Having graduated from Library School, it is time for me to become a Librarian. This is proving harder than I might've hoped. Fortunately I'm currently employed as an Assistant, so things are not too desperate, but it would be nice to have the encouragement of an interview soon: so far my applications are getting discarded before that hurdle.
Why?
In most cases it is probably a simple question of competition: I have been applying for very good-looking jobs and in that regard sheer weight of demand cuts down my odds dramatically. I do my best to make my applications stand out, while attempting not to go too far as being alienatingly unusual, but no subtle font selection or delicacy of prose can overcome that greatest of Catch-22s: the Question of Experience.
Collecting dust upon its hanger: my interview suit.
I have six years of library experience and an MA in Librarianship, but I am not a Librarian. A Librarian is somebody who has already been a Librarian. And in these days of immense competition for jobs it is such past experience that is all too often a defining criterion of selection. As someone who has never been a Librarian, I cannot, it seems, hope to equal the match of the Person Specification achieved by someone who is already doing that exact job (albeit at another establishment). So it is that Librarianship becomes a closed shop: a club which only admits past Librarians.
This may not be a universal truth, but it was the fundamental reason given to me for my failure to secure a post in the same building that I currently work. While I believe that my Librarianship education and my 'para-professional' experience (along with my past employment experience) adequately equip me for the step up the job-ladder to Librarian, I cannot tick all the boxes with the same emphatic flourish as someone who's already on that rung.
What is the solution to this problem? In part it may merely be a question of lowering my job-hunting sights a little: making a smaller step towards Librarianity: a senior Assistant or subordinate Librarian position, or simply something a bit less attractive. Or perhaps it's a question of just keeping on keeping on: waiting for all the Librarians out there to finish their games of musical chairs until eventually my application rises to the top half of the pile. In the meantime, I'm trying to squeeze all the experience I can out of the Librarians here at work. While it may be true that stones let blood more freely than some Librarians let me work-shadow them, I'm steadily extracting a gentle trickle of opportunities. I may ultimately have to press them a little harder in order to get myself some hands-on Librarian Action.
At times of high unemployment, the Question of Experience gets asked all the more often. It's an issue I feel quite strongly about, and this is my third attempt at writing this blog post. The previous two just descended into rants. Let us hope that this one does not.
(It will, CPD23 fans; it will.)
I recall a Library School exercise in which groups of about five acted as recruitment panels sitting in judgement over the CVs and covering letters of five fellow students applying for a fictional job. We recruiters had to narrow the pile down to two. My colleagues took their cue from the role profile, and so it was that the two candidates I considered least suitable were the two that went forward for interview. I had disregarded one candidate as intolerably smug (and clearly harbouring desires for my own position), and another as disinterested in the role (the application yearned desperately towards a different sector). Rather I thought the best candidate to be the one whose covering letter gushed with excitement and desire: who clearly saw this job as a vocation. It did not matter to me that she was in want of some experience: one has to start somewhere. What mattered was that her letter seemed genuinely enthusiastic: that her heart appeared to be in it.
Of course, this enthusiastic patter may just be a masquerade. The applicant may have been as disinterested or as avaricious (in the nicest possible way) as the two we ultimately put forward. But that would hopefully become apparent during the interview (by contrast, the candidate I characterized as grasping and smug proved to have a friendly and bubbly demeanour in the flesh, although I knew this anyway because the exercise in no way attempted to obscure the identities of our fellow students).
All of this subtly suggests that I am profoundly at odds with the rest of the world in my view of recruitment. As is often the case, I can't help but assume that I am right and the rest of the world is wrong in this regard.
The candidate who I favoured took a while to find a real library job, and had to do voluntary work in the museum sector in order to finally get an amount of experience deemed acceptable by recruiters. This state of affairs makes me sad. It makes me sad that to be a Librarian one must spend several thousand pounds on an education and then potentially also have to do voluntary work; that is: working for no money. That's quite a deposit we're having to lay down.
There's always been a voluntary sector, rightly or wrongly. But there also used to be job progression: opportunities for promotion: a way up a career. The present culture of role profiling is increasingly a hindrance to such progression: a job at Spinal Point n is no kind of work for somebody on Spinal Point n-1 after all! The only way I can get some experience that will come close to matching the experience of someone else already in that role is to do some similar work for no pay (and hence no formal recruitment regime). There are two ways of looking at this: in one respect you might argue that voluntary work brings its own reward: the experience required to make the leap to the next level of employment, where the benefits will have a financial element as well as a vocational one: payment is in part received in a non-monetary 'experiential' currency and in another part deferred. Or, one might argue that work without direct financial recompense is unethical within a capital-orientated society.
This is not to criticize the principle of volunteering or the concept of vocation. One could speculate of a utopia where work is replaced by hobbies: where our debt to society is paid in a way we actively enjoy. But we do not live in such a utopia. Somebody has to clean the shit out of the sewers, and not everybody can sustain themselves as pop-stars (as Saturday night television consistently demonstrates). Hence remuneration.
There's always been a voluntary sector, rightly or wrongly. But there also used to be job progression: opportunities for promotion: a way up a career. The present culture of role profiling is increasingly a hindrance to such progression: a job at Spinal Point n is no kind of work for somebody on Spinal Point n-1 after all! The only way I can get some experience that will come close to matching the experience of someone else already in that role is to do some similar work for no pay (and hence no formal recruitment regime). There are two ways of looking at this: in one respect you might argue that voluntary work brings its own reward: the experience required to make the leap to the next level of employment, where the benefits will have a financial element as well as a vocational one: payment is in part received in a non-monetary 'experiential' currency and in another part deferred. Or, one might argue that work without direct financial recompense is unethical within a capital-orientated society.
There are subtleties to consider: education is fundamentally unpaid, and perhaps the voluntary role may be conceived in terms of an apprenticeship. There was once a time when an apprentice received pay, but then there was also a time when a student received a grant. Faced with the choice of nine grand's university tuition or an unpaid apprenticeship, the latter may appear the sounder bargain.
In such a way, volunteering becomes a form of practical further education. If it is reasonable to expect the applicant to have a graduate qualification (which in recent terms would have cost the applicant the best part of £4,000 plus expenses), then is it not far more reasonable to expect some voluntary experience (not nearly so expensive)?
There is clearly a dilemma here. One must be very careful. A graduate traineeship is one thing; unpaid work as a Library Assistant is very much another. Beware the internship as a mere means to free labour: if somebody gets paid for the same work you're doing for free, you're a) being robbed of pay under any system which is fair, and b) robbing them by effectively devaluing their job. It may be in our immediate self-interest to take on voluntary work as a means to experience, but it is to our long-term collective disadvantage if as a consequence of that voluntary work such paid jobs cease to exist.
While some volunteering exists in a sector which is near-universally unpaid on account of being closer to a hobby than to a job (Steam Railway enthusiasts spring eagerly to the footplate of the mind) much unpaid work is to be found in the forgotten corners of our society that become the domain of charity. Charity exists where the state has failed to act. It patches up the holes that capitalist society steadfastly refuses to darn. It must exist whilever people of good conscience refuse to stand by and allow abuses to continue. But the existence of a voluntary sector within our economy poses a tacit risk to those at the bottom of that economy. It is a rare government that intervenes to replace a volunteer programme with a state-run body, because such intervention means an expense for that government. Once a sector becomes volunteer-run it is difficult to recapitalize (why pay for something that used to be done for free?).
Hot steamy action!
This is not to criticize the principle of volunteering or the concept of vocation. One could speculate of a utopia where work is replaced by hobbies: where our debt to society is paid in a way we actively enjoy. But we do not live in such a utopia. Somebody has to clean the shit out of the sewers, and not everybody can sustain themselves as pop-stars (as Saturday night television consistently demonstrates). Hence remuneration.
But, points out our Prime Minister, bored middle-class housewives of a certain age can find great pleasure in maintaining for free what many state workers do for a wage. We do not pay the Steam Railway enthusiasts so why do we pay the Librarians?
That we pay for footballers is a mute moot point, but one with some historical lessons: sporting professionalism stemmed originally not from greed but from need. Amateur Rugby Union was a game for rich public-school boys; professional Rugby League was for overworked factory-hands who could only afford to give up time to their beloved sport if they got some money in return. Vocations should not be the sole domain of the wealthy.
Local government spending restrictions are the national government's chief weapon in its attempts to bring about the Big Society. For "the Big Society" read "the wholesale dumping of state responsibilities upon the charitable sector". This is Thatcherism dressed (rather unconvincingly) as a provincial sort of socialism: just as privatisation of state industry brought in a quick fix of cash, the dismantling of the welfare state provides a quick-fix reduction in outgoings. This is revolutionary economics, albeit a seemingly retrograde revolution. I call it the New Feudalism (which in a way is unfair on feudalism).
The rot has always been with us: charity has been there mopping up society's piss ever since society was born. Voluntary work in that regard is a necessary evil. While such volunteering should not be necessary, the failings of our society make it necessary. But that does not mean that we should allow the rot to spread into areas of work that are traditionally paid. The fight for a decent wage has been long, hard, and in many cases violent, but it can be undone in a near-instant. To do for free what was previously done for money is not so much charity as robbery.
We must not rush to shout 'scab'. The work contract is between two people and it is the employer who is creating the position in the first place. What ire we bear must be cast in that direction at least as much as any other. When an authority refuses to pay its library staff, and lays down the Sophie's choice that either they work for free or the service is shut down, the real baddies of the piece are, of course, the authority. But knowing that doesn't help us any. We still have to choose between descending into charity or watching as a community suffers. At least as things currently lie, I believe the only responsible action is the latter. I believe this in part because I suspect the voluntary model to be ultimately unsustainable, but principally because I believe we have a collective responsibility to our trade on a broader level. The communities we serve can only prosper if we can afford to serve them.
Not that any of this stops me from work shadowing, and getting myself as much experience at my current place of work as I possibly can. I am lucky in as much as I was able to get into a library position six years ago when the economic situation was not so grim. In that regard I do not envy my younger peers.
And so it is that for now my interview suit continues to collect dust upon its hanger, and I keep on filling in those awful online forms, seldom receiving even a token rejection email for my efforts. It's dispiriting looking for a job, but it could be a lot worse:
Not that any of this stops me from work shadowing, and getting myself as much experience at my current place of work as I possibly can. I am lucky in as much as I was able to get into a library position six years ago when the economic situation was not so grim. In that regard I do not envy my younger peers.
And so it is that for now my interview suit continues to collect dust upon its hanger, and I keep on filling in those awful online forms, seldom receiving even a token rejection email for my efforts. It's dispiriting looking for a job, but it could be a lot worse:
At least it's not this bad.
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