When I graduated from FSU with my MLIS, I didn’t come out of it with job searching tips, an alumni network or really any help of any kind in finding a job. The College of Information, as it is now called, wasn’t great with the mentoring, networking, support stuff. So when I saw the Prospectus 2006 from the School of Information Management at Dalhousie University a couple of months ago (thanks Dave!) I was blown away. They’ve created a database for employers to search to find new and soon-to-be library school grads who meet their job requirements. They can search by geographic area, type of work, institution type, date of graduation, languages and keywords. So if you’re looking for a new graduate who wants to live in British Columbia and work as an academic reference librarian who speaks French and has Web design skills, you can actually find someone who meets just those criteria. Employers can then read a brief statement they wrote about themselves as well as view their resume. Cool stuff!
My question is: why aren’t more graduate programs doing stuff like this? It’s bad enough that many library school students don’t know how bad the job market is until they graduate, but it just doesn’t seem like many schools are doing all that much to help them. This really should be a model for other LIS programs to promote their graduating students to potential employers. Nice work Dalhousie SIM!
Are there any other LIS schools doing cool things to promote their students or help them in finding a job after graduation?
I went to Michigan and graduated a long time ago and at that point, they were not so great at doing those sorta things either. They definitely were not taking pages from the business or law schools about helping the grads find jobs, although I think most large public systems did come there to interview people.
Since that time though they appear to have stepped up their efforts pretty substantially – they now have this site –
http://www.si.umich.edu/careers/MSI-profile.htm
that highlights the skills of graduates and also a similar database program for employers called I-Track that they can identify the job requirements / candidate skills for which they are searching similar to what you mention.
I still wish that MLIS programs would be required to post placement statistics and that interested applicants could look at those statistics and compare them across schools. I invested a hunk of change to get the degreee and was interested to see the placement stats of UM grads. UM still posts their placement stats – this has their reports for the last four years – http://www.si.umich.edu/careers/placement.htm
As the web page states:
The reports linked below include information such as the following:
* MSI average starting salaries
* MSI graduate job search length
* Types of organizations hiring MSI graduates
* Methods and resources used in the MSI job search
* Geographic distribution of MSI graduate jobs
Hope this feedback is what you were wanting – it would be interesting to have ALA make this a part of accreditation.
I think the students initiated Prospectus. The school deserves kudos for supporting it. As for help with the job search, perhaps a resume reviewing service would be of use to new grads. CACUL (a division of CLA), and ALA’s NMRT offer such services.
Hey, they’ve been doing that for three years now!
I was part of last years’ graduting class, but couldn’t get my act together to get my stuff on there.
But I’ve got to put a shout-out for one of my co-grads, MJ D’Elia, who was a big player in the first prospectus and did something even bigger for Dal’s students — ran a profitable t-shirt company to raise funds for the student association:
http://www.geardownclothing.com/librariangear/policies.html
There’s something else coming out that MJ was involved in, but I can’t say yet. It has something to do with destroying the librarian stereotype though and it is very cool.
Great post. – work at wayne state in detroit; and there is nothing like this that I know of. I will do some digging and propose it at my college. Great idea.
Oh — as I think of this, it should be noted that the prospectus project was initiated by the students, not per se by Dalhousie. Although Dal was certainly supported, the legwork, organization and development should be credited to the students themselves.
I remember the dawn of the project being thought of by the likes of Steve Lelievre, Julia Stewart and Francesca Frati back in 2003/04 I think, and put forward for about 3 years now.
That’s so cool that students initiated the idea! I really believe that it should become a model for other schools, and that the school itself should initiate the project. Promoting grads and helping them to find work should definitely be a part of the mission of any institution of higher education.