Dunn and Wilson scholarship project 1999 Changing roles, changing goals: transferring library technician skills beyond the library

ALIA - an Association viewpoint

Part of an association's role is to track changes in workplace environments and to offer advice on future career projections. The ALIA website disseminates this information and outlook to industry members, discussing key workplace issues affecting our future and providing statements on job opportunities and future developments.

'As technological and labour market change expands, library and information workers will take on a wide variety of workplace roles. Many of these will have new titles, possibly identifying specialist skills or targeting the needs of particular client groups: information manager, network administrator, information systems analyst, resource co-coordinator, community relations officer, and so on. To fill such positions effectively, formal education and training in industry-focused skills and enterprise specific competencies will be crucial.

Career paths will thus be more complex and are likely to include many divergent stages. Barriers between job categories are breaking down. Workers who qualified as librarians or library technicians will take their skills into new areas, whether traditional information based occupations such as records, museums, and resource collections, or into the newly developing electronic business domain. More and more, the quest for employment opportunities involves 'looking beyond the L for librarian''.

ALIA identifies the need for skills diversification through ongoing training and professional development. This is especially important as the barriers between 'occupations' become blurred and is expected to be a continuing characteristic of work in the future. With less defined career directions and flattened management structures, there is a greater need for the opportunity to develop new skills through lateral transfer.