Who’s Hiring Librarians and Other Information Professionals?
Key findings from the 2019 MLIS Skills at Work Snapshot Report
Where are the jobs? If you’re a soon-to-be MLIS or iSchool graduate — or even a professional considering a career pivot — it’s the question that tells you where your opportunities are likely to be found (or not). The answers to this question can help you narrow your job search or perhaps shift your direction a bit to focus on a more “target rich environment” when it comes to job openings and welcoming hiring managers.
Answering the “where are the jobs” question is one of the reasons that the San José State University iSchool undertakes its annual MLIS Skills at Work project. It’s not intended to be an in-depth research and analysis, but rather a top-level snapshot of findings gleaned from analyzing 400 LIS-related job postings at a specific period in time.
What We Found
Largest number of employment opportunities (as indicated by number of posted jobs). As with the 2016, 2017, and 2018 reports, academic institutions and public libraries continue to be the largest employers by a substantial margin (Academic: 41%, Public: 13%). However, those two numbers represent notable changes from the 2018 report, where academic libraries represented 38% and public libraries a much larger 20% of the total jobs posted. That’s an eye-catching 35% drop in the number of public library job postings between 2018 and 2019.
As always with this kind of data gathering, it may simply have been a momentary aberration reflected in the period of data capture, but it’s definitely something to consider as a potential harbinger of changing hiring patterns.
Smallest number of employment opportunities (as indicated by number of posted jobs). As with the 2018 report, nonprofits continued to represent a modest 1% of hiring organizations, as did museums and archives. Medical/pharma/science jobs more than doubled from its small 2% of job openings last year to a 5% share in 2019 — still not a huge number, but importantly, a growth rate of 150%. Another reason to pay attention to this statistic is that medical/pharma/science jobs cover so many different uses of information skills that it presents a very diverse range of potential job opportunities (translation: ones that would match your skill set). In addition, economists are now predicting that the medical/healthcare field is going to experience explosive growth in the coming decades.
Museums and archives jobs have also seen healthy growth since 2018. Although still a very small subset of LIS jobs, last year’s 1% of job postings improved to 3% in the 2019 report — again, not huge numbers, but trending in an encouraging upward direction.
Most interesting changes (as indicated by number of posted jobs). Business hiring continues to grow. Going back two years to the 2017 report, business hiring was a solid 12%, then grew to represent 13% of the job postings in the 2018 report. This year, the report shows that 13% of job postings to have grown to 16% — a 33% growth rate in job postings in two years.
Moving in the opposite direction, however, are government job postings. At 14% in the 2018 report, they have dropped to 6% in the 2019 report, perhaps reflecting the uncertainty in government opportunities and structure these days.
Legal job postings more than doubled from 4% of the total last year to 9% of this year’s job postings. Balancing that fairly explosive growth rate, however, has been opportunities for school libraries: last year’s 6% share of job postings dropped to 5% for 2019. Not a huge difference, but definitely a trend we’d all like to see reversed.
Key Take-aways
It cannot be emphasized enough that the MLIS Skills at Work snapshot report represents a brief period of time when a specific number of job postings were analyzed; consequently, these numbers should be considered potentially indicative of trends rather than predictive of clear-cut changes in the profession.
However, the data collected suggests that, for example, there are a lot more academic and/or public library jobs than there are positions for archivists. That shouldn’t stop you from following a passion for archives but should provide you with information that encourages you to actively explore many alternative ways to use your archives skill set should that dreamed-of archives job not materialize.
If you have your heart on being a teacher librarian but the numbers appear to indicate that K-12 library jobs are contracting, then it is incumbent on you to research which states mandate and support certified school library media specialists, and be ready to relocate if your state isn’t one of them.
And if you’re thinking about special librarianship-type jobs, it looks like both the legal career path and medical/pharma/science employers will be solid employment paths to pursue. If that’s the case, now is the time to take a deeper dive to learn more about skills required, job duties, specialized skills highlighted, and other key insights that will help you prepare for those professional paths.
In fact, whichever of these many career paths you may wish to pursue, the 2019 MLIS Skills at Work report will help you be better informed about and better prepared for whatever jobs you go after.
Source: MLIS Skills at Work: A Snapshot of Job Postings, Spring 2019, from the SJSU School of Information
