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>> Hello and welcome to the San Jose State University School of Library
and Information Science career colloquia session.
This is Jill Klees, the SLIS career consultant and I'd like to thank each of you
for joining us tonight in our discussion on Expanding Your Horizons,
New Roles for Information Professionals.
We have the honor of having Sue Charles, a Research Analyst for HP Labs,
share with us her professional journey through the LIS field.
So take it away, Sue.
>> Sue Charles: I basically did a talk a few months ago
to the Northern Colorado Law Librarian Association with a colleague of mine.
We talked about working virtually in a large company and that's how I got invited
to do this talk because I've actually been exactly
where you are and it doesn't seem so long ago.
But I've had a long, I've had an interesting transition through my career in librarianship.
I'll confess that it wasn't all planned this way.
A lot of it was an accident but I'm going to talk about that adventure and some
of the attributes that helped me along the way and some things you'll probably be able to think
about as you think about where you're going to go with your career.
And it might obviously not be necessarily in a library.
Your horizons are much broader now than they used to be.
So with that I'll go to the next slide.
I thought I'd kind of start out kind of showing how I got here.
You'll notice in this slide I have some little square paths,
stepping stones, that are pretty well aligned.
So I'm trying to indicate that my path to HP was reasonably traditional.
So you see up in the corner I have the start.
I started working in libraries as a paraprofessional shortly after I graduated
with a Bachelor's degree, an MS, a Bachelor's of Agricultural Science
at Colorado State University, which is my hometown where I live now.
My husband was still in school and I was looking for a job, unfortunately the jobs
in my field weren't real, there weren't that many of them at the time.
So I'd always enjoyed being in libraries.
I'm a mad reader, like probably most of you are.
And I went to the local public library to see if I can find a job.
Oddly enough I got a job with them because they were just bringing up their online system.
It was a brand new system that talked to a UNIVAC computer so it kind
of dates me a little bit but they thought I'd be a good edition because I actually knew how
to program computers, not very well but I'd taken one Fortran class and they thought
that at least meant I wouldn't be afraid of them so that's how I beat
out a number of competitors for that job.
So I worked there for quite a while.
And finally, as you see in the middle, I thought well duh, I love working here
and I should probably think about getting a degree the degree enables most of the managers
in this library to have their job, which would be an MLS.
At the time in Colorado we were between library schools.
We had no library school.
DU had traditionally, that's Denver University, had a library program but I had
to seek a program outside my state and basically move somewhere else
to get, to go to library school.
So I ended up at University of Texas at Austin.
So right here, where it says you are here, that's where I was, UT Austin.
It was a great program.
I really liked it but I started out totally convinced that I wanted to be a cataloger
but we have some really great experiences doing SciTech reference.
They had an amazing engineering library there run
by an amazing woman who was quite inspirational.
And so I quickly realized that perhaps I wanted to go into SciTech reference.
So that's what I did.
When I graduated I was kind of on the fast track
because my husband was still in Colorado working.
But I actually found out that there weren't any jobs back in my home state
so I looked the field, selected a job in Texas.
Went to ALA and got recruited by Texas A&M and basically went to work for them because I knew
at least I wasn't that far away from Austin and I could get back there if I wanted to.
But they kept me so busy that I basically didn't get to Austin as much as I wanted.
So there I became their official Agricultural Reference Librarian
but we basically did all around reference for all.
I tend to think of that experience as the mash of reference
and it was an invaluable experience.
It was a fast plunge into the deep end of the pool for doing science reference
because that is a big school and there are a lot of programs there
and there are lots of engineers and scientists.
So basically as a science reference librarian I got to do bibliographic instruction
and online searching and reference for all of the science related people and many others,
including undergraduates in all the fields at A&M.
So online searching was pretty old school at that point.
At one time I knew the dialog in and out.
I was a dialog expert.
And at that time we were doing a dial up, which was quite an experience.
Shortly after that we got a lot of CD Rom online data basis so that was kind
of the initial plunge into being a digital library at that point.
Shortly after that there was all these consideration in such an intensive environment
that you were to put in your two years, get your reference job
and then perhaps consider where you wanted to go next.
A friend of mine from Austin, she was an Austin native,
was actually working at the corporate library for 3M.
And she said you really should try this because it's very cool, very interesting,
and by the way, it pays pretty well.
So I went back to my library school and I basically said,
I got hooked into their online career and job search situation and low
and behold I stumbled upon a job that was open at HP in my hometown, Fort Collins.
So that's basically how I ended up at HP.
So on this next slide basically I'm going to show you that,
you'll see we have little round stepping stones now and they aren't going in a direct line.
So this slide indicates that at that point we had, there were some not so,
how shall I say, traditional career paths.
So I started in the HP Fort Collins site library.
At that time, every library, every major site at HP, at least in the U.S. and a lot
of sites overseas, we had one in Spain, we had a huge one in Bristol,
and they all had their own site libraries and their own site library staff.
So we have a very, very close relationship with the business unit people, the managers,
the scientists and the engineers at each of our sites.
And we specialize in the technologies and products
that they were actually working on on those sites.
At Fort Collins I was quite blessed with the fact that we were doing a lot of things
on that site, including workstations, servers, networking software, IT management software.
We were also doing integrated circuits so that actually was very appealing to me because I came
in with a Science background and a background in Chemistry.
So that was a pretty exciting stint, being in that library
and getting to know my clientele so well.
So I think I've covered who my customers were.
Besides the scientists, engineers we had managers, admin and executives.
I did mostly online research, primarily technical but as time went on I found
that there was a great demand for business and marketing research.
We had a specialist in that area but it took more than one of us to actually handle
that so there was a point which I started making that segway in broadening my expertise.
I actually was hired as well to run our online catalog, get it up and running.
It was networked at that point, which was somewhat unusual.
And when the internet, when the worldwide web began I immediately became a webmaster.
There were plenty of people on site that were eager to help me learn HTML so at that point
if you look to the right you'll see that the path kind of jogs.
Everywhere I have a little disruption and some yellow text, that's where we had a turning point
in my career and the career of my colleagues.
So if you look there you'll see there was some pressure within HP.
There was a drive for centralization.
At that point some of the smaller HP site libraries did close.
So we kind of went along because we were one of the larger site libraries
but at the time we also thought it would be advantageous for some
of us to form a coalition within HP.
We did have informal library network where we all got together at least once a year and talked
about issues within our libraries.
But as some of the smaller libraries were closed we decided we were going to try
to form a more formal organization.
So the Fort Collins library became.
We went under the HP Labs Research Library, which was the largest library
in HP and it is located in Palo Alto .
We became something called GLIS, Global Library and Information Services.
The interesting part of that is we had a fairly large staff of research analysts
but at that point we began serving everybody in HP
with some exclusions but I won't go into details.
So then you see another kind of steady path going down and some more yellow text.
So at that point, yet more funding pressure and further desire for centralization,
by that I mean from upper management.
This is not our choice.
Surprisingly we had several people decide to leave the library system
and at the same time my entire library team was laid off, with the exception of me.
And one of the reasons I was kept on because I have some pretty,
I'd done some pretty involved work for some of the executives out in Palo Alto
and in other parts of HP and so they basically wanted to keep me on.
And the unfortunate part of that was I got to be the survivor.
Again, it was survivor's guilt and I also got to close my own library,
which let me tell you was no fun.
So at this point I now become a virtual analyst, a virtual research analyst
for the HP Labs Research Library.
I don't have physical space to live in so I'm virtual by vintage, being remote.
I'm not yet working out of my house but I'm offered a home to sit with Natural R&D Team.
This R&D team was working for HP Labs and they were working on a brand new exciting technology
at that time, which was called virtualization.
So I basically started doing my deep analysis within HP Labs, when I was working for this team
and they were trying to understand the market for this emerging technology.
And those of you who may be computer savvy know
that virtualization is basically the enabling technology for the cloud.
And so I was in on the beginning of all that.
That team basically told me sit with us and I want you to do competitive intelligence
and in depth analysis on our technologies and write report for us to help us understand this.
And he said I want to know what you think.
I don't want you to just compile information, analyze it and put it together.
I want to know exactly what you think.
And for me that was a big light bulb because I'd been thinking lots of stuff
up to this point throughout my career at HP.
Because they found that one of the things I did is every time I did research I tended
to help analyze it and present it to customers so I was,
but I'll talk about that a little more in a later slide.
So what happened here is basically other R&D leaders saw what I was doing for my team
and they wanted more of the same.
So I basically became, kind of several large labs caught onto this and started borrowing me
for all their in depth analysis, asking me
to make recommendations about the competitive landscape.
So about that time we still had a pretty big staff at HP Labs research library,
including a whole team of research analysts.
So there you see the next batch of yellow text.
More budget badness, most of HP labs library staff was laid off.
The library was a very strong digital library.
Prior to this point we had a lot of online resources as well
as the physical library which many people used.
But at this point the library pretty much became digital.
There were two analysts left, myself and a research analyst who was sitting
at HP Labs digital UK, Bristol UK library.
So basically that was a rough patch for she and I.
We were quite good colleagues and friends.
And during that time she actually looked for a job and found another one
at a University library in Bristol.
And so I was left as the only analyst for all of HP Labs.
And I was scooped up by a manager who basically I had done a lot of work for in the past
and he put me on my new team, which was the HP Lab's Strategic Planning team.
And I have to say this is the most interesting, challenging and exciting job I have ever had
and so under the little thing it says to be continued.
So that's where I'm at now.
I will explain, in this next slide, what I do now.
Because, as you've probably noticed, only a small part of it is what I did
when I first became a research analyst.
So two [inaudible] from the bottom I am still the research analyst for all of HP Labs.
But right now I tend to do the really hard stuff.
So basically the entire population of HP Labs has been become quite familiarized
with their digital library research so a lot of the big league bracket databases
that they would normally, that in the past I would have searched, they have full access to
and they can actually search so the ACM Digital Library, [inaudible],
Scopus, Web of Science, TotalPatent.
So because we lost so much staff we got to the point where we really had to have kind
of the basic research activity be kind of done by the researchers themselves.
It's not like they have a whole lot of time but that's one of the things that had to come
out of reducing staff, basically.
But they still, I still have people that come to me and ask me the really hard questions so I get
to do some fairly in depth research on a fairly ad hoc kind of manner.
Basically a lot of people come to me when they're first starting their research proposals
and projects and trying to understand the market landscape.
And some of them keep me on throughout the life of their project.
Right now I'm a 10% member of, 10% of my time is spent working
on a research project in one of the labs.
So I'll start at the top.
I'm right in the middle of working on an HP Labs technology vision.
I and the rest of the team, the strategic planning team, have been asked to do this
for basically the first time in quite a long time.
So I have been, I was nominated as the lead.
I'm compiling all of the input from the HP labs directors and BOT leaders.
I'm generating a vision report, technology vision, which is basically a written document,
which also has been repurposed into slides to show executives as well as other things
that we'll be showing people in the future.
At some point some of this will go public.
So basically, at this point, I've stepped into the role of being somewhat of a futurist.
So before we started in on building that technology vision document,
I was in charge of leading the main trend initiative.
So we kind of got roped into this on a very short timeframe.
We knew it was coming and the good news is that as a research analyst and a strategist,
we tend to watch the trends anyway.
And this is a big part of our job but we had to formalize it, turn it into an initiative,
develop an entire slide deck for the HP labs leadership so that they could go off
and start their visioning exercises.
So we're doing ongoing tracking and research into what the trends are as they change
and we will be updating both this and HP Labs technology vision
as living documents essentially, living initiatives that will go on in the future
and be a big part of our research of our strategy team's mission.
So that all kind of sprang out of our main mission
which is being HP Labs Strategic Planning and Portfolio Management.
As part of that, because I've been close to business units, I kind of got the job
of doing detail analysis on HP business units and mapping them
into the HP labs research portfolio.
This is an activity that everyone on my team does.
If you all get an actual copy of these slides, I put a lot of notes in the notes fields
and I've actually explained what strategic planning and portfolio management is.
I see I have a question, what are the most important skills you use as a research analyst,
knowledge of sources, how to write?
I'm going to cover that in the next two or three slides.
So before I segway into that, I also am in charge using my long time library skills,
I am the keeper of the HP Labs external publications bibliography,
which is actually an online system.
So we built a system that generates clean citations for us
for all the HP Labs publishing activities.
And we use this to generate the bibliography that we put into our HP Labs annual report.
Ah, okay I will answer that question as well.
I see how did you get by as supervisors
for additional professional development and education?
I will actually answer part of that now.
I have had some amazing managers.
This is not something everyone is lucky enough to have.
My first manager, and the one I had for the longest time,
wasn't too keen on professional development and education outside of my existing role.
So basically we have a lot of online training, searching,
you know and we also had a separate market research group at that time so I only became big
on market research as kind of an offshoot of my business
and marketing professional development, so to speak.
But once I had, my last three managers were very, very big on this,
in fact I'm going to touch on SCIP, which is the strategic
and competitive intelligence professional organization
and I have been a member of that for quite a while.
I've gone to some of their conferences and they offer excellent training.
So my last three managers, very big on professional development
in education and HP is big on it in general.
So it is part of something that managers have to do within HP and prove
that they are, ah, the conferences.
I've basically gone to the SCIP annual conference, which is in May.
I won't be there this year.
But I have actually gone to some technical conferences for HP as well.
And I've done some separate SCIP training, which was like a workshop where I went to another city
and stayed for a few days and did workshops on competitive intelligence.
So I think that about covers it.
Oh I still, right now I manage the HP Labs of Market Research Portfolio
so I make all the decisions about the content the HP labs need to do have
for market research purposes so the IDC, the Garner, the Forrester and some
of the niche providers that we need in HP Labs.
So I want to start this section with this heading,
thinking like an entrepreneur, even inside global companies.
So early on in my career at HP, prior to that I worked for city government and state government.
And when I went to work for HP it had many amazing things going for it,
including some of the most professional people I have ever worked with,
just sterling people and that is true even now.
But there were some scary things about working for a company,
including things like stock fluctuations and early on some
of the first layoffs that HP actually ever did.
So at that point I realized that you really have to think kind of entrepreneurial about,
not necessarily about getting different jobs but about how do you approach your job,
the role that you have at the time and expanded it and prepared
for other roles that might come along?
So as I put this here, this is not about being annoying or overtly ambitious.
In some cases I wasn't even that ambitious but I like to think on my feet
and I like to think that, I like to plan so basically this is about being able to see
and seize new opportunities, including new roles for yourself,
and that may even include new jobs.
Being able to overcome challenges, people come in and ask you interesting things all the time.
If you end up working in a reference situation you will find that is definitely true.
If you're working in any research, strategic features situation, challenges are the norm
so basically, and being able to overcome the barriers that you confront when you have
to meet these challenges and there are always setbacks.
You've seen a few setbacks in my path, in my transition in my career
but there are daily setbacks, being able to get things through procurement,
being able to find the right people to talk to, I mean you just have
to start feeling comfortable with that kind of thing,
being a great problem solver is really handy.
This enables you to feel good about your destiny and feel
like you have some choice and some control.
I mean if you didn't plan ahead a little bit, things can happen in your company
that can make you feel totally out of control and I know that's true
for all organizations, not just companies.
And it helps you look back and see that the change you encountered, even if it was horrible
at the time, such as closing our libraries,
ended up leading you to a good place, in most cases.
So every big upheaval I've gone through, I've been able to look back and go wow.
This really offered me an amazing opportunity.
Yes, I was going to put that, that's in my next slide.
You gain a whole new set of skills every time you go through one
of these transitions or overcome a new challenge.
A lot of challenges I had to overcome when I was in my earliest research analyst job at HP
and someone just walked in one day and said we want to set up a document management system
and you're a librarian so you seem like you'd be a perfect person to help us do that.
I'd never done anything like that.
I'd never interviewed software providers.
I mean I'd talked to representatives from Oracle.
You know I talked to people at the time from Documentum and some
of those other big document management companies.
I'd never written an R-reply, which is a request for information or proposal.
I had to do all those things and set up the document management system,
work with a really talented IT person to run it.
So that's just an example.
These things happen and they can just come out of the blue.
And one thing I got out of that, I had had experience in publishing
in my academic publisher parish environment, which I actually really like writing
so I did get a chance to write a paper in online about that very experience.
So let's go to the next slide.
We'll talk a little bit about attributes.
I've got several slides of these.
So the first thing was aptitude.
That, you know, I naturally had but I didn't realize I had but I had always,
I always was driven to think about the bigger picture.
So basically I do research and I think about what are the implications of this technology,
this interesting trend or something a competitor was doing?
What did this really mean to HP's market in this space, to the competitive landscape as a whole,
our competitors and ourselves and how we position
against each other and our future as a company?
So that kind of thinking basically made an easy segway for me
to seek out ways to use this aptitude.
And I didn't necessarily have to seek them
out because what happened was people noticed that about me.
I'd do research for them and they'd go wow, that was really cool and pointed out something
that you know I had thought of, you're actually doing analysis for me.
And so that became more common and basically word spread.
Curiosity and an open mind, this will get you many places.
Some of you probably go ah, some of the things I must do
on my job must be kind of strange and boring.
Well, no, actually they aren't.
I've always been curious about science and technology and not just high tech
but my background is in biological and agricultural sciences so I'm very comfortable
with scientific method and thinking that way but I'm also an artist in my spare time
so I have one of those right brain, left brain things that really helps me in a situation
and makes me kind of a different person within HP.
I can bridge the gap often between highly technical people
and executives and marketing types.
So I'm appreciated for that and a lot of that is my curiosity and being open minded
about the people who come to me and say I want you to research this field.
And I'll go I know nothing about it but I'm sure we can go out and find out about it.
And usually they aren't disappointed.
So I guess I should add just stubbornness, diligence and being very detail oriented
to that bullet so that helps too and that's a trait that most of us,
a lot of us have when we go into librarianship.
So flexibility is a big one.
I realized early on I had to be willing to do many things
and that at HP, change was inevitable.
Life in R&D is what they call, engineers love to use this term, orthogonal.
Life in R&D is orthogonal rather than linear.
Every day is different.
Engineers love to think, try to at least, try to think out of the box, so to speak.
So by orthogonal they mean going at right angles in a different direction
from what you might expect and this they see is the key asset for them in problem solving skills
and it's really true but I love orthogonal.
It's interesting.
So you can't be afraid to try new things because those opportunities will come up,
or at least don't act afraid to try them.
You might be quivering inside.
You go oh my God, this is going to be the biggest weird thing I've taken on yet.
But don't act afraid and if you don't take these chances, you'll never know if you can do them
and plus people stop asking you if you want to try something interesting and new.
And in the challenges, not only do they give you new skill sets,
they are great confidence builders.
So with that we'll go to the next one.
Key attributes that got me here, it does help to have really great mentors.
And as I hinted in my answer to that question, these can even be your bosses.
So I've been lucky that I've had bosses that wanted to be great mentors.
But right now one of my best mentors is the guy who was never my actual boss who sits next to me
when I'm in the office and he was the leader of the R&D team that I first got to sit with.
And he basically became a very great mentor for me so he was really great at knowing the ins
and outs of an R&D organization and how the engineers think so I've had some great mentors
and I never really had to seek them out, which was really lucky for me.
But HP does have mentor programs and if you get into a situation, into a climate where you have
that opportunity I would highly recommend it.
Sometimes these will be the people that give you the new challenges and the encouragement
that you can succeed at these challenges.
So that was my experience with the person I was just describing and I've had several
of these basically research projects, special assignments that turned
into these really involved situations that were exciting opportunities
and I ended up with some mentors.
Next, be a great team member and by that I don't mean yeah, you know, I mean things much deeper
than they often say about being a team member, cooperating.
Being a very strong contributor, sometimes you have the tendency to just really want
to do things on your own, work on big projects on your own, I mean we can still do that
and have a really great relationship with the rest of your team.
And believe me with the team I've got, I'm on a team of all really strong contributors
and I'm an old horse who can still learn new tricks so I have recently learned how to write
in tandem very complex documents with a lot of contributors.
So even I can still learn.
So key attributes team members like, honesty, reliability,
trustworthiness, strength and actually humility.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't be like you know tooting your horn.
It's just you know you have to acknowledge that they're great at what they do too.
And acknowledge that they've had accomplishments.
You have to have the willingness to step up and pitch in even
when the job isn't officially yours and it's seems like a big new challenge.
This is a fabulous way to expand your skills and your responsibilities.
By the way, it does really take a great manager to create and maintain this type
of team environment so my wish for all of you is
that you find really great managers in your career.
Don't be shy about acknowledging your achievements but do it
with sensitivity regarding your team and your colleagues.
You will find that they are more eager to acknowledge and boast about your achievements
as well as their own so they really appreciate this.
And by all means, build your team of fans.
Do good work for people and they will pass the word.
Many people, especially in kind of an analytical environment, like an engineering environment,
they have to experience your work firsthand but once they do, you prove yourself,
they are more than happy to, well I can't say share you because sometimes they resent
that other people are taking your time but they're more than happy
to pass the word that you can get the job done.
So here we have some more key attributes.
Believe it or not I was shy and hated public speaking when I first got through grad school
but I quickly learned that if you know your stuff, just talk about it.
And this applies to all situations.
Speak up, polish your presentation and writing skills.
Be able to speak to other people at meetings, in groups,
be able to speak to executives and even on the spot.
And I have to say the elevator pitch is probably my weakest point.
[laughter] So I still have places where I could really improve
but these are skills that are pretty essential.
The next one is articulate, describe your desired future.
And I'll readily confess I was pretty late in the game on this.
What really got me doing this was the experience that I had to polish my resume up and in reading
about writing better resumes I thought
that you should have a business statement for yourself, basically.
So I articulated my desired future before I got it.
So I stated that I wanted to be a competitive intelligence person, a strategist,
someone who looked at the big picture, covered the competitive landscape,
looked at future trends, and that was basically how I articulated my future.
Not many people saw that, although we do post our user resumes
within HP so people tend to see that.
But basically that was a good way for me to focus, yeah there is something
that I can move towards and I can do it here in HP.
Okay, what else we got here?
So, I thought I'd talk a little bit about other jobs, not just mine.
But I'm sure you know about this, this thing called big data.
HP Labs is real involved in this.
We have a whole lab of people that is working on this, information, management and analytics,
including big data analysis and management.
There's a boom in this area right now, it's the hottest thing since cloud so any of you
who follow technology press, this is becoming a really big deal.
Basically people are starting to realize that they need insights
into all the data that is swimming around them.
So IDC predicts, over here on the right, they just came out with this report.
They're the first people to kind of try and define this market in a formalized way.
But they're predicting that big data technology and services will reach 15.9 billion by 2015,
which is a 40% per year growth rate.
This is what we consider very fast growing in the tech market, amazing growth.
The problem here is data and information science professionals,
there's a shortage, right now and into the future.
So EMC, which is a big technology company that is very involved in this area,
they've recently predicted that 65% of data science professionals believe, they went out
and did a survey, and the professionals believe that demand
for data science count will outpace the supplier in the next five years, with most feeling,
and this is important to you, this supply will be most effectively sourced
from new college graduates.
McKinsey did a big huge report, they've done several on big data but their report
from May 2011, they came up with statistics where the U.S. alone faces a shortage by 2018
of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills.
These are probably the information sciences, IEU guys,
and people from computer science backgrounds.
You know, these are all merging so you know if you understand how to manage
and organize information and you have the analytical mindset,
you can go very far in this area.
McKinsey goes on to say there are 1.5 million managers and analysts
so this includes the managers that run the information management side of businesses
and business analysts who have to basically work on analyzing a lot of this data,
we are short that many of them who can analyze this kind of data flow
and make decisions based on our findings.
The good news is a lot of people are working on trying to automate pieces of this
but we still need the humans in the loop.
We need the analysts.
So basically this is a really cool thing for you guys.
I don't know how many of you, I mean any of you who are inclined to get PhD's,
that would be a good thing but not required,
by any stretch of the imagination, to be one of these people.
If you wanted to be an information scientist in HP labs,
that would be something you would want to do.
But you know I look back on this now and I think man, you know, one time I toyed with the thought
of getting a PhD in information science and if I had have done that I could have worked
in the information analytics lab.
So there are just many opportunities from across the entire continuum of information management.
So here's another slide that I made up after I sent you guys the slide deck
so I'm just going to speak to it.
I called it odds and ends.
I just want to give you a few more examples of other jobs.
I remember for a new colleague who worked with me as a librarian at HP and she is
since the segway into running an electronic medical records initiative
for a very large major local hospital system.
So there's her skills in information management.
She was able to move into that position and was very successful at it.
I know formal librarians that are working as competitive intelligence professionals,
either for companies or as consultants on their own, strategists and even futurists.
I know librarians are basically running companies that do analysis
or designing software to do analysis.
I talked about SCIP, the strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals,
very easy URL, basically www.SCIP.org.
So just attending one of their conferences,
their annual conferences, would be an eye opener.
Basically there are a lot of sessions and you get exposure to a lot
of different people doing a lot of different jobs.
So if you were at all interested in this kind of job career, that's a really good place
to get a lot of information and immerse yourself in that climate.
One thing I'm going to tell you, another statistic before I wrap up and take questions,
is when I took some SCIP training, basically on competitive analysis and strategy,
one statistic that I took away from that was they asked us all our backgrounds.
And basically those kinds of professionals come
from two key backgrounds and you can guess what they are.
The first one would be MBA's, basically people with business and finance backgrounds.
Turns out they're really good at doing financial analysis but they aren't very well trained
at research and maybe not necessarily finding all those pieces and putting them all together.
The other background that was most common was the MLS, people with library science degrees.
We are stupendous at doing research.
We're really good at making the connections among the pieces of research as well the people.
And we have the aptitude for putting the pieces together.
This is a natural trait for many of us.
And so my story is one of just kind of following the career path and segway, stumbling my way
and segway into that opportunity.
So I never planned to be here exactly but I am glad that I made it to where I'm at so let
that be encouragement and don't think linearly, think orthogonally, as the engineers would say.
And with that I will hand over the microphone.
>> Jill Klees: So if anybody has any questions at this point, go ahead and raise your hand
and we can let go of the mic so that you can pick it up.
While you're all thinking up questions, I have a question for you, Sue, this is Jill.
What advice overall would you give to new grads who are interested in kind
of the technology work or moving more into this technology side?
>> Sue Charles: Basically I would tell them you know obviously people
like that are probably already reading a lot of tech news and keeping up with it.
I don't think it would hurt to take some classes and get some experience in the computer side
of things or there are other technologies that you might be interested in, biotech or nanotech.
Interestingly enough a lot of these areas are kind of overlapping emerging.
So I mean even, I mean I got into this frankly and this was a while ago but basically,
number one, I had a bachelor of science degree.
They didn't care what field it was in, if I had a science degree they were like, yeah,
we want you, you know, we want you to do SciTech reference and research.
I also ended up thrown into work with a lot of engineers and so it was easy, when I saw the job
with HP, to go to them and go look, you know, I'm an expert dialogue searcher.
I know NewSpec in and out, you know.
I know, you know, I work with engineers.
I work with scientists, you know, on a daily basis.
You know I have this agricultural degree but you know basically I got the interview and all I had
to do was convince them of my skills.
And so the other thing is join some professional organizations.
I mean if you're interested, I mean get exposed, basically,
you know to people, to the terminology.
I think those are probably the key pieces of advice I would have.
I know now people even do information interviews with companies
but as an information professional,
do have skills that companies are starting to really value.
And we're seeing, even within HP they're starting to realize they should hire more
and more people with different backgrounds.
So you know it's not just the real categorized box like world it used to be in tech.
And I won't say that it isn't still a highly male environment, it is.
But boy it's, for the moment it's a great place to work.
>> Jill Klees: And you've actually kind of addressed really most of the questions
that I was writing down throughout the presentation so I appreciate that.
You did touch on the fact that more tech companies are starting to notice the value
in students or people with an MLIS.
Can you talk a little bit more about what you think are the most important skill sets
for MLIS professional to have today?
And you did address some of those but I'm curious, do you think if there's some
that are the most important skill sets that you can think about and that will be important
for our students and new grads to know about?
>> Sue Charles: I tried to be pretty thorough because I basically sat down and put my,
I kind of relived my career and thought about all those things that I found helpful.
But it's true.
It's a different world now then when I came out of library school.
It's a fast paced, very connected world.
And I think you know the more you are familiar with technology and are able to use it,
I didn't even mention, you know, I've been, I was probably one
of the original members of LinkedIn.
Some guy had invited me to link in with him like years ago
so I'm not the world's biggest networker but that is obviously,
a lot of people are really good at that.
And the friend I mentioned who got into electronic medical records,
she was a sterling networker and that has made her be able to segway into,
to transition into different corridors.
So she was much like me.
She's worked in academic libraries, corporate libraries, public libraries
and now she's working in the medical profession so you know it can be done
and I think the more open minded you are, the more kind of understanding you have
of where you're trying to go and what the jobs are like, what the skill set is like.
I mean obviously if you went to a SCIP conference you'd learn a lot
about what people are like who are working at competitive intelligence and doing analysis
and even futurists, they'll do some of the most interesting sessions I've ever attended.
And a lot of those people work for food tanks and the government.
Again, getting back to technology, I think the more you just understand the resources
in that area, the trends in the technology area,
I mean that's what's always been really handy for me.
One of the big things is as a librarian I've always thought of myself
as this giant information filtering sponge.
And so I've always tended to just see things and the more I know about the people I work for,
i.e. the researchers and scientists, I tend to remember what they do.
And now as part of the Strategic Planning and Portfolio Management Team, I might have a lot
of inside information about their projects,
I tend to very proactively throw information at people.
Go, hey, I kind of thought you'd want to see this.
And I don't overwhelm them with information but I tend to be real,
I tend to use my analytical skills to go I know something about this person.
I know this is an important thing to them.
So this is something that also comes with experience.
The more you do research for people, the more you understand what they need.
Let me just say it's kind of the new,
I'm kind of the new tech version of the reference interview.
So basically, absorb as much as you can about the field you want to go into
or the technology area, if that's where you're going.
Talk to people, network with people.
I think you'll find the opportunities will come.
And like I say, if you're interested in the whole big data thing and information management,
keep a line on that because that is just an explosive area
and it's a great opportunity for people like us.
>> Jill Klees: That was really, really informative and I thank you so much
for taking the time because I do know how busy you are.
So I really appreciate you putting the presentation together and agreeing to come
on with us tonight and talk about all you do and your path through the LIS field.
So thanks again for this fantastic evening.
I really appreciate it.
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