Don’t hide your skills under

a bushel:

Librarians and our own

employability

Gillian Siddall

Aims

• Identify some of your core competencies

• Align these to CILIP’s Professional

Knowledge and Skills Base

• Highlight key employability skills that can

be directly supported by Librarians and

information literacy instruction

Hi, my name is …

Group work

• Choose a sector e.g. further education

• Discuss and write down the core

competencies or skills that you think are

essential to the role of Librarian within the

sector

Discussion

• Core competencies . . .

– Sector and competency

CILIP PKSB

PKSB

• Professional Knowledge and Skills Base

– Ethics and values,

– Professional expertise and generic skills

• Self assessment tool

• “It can be used to demonstrate your

unique skill set to employers”

Group work

• Looking back at your core competencies,

can you link your skills to the PKSB?

• Can you identify any that you think could

also be considered as employability skills?

– Put an asterisk * next to the relevant ones

Information literacy

“Information literate people will demonstrate

an awareness of how they gather, use,

manage, synthesise and create information

and data in an ethical manner and will have

the information skills to do so effectively”

(SCONUL, 2011).

Employability Skills

Employability skills

Oxford University

• Initiative & problem

solving

• Communication

• Team-work

• Leadership

• Commercial awareness

• Organisation & planning

• Self-management

– Computing and IT

– Languages

– Cultural awareness

Discussion

• Are there links between information

literacy skills and employability skills?

“gather, use, manage, synthesise

and create information and data”

– Planning and organising

– Initiative and problem solving

– Commercial awareness

– Communication

– Analysing and investigating

How do we contribute to the

development of employability skills?

Conclusion

• PKSB can be used to highlight our skills

and demonstrate our value to the wider

institution

• Information literacy skills can help

students to develop employability skills

Thank you

for listening

Any questions?

References

Cole, D. and Tibby, M. (2013) Defining and developing your approach to employability. A framework for higher education institutions. York: the Higher Education Academy

Cox, A. M. and Corrall, S. (2013) Evolving academic library specialties. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64 (8). pp. 1526-1542. Available from: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/18951/1/asi22847-post-print.pdf [Accessed 10th March 2015].

Oxford University [n.d.] Employability skills. University of Oxford. The Careers Service [online]. Available from: http://www.careers.ox.ac.uk/internship-office-and-work-experience/employability-skills/[Accessed 18th March 2015].

SCONUL (2011) The SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy: Core Model. SCONUL [online]. Available from: http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf [Accessed 19th March 2015].

Sen, B. (2014) A “jack of all trades”? The key skills of health information professionals. HLG Conference, July 2014.

Sen, B.A., Chapman, E. and Villa, R. (2014) Working in the Health Information Profession: Perspectives, Experiences and Trends: the results of an EAHIL-funded 25th anniversary project. In: Proceedings of the 14th EAHIL 2014 Conference. 14th EAHIL 2014 Conference, 11th - 13th June 2014, Rome, Italy. EAHIL

Full report: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/78521/

University of Kent [n.d.] What are the top ten skills that employers want? Careers and employability service [online]. Available from: http://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/sk/top-ten-skills.htm [Accessed 18th March 2015]

References continued

Images:

Photographs by James Heppell at Heppdesigns

CILIP (2013) My Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB). London:

CILIP. Available from: http://www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/jobs-and-careers/professional-

knowledge-and-skills-base/what-professional-knowledge-and-skills

University of Kent [n.d.] Employability skills map. Careers and employability

service [online]. Available from: http://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/sk/skillsmap.htm

[Accessed 18th March 2015].