For one of my management assignments, I decided to do a job analysis of the current job opportunities.
Purpose
Looking at the various aspects of the job postings to look at where and what opportunities are available as well as what is being looked for.
Methodology
Collected all systems related librarian positions which were primarily either systems or web services from September 1 to October 15. I collected 19 job postings and tallied the various aspects including skills and areas of knowledge required and preferred.
Results
The Basics
Jobs were primarily in academic libraries (17 of 19) and a majority were permanent full time (13). The job subareas and titles differ, but were generally broken down in this way:
| Systems & Technical Services | 2 |
| Systems | 8 |
| Web Services | 11 |
| User Experience | 1 |
Jobs were also generally in the East.
| Canada | United States | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| West | 1 | West | 4 |
| Central | 1 | Central | 2 |
| East | 4 | East | 7 |
Finally of the salaries that were listed the average minimum of $49,000.
Education & Work Experience
No surprise that every single posting required: MLIS degree from ALA accredited school or equivalent.
Most required or preferred at least 2 years of experience, and preferred but did not usually required experience within the area of hiring.
Note that the “type” is an indication of whether the experience needs to be in the same type of library (e.g. academic library by posting from academic library).
Duties
Many positions included non-technical related duties. The top two:
- Reference – 37% (7)
- General/Student Instruction – 26% (5)
Technology Related Skills & Areas of Knowledge
As the majority of the positions were web services related, there was a bit of a bias towards skills that are web related, but generally for systems, I simply found that there were less specific technology requirements and it was also more diverse. The top technology related required skills & areas of knowledge:
- HTML/XHTML – 58% (11)
- Web Development/Design – 47% (9)
- CSS – 42% (8)
- Standards & Best Practices – 37% (7)
- Emerging Technologies, Trends, & Issues – 37% (7)
- Usability/User Experience – 32% (6)
- JavaScript – 26% (5)
As I said, the range was wide and included everything from server administration to proxy to analytics.
General Skills & Areas of Knowledge
What might (or might not) surprise people is that the top required skills and areas of knowledge were general in nature and not technology related.
- Communications & Interpersonal – 95% (18)
- Collaboration & Teamwork – 84% (16)
- Project Management, Planning & Organization – 68% (13)
- Problem Solving & Analysis – 58% (11)
- Work Independently – 47% (9)
- Leadership – 26% (5)
- Flexible & Creative – 26% (5)
If anything, I think this trend is encouraging for new graduates as it seems that “soft” skills are more important than the technology/technical skills which frankly, many of us just do not have the opportunity to learn in library school, but with some tech savvy would be more than willing and able to learn on the job.
Limitations
There are some obvious limitations to my analysis. For one, some job postings were no longer accessible as they were closed, which meant that they were not included. For my purposes, I also left out all management positions, such as AUL and director positions.
Another issue is that how qualifications were grouped was very subjective on my part, so may not have been consistent. For example, planning and organization was grouped with project management, but results would have been different if the three had been kept separate.
Possible Future Work
It would be interesting to see what the trends are in general rather than only looking at systems positions, but that would be a much larger effort.
Hopefully this information is useful for anyone else in North America interested in systems related jobs.