de Stricker

More on Information Credentials and Continuing Education

In response to the February 10 post, Wendy Reynolds provided the following comment: 

 

Fascinating post, Ulla. I wonder if some of these jobs come after a few years of experience in the workplace. How much can one degree program include, and still provide an meaningful educational experience? If the program goes in too many directions, there's a risk that the marketplace won't know what to do with the grads. Communication is going to be a really important piece of this. I'll be watching with interest.

 

With her permission, I shared it with Bruce Stewart, the new Director of the Professional Learning Centre at University of Toronto's Faculty of Information, who in turn permitted me to share his reply:

 

When I think about degree programs, what I see is a stream coherent and comprehensive enough to allow those who complete the Masters level to assume a professional role and to allow those who so wish to carry on into the stronger research focus of the Doctoral stream.

 

Continuing education, therefore, takes up the slack vis-à-vis the changing careers of the degree holders. There are also — particularly in the records management field — many who are transferred in to do clerical/process-oriented jobs who never did hold the professional degree, and these are catered to where the need makes sense. For those with the Masters degree out in the workforce, however, continuing education should keep them up to date in their field and give them paths to move amongst the Information space streams as their roles evolve and grow. A librarian, for instance, might find him/herself driving a project to define the information architecture for an online service in the future: while there are IA experts, some "new background" would be needful, and this is a need we should be able to meet.

 

The mark of a true profession — say, law or medicine — is the requirement from the professional society for continuing education to retain the right to practice. The Information professions do not yet share this characteristic, but it is — as engineers have shown for years — a good touchstone to have. (IT "professionals", despite a half-century of aspirations toward professional recognition, have not shared that commitment, and I suspect that's one of the solid reasons they are not seen to be professionals in the same way as are solicitors or surgeons or even chartered accountants or professional engineers.)

 

In our Faculty's "space", the Information Management and Records Management areas have the least sense of professional definition; Librarians and Museum curators do understand themselves to be professionals, but do not yet have the full public recognition of being "a profession" as the Law Society or College of Physicians does. But, because our "space" for continuing education is as broadly defined as it needs to be to keep pace with the Faculty's research interests and teaching, our catalogue will always (I suspect) feel "more scattered" than Continuing Legal Education or Continuing Medical Education programs do to the outside viewer.

 

I hope the way we revamp our catalogue (online and in print) will help make some of that apparent confusion go away over time.

 

Many thanks to Wendy and Bruce for their input!

Addendum to Feb 10: Wendy Reynolds' November 2009 Post

Wendy Reynolds kindly reminded me of one of her previous posts:  Dealing with the outlook for information professionals' jobs, it's highly relevant to my recent focus - check it out at http://www.slaw.ca/2009/11/01/speaking-out/#comments

The Relevance of Information Credentials: We have Work to Do

My fellow instructors in the Professional Learning Centre at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information and I had the occasion recently to meet with its new Director, Bruce Stewart (www.ischool.utoronto.ca/news-events/news/professional-learning-centre-welcomes-its-new-director).  During our meeting, we touched on the ramifications of the fact that "information credentials" prepare professionals for many jobs and functions going far beyond the traditional ones.  We each could relate personal experience illustrating how expertise in the management of records, documents, information objects such as multimedia clips, intellectual property rights, and other variations of information and knowledge is relevant in workplaces that are likely outside the job search scope for recent MIS graduates and mid-to-late career changers alike - and similarly out of view for managers looking for qualified personnel.  We see a need for efforts to bring together the cadre of employers needing information professionals, but not labeling them as such, and the cadre of information professionals whose skills are easily transferable to a wide range of settings.

 

As an example, some information professionals work as business analysts.  Wouldn't information credentials be relevant in facets of safety and security work as well?  Public policy analysis and development deserves a closer look as a career path for information professionals; information forensics could prove a fascinating line of work, and so on.  However, "we're not there yet".  For starters, typical job descriptions, classifications, and assessments require tuning to accommodate the contributions skilled information professionals are in reality able to bring to the table.

 

Our discussion turned to the need for supplementing technical information related skills with "soft" ones associated with organizational dynamics, interpersonal communication, the art of influencing at the grassroots and senior decision maker levels, managerial and political savvy, and the like.  Something as basic as presenting oneself convincingly to a potential employer outside traditional mainstream work settings was pointed to as an example of a skill area often receiving insufficient attention.

 

Working to assist our course attendees widen their skills and their career scopes, we instructors in effect participate in a permanent campaign to deliver the benefits of information credentials in new domains such as the ones suggested here.  There is much work to be done, and I for one look forward to the ongoing process of doing my part.  Welcome, Bruce!

Business Case Packaging: The Role of Visuals and Presentation Skills

Thank you to Karen Huffman for inviting me to guest webex today for her Library Technologies & Project Management class at Catholic University of America.  Karen had asked me to cover the subject of developing business cases, and I provided a highly condensed version of the material in my book on the topic (http://books.infotoday.com/books/BusinessCasesforInfoPros.shtml).  The exchange after the presentation touched on some aspects I'd like to share here, with credit to the class members.  Those aspects go into the series of what my colleagues and I refer to as 'things we didn't hear about when we went to school'.

 

Make it visual:

 

At senior levels, some decisions are made quite quickly - contributing factors could include prior familiarity with the circumstances at hand, previous evidence pointing toward an approach, and the combined voices of stakeholders having chimed in.  In the "boardroom moment", there is not enough time to wade through long texts or spreadsheets - instead, punchy visuals summarizing data and illustrating desirable future states can be powerful persuaders.  There is a reason data visualization is a hot business area - given the same number of seconds for a person to assimilate information, much more can be crammed into visual means than is possible to communicate through the written and spoken word.

 

To be sure, a business case document must be solidly backed up with evidence, indicators, references to published literature, quotes from authorities, and so on.  But crystallizing facts and statistics into images to help decision makers understand quickly the key messages could be the factor setting one case apart from others when the votes are cast.  Of course, visualization may be a challenge for information professionals because our cases may be abstract to put it mildly; teaming up with people talented in the art of creating visuals or looking for an appropriate continuing education course could be advantageous.

 

Make it memorable:

 

In my book, I emphasized the value of practicing a business case presentation so that it comes across with factual heft, research strength, and professional polish … what I didn't say but wholeheartedly endorse is that - as a class member pointed out - our few minutes in front of the executive committee must also be vivid and memorable.

 

For information professionals advancing and advocating initiatives, I believe "it's not about us, it's about the stakeholders".  We do not ask for funding … the stakeholders do.  We are not pushing for change … the opinion leaders / knowledge workers / sales & client service reps (etc) are.  Yet we are likely one day to be standing there in the boardroom, having 10 minutes to pitch our proposal and put all our research and previous work into one concise delivery.  Skills in getting and keeping the attention of a tough audience are paramount!  "Where do I learn such skills?" you may ask.  I told Karen's class that several of my colleagues have described the strong boost in confidence they gained from the Toastmasters process (www.toastmasters.org).  Several avenues can be explored … the key is to be goal oriented about the need to build skill in engaging an audience.

 

Many thanks to Karen's class for raising these points.