e-book invoice; good, been waiting for some! Oh, hang on, the balance doesn’t look right. Must go and check. Oh, both the people I need to discuss this with are in [different] meetings.

A member of team can’t attend a mandatory course because it’s not being held during hours that match her working pattern: I need to check the availability and suitability of the online version.

Meeting now set up for tomorrow to discuss inter-library loans??? That’s interesting as I work in a cataloguing and acquisitions team!

10.30am

Headache requires more tea. Arghhhh, now I remember why I never go in the staffroom at this time – too many people, not enough kettles, slow running cold tap, bumping into folk you’d rather avoid ... Bother, left last week’s [soya] milk in the fridge and just used that instead of this week’s. Luckily it looks and smells ok, but wonder what it will taste like? Have now eaten the filling from my sandwich, so it’s bread for lunch.

1.00pm

Oh, it’s now 1pm and I have spent the last 2 hours with one of our spreadsheet experts to see if we can find why I seem to have an extra couple of thousand pounds to spend! Now I have something to work with I’ll finish this off first, before going for lunch.

3.00pm

Now back at my desk doing a couple of odd jobs before I go up to the enquiry desk for a couple of hours of answering queries!

3.30-5.30pm

Steady stream of enquiries at the desk this afternoon. The usual problems with the photocopiers and other equipment. People having problems tracking down journal articles (or rather, more fundamentally, not realising it was journal articles they needed, not books). The usual confusion over which floor to go to for which books, misinterpretation of the information available on OPAC, and people not being able to find books on the shelves. Sighhhhhhh...

6.00pm

After a short tea break, I am now going to do some cataloguing! It’s a treat: I don’t get to do it very often, but I’ve had enough of spreadsheets for one day, and we do have a small backlog! Despite telling everyone to take their books for cataloguing in chronological order of receipt, I am going to take as many multiple copies as I think I can do, but shhhhhhhh, don’t tell anyone!

8.00pm

Have managed to get through a grand total of 14 books in 2 hours. 14 books in 2 hours????? That’s a rubbish amount of cataloguing, but I suppose that’s what happens when you don’t do it very often and have to keep checking the MARC manual, the LCSH file and webDewey!! Long gone are the days when I could get through 143 in 7 hours!!

So, hometime ...

Mentoring

Mentoring post-cpd23

I've been thinking a lot about mentoring since I took part in cpd23, and various things that I've read have given me yet more food for thought.

I recently read an interesting comment about the outlook of people who are knowledgeable and experienced which seemed to imply that knowledge is the opposite of creativity, and experience is built on solutions to problems that are now old, and therefore neither were good qualities to have. However, in the context of mentoring, I think it is just this knowledge and experience that a mentor shares with a mentee that helps to develop the mentee, to help them work on solutions to problems and gain experience.

So, in order to be a mentor, surely you need to have some knowledge that is worth imparting? I don’t think I have (stemming from a complete lack of confidence, confidence that has been eroded over the years by various circumstances and various people), but having been put into the position of acting as a mentor I am now having to take a closer look at myself because I am trying to help someone else. This is hard for me. I’m sure most people would take this in their stride, and even if they were feeling a little unsure would hide this and plough on, but that’s not me; I need people to know where I’m coming from, but I do recognise that this isn’t always a good thing.

I’ve been reading around the topic just lately; I haven’t read enough yet to be able to mentor properly because almost everything I have read has said something profound which I’ve needed to take time to think about. Initially, I was struck by this comment:

“A good mentor can make a great difference in someone’s life. A good mentor helps, guides, shares knowledge, and enjoys doing it. Mentoring, when done right, benefits both the mentor and the mentee.” http://www.ehow.com/how_4670053_be-perfect-mentor.html

No pressure there then! But, I am certainly beginning to realise that there are benefits to me, as the mentor, even though my poor mentee is probably not getting as much out of the relationship as they’d hoped, as I am also on a learning curve.

As with offering training to people, mentoring is one of those activities that helps you to remember or realise just how much you do actually know, and that just because you know something doesn’t mean that other people do. So, I guess, in a way it’s a confidence builder; the more I mentor the more I realise I know things, the more confident I will become.

However, I’ve also read that I should be careful that I don’t make this relationship into an ego-building exercise for me, rather than a confidence-building process for the mentee! In my case, I think my sense of self-worth is so low, any ego-building will only ever bring me up to the same level as any “normal” person, who’s done normal things in their working life!

So, moving on swiftly, I have also discovered that in order to be a good mentor, the mentee needs to have shared their goals with you; they need to know where they are going and where they want to be, so you, as the mentor can share relevant experience with them. As with most, if not all areas of life, if you don’t know what your goal is then you will never know when you’ve reached it and therefore risk remaining unfulfilled.

I was also struck by this comment:

“people become stagnant out of fear. Fear of failure, fear of success and fear of something different.” (http://www.ehow.com/how_4513054_be-good-mentor.html )

So, I need to be a supportive mentor (tautology!) and I should be encouraging my mentee, helping them to get over any self-doubt they may be experiencing. I was also struck by the idea that a mentor can help to motivate the mentee by building on their strengths and improve upon their weaknesses; so I need to make sure the mentee does a SWOT analysis so that we both know what they’re working with!

And then there’s the idea that the mentor/mentee relationship is not just about two people getting together and chatting; it’s about chatting with a purpose, usually focussed on the mentor helping the mentee with their development. It’s also important to remember that actually, the responsibility to develop lies with the mentee; provided the communication between the mentor/mentee is open, honest and transparent this will foster a large degree of mutual respect which will help the mentee fulfil that responsibility.

As a mentor it is also important that the mentee is my focus. If I share experiences, or the way I handled particular situations this can help the mentee to value my opinion and feel connected to me, and this is fine as long as I stick to experience that is relevant to the goals of the mentee.

Most of what I've written here is distilled from rather a lot of sources I've read. I don't think there is any one right answer to how to go about mentoring, so the points I've highlighted above are the ones that resonated with me, and seemed to make the most sense. I'm sure there are plenty of other good ideas around, but these are the ones that I shall be thinking of when I actually mentor.

What next? well, I am considering attending the CILIP mentoring course. Will let you know in a future blog post!

cpd23 - now that's the course for me!

Things have been a bit quiet since I completed the cpd23 programme, but I have been thinking about it, and have written the article below for our staff bulletin, in the hope of encouraging staff who may have an interest in cpd to have a go!

Web 2.0 – what does it mean to you??

Way back in June 2009 we ran a session for Bib Services staff on new things that were happening on the internet; we thought it might be useful for staff to at least know of the existence of things like facebook, yammer, twitter, blogs, and wikis etc., and then they could have a look and evaluate these services in relation to their work.

But, a lot has changed since the summer of 2009 and while some services have taken off beyond belief, some have fallen by the wayside and new ones have emerged. Keeping oneself up-to-date can be almost impossible! And that's where cpd23 comes in!

You may already have heard of it - you may already be doing it! But, if you haven't/aren't it's based on the 23 things programme of 2006, devised by staff in Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County which aimed to encourage staff to explore new technologies http://plcmcl2-things.blogspot.com/ . This was followed in the UK by a 23 things programme devoted to public library staff, (review here: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/leech/ ), which, in turn, inspired the 23 things Cambridge in 2010 ( http://23thingscambridge.blogspot.com/ ), which was repeated in 2011 ( http://cam23things.blogspot.com/ ), and has now prompted a cpd23 programme for all library staff - http://cpd23.blogspot.com/ This is a brief history; I may not have got it exactly right and I may not have cited all the instances of the 23 things programme, but, you get the idea that it’s a tried and trusted training method!

Initially, when I enrolled on cpd23 in June 2011, there were about 200 people registered, but by the end of programme there were nearly 800 participants! I joined the programme partly because I wanted to be more up-to-date with what was available, and there was an advantage in being pointed in the right direction for potentially useful resources, in being able to follow the programme at my own pace, in being encouraged to blog and in being encouraged to learn by reflection about things.

Apart from learning about weird and wonderful whizzy webby things – jing, online calendars, file-sharing options, online networking, etc. - there were also things that covered topics like advocacy, conferences, qualifying as a librarian, and mentoring, as well as several opportunities to sit back and reflect – well, actually to write up my reflection in my blog.

Along the way, the cpd23 things were supplemented by cpd23 tweets, a cpd23 LinkedIn discussion board, several physical meet-ups for various geographical regions and a live twitter chat, #uklibchat. An added bonus, that I hadn’t anticipated before, was the benefit of contact with other folk who were following the programme; finding like-minded souls was quite an eye-opener for me (no, really, I didn’t respond to thing 2 by looking for blog titles that looked as though they might have been created by cataloguers!)

All-in-all, I found the cpd23 programme extremely helpful as it almost forced me to look at things that I’d heard of but never found the time to investigate, whilst at the same time showed me things I’d not heard of. I would encourage anyone who wants to try and keep up to give it a go!


cpd23 – now that’s the course for me!!