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The Library & Information Science Professional's Career Development Center |
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From
Baby Librarian to Tenured Faculty:
Strategizing for Success by Ann Snoeyenbos |
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Institutions
across the United States differ in their promotion and tenure practices.
The norms are often established locally, but with an eye to
performance criteria and standard competencies applicable across the
profession. Wherever you
are and whatever the process, one needs to keep firmly in mind that the
option to apply for permanent employment is a privilege, not a right. You are not entitled to a job for life from your employer,
and (from their perspective) they don’t owe you anything. You need to remember that your goal in preparing the dossier
is to convince the employer that you have current value, and that you
will be a valuable employee for many years to come.
You need to demonstrate a strong commitment to your employer
before your employer will demonstrate any commitment to you. How
do you demonstrate that commitment?
By writing, speaking, teaching, mentoring, facilitating,
creating, and just plain working hard. I
believe that a serious professional will be willing to pay the price of
permanent employment. That
price may be paid in time, money, energy, and attention.
One should be prepared to do more than a 9am-5pm job in exchange
for the security of permanent employment.
There are many people who cannot make this type of commitment, or
who chose not to for a variety of reasons, and there is nothing wrong
with that. Each person has
to weigh their own circumstances to come up with the best equation for
their working life. There
are times when this commitment will require tough decisions about the
relative merits of the activities on your to-do list.
At times you will need to let daily duties slide in order to
cultivate grander professional projects.
Don’t assume your supervisors will help you make those
decisions. Their primary
concern is the performance of the department(s) they oversee, not an
individual’s portfolio. You
need a mentor or advisor on the outside (but within the profession) who
can help you make the best choices for your career trajectory.
The theme to keep in mind is that strategic short-term sacrifice
brings long-term gain. Once
you make the decision to work toward tenure, then you must overcome the
inertia that exists for anybody embarking on a new career. Even if you worked in libraries for a long time before
attaining the professional degree (MLS or equivalent), you will need to
reposition yourself as a professional.
Having once broken through this inertia, you’ll need to pursue
opportunities as they come along and work hard to make sure that they
do. Contacts and
opportunities lead to additional contacts and opportunities.
As Groucho Marx once said, “The harder I work the luckier I
am.” Start
Slowly and Let the Momentum Build A
good promotion/tenure dossier will demonstrate a career trajectory that
moves from the beginner stages, in which one would expect to see
relatively little involvement outside the job-specific environment, to
more and more advanced stages in which the candidate’s circle of
influence expands into different parts of the home institution (library
committee work, college/university committee work and cooperative
projects) and then out into the profession at the local, regional, and
national levels. It
is important to plan in advance to nurture your professional momentum.
You should consider the strategic impact of specific activities
before accepting new appointments.
If you over-commit early in your career and aren’t able to
sustain the momentum, then you risk both professional burnout and a poor
reputation in the field. You
will also have a hard time convincing your employer that you are capable
of making significant contributions to your field over the long term. It
takes time to find out what you’re best at and where you can make the
most valuable contributions to the profession.
There are many options, ranging from events planning to scholarly
research and writing to teaching to editing.
Consider the first stage of your career to be a sort of
apprenticeship. Start with
involvement on committees for which the work is not too demanding, or
where you will be closely supervised and/or mentored.
An example of this might be a committee that puts on a function
at a conference. Organizing
an orientation program or putting together a social event can be useful
experience for a new librarian because it puts you in direct contact
with a lot of different people representing different aspects of the
organization (members, speakers, officers, financial planners, etc).
If
writing is your interest, then practice writing shorter, lighter pieces
before embarking on a peer-reviewed scholarly article. Working on a departmental, association, or organizational
newsletters provides exposure to editors, publishers, and other writers.
Focused and finite writing projects, such as book reviews,
bibliographic essays, short opinion pieces and the like, can help move
you past feelings of shyness or inadequacy and teach you how to write
for discrete audiences. The
good thing about our current media-rich society is that all these
publications and programs need material; in fact they are often
desperate for ideas and new writers. Say
Yes More Often Than You Say No An
important part of building professional momentum is demonstrating that
you’re willing to work hard for the cause, no matter what job you’re
offered. Keep in mind that
signing on to a project for which you do not have the time or
appropriate skills is disrespectful; however, when an opportunity does
comes along consider whether you can afford to pass it up. The
connections you make through one activity is likely to build upon itself
and lead to better things later on. You might be offered a less glamorous assignment just to keep
you involved in the group until a plum assignment is available.
In association work committee appointments are made just once
each year, so if you turn something down now you might not be considered
again until the following year, or the year after that.
Momentum
Carries You Past Tenure The
professional momentum you create in your pursuit of permanent employment
keeps you involved in the profession long after you’ve succeeded.
Many professionals have found that they are more productive once
they achieve tenure than they were when they were working so hard to
prove their abilities. The
things you do to get tenure are really just the fundamentals of becoming
an active, engaged professional. Arguments
can be made for and against faculty status for librarians, and the
academic tenure system, but I believe these structures enforce a quality
of engagement that serves the profession.
The demands of a librarian’s day-to-day job seem to expand to
fill all available time. However,
individuals making a commitment to local, regional, and/or national
involvement are vital to the health of any profession.
Where would the profession be if we each tended our own workday
without sharing any of the fruits of that labor with others? Monitor
Your Own Progress Keep
a log of your activities, and maintain a file of notes and ideas.
Save every letter and message of praise (I have a file marked
“kudos” that never fails to restore my confidence).
Keep every review by your boss, letters from the Dean and/or
University President. Keep
a copy of every piece of official correspondence between you and your
employer. Your resume
should be current to within one month.
You can use your resume as a sort of logbook to serve multiple
purposes: you can submit
applications (for awards, travel grants, additional responsibilities,
etc) in a timely fashion with much less effort, and it will be easier to
reconstruct your year when annual review time comes around. Practice
the Art of Self-Promotion By
this I don’t mean to encourage conceit, but rather to encourage you to
talk up your experience so it’s more likely you connect with projects
that are interesting to you. It
is useful to practice communicating with others about your projects,
your goals, and your interests. Some
people cultivate only those connections that they feel will help them in
the moment, without considering the high degree of mobility in the
profession. Consider where
a person could be in three to five years and keep in mind that
opportunities often arise in unexpected places. The more people there are who know about your work the more
likely you are to be given consideration down the line.
One way to do this is to send a query or a request for assistance
to an electronic discussion list, or talk it up at a meeting during
casual conversation. You
might even discover a colleague in your own institution who shares that
interest. When appropriate,
don’t be shy about sharing your experience with others who are trying
to do similar work. This is
a way of letting people know that you can make connections among ideas,
and it might foster new collaborations. Be
Gracious You
can’t win all the time, and you shouldn’t expect to. So always be polite, express thanks to the sponsoring
organization, and then mark your calendar to apply again the following
year. When people take the
time to help you, let them know that their assistance was valuable to
you, and in what specific ways. From
the mentor’s perspective mentoring can sometimes feel like meddling,
so let people know how they can be helpful to you. Ann Snoeyenbos is the reference and collection development librarian for West European Social Science at New York University. Article submitted Mar 2003 Disclaimer: The ideas expressed in LIScareer articles are those of their respective authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the LIScareer editors.
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Page last updated
10/03/2005
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