Every day for a month, I’ve come to work excited about it! I have my own desk with a plant. Our members are still congratulating me on my new role. I’ve already pitched two ideas that I’m currently working on bringing to fruition with my library director’s support and my colleagues’ collaboration. I have the kind of job that allows me to wear heels, to carry a briefcase bag, and (within a range) to dress either up or down depending on my mood. I get (most) evenings and weekends off. Certain parts of my job include using InDesign to publish newsletters and learning Drupal to make websites and analyzing/organizing statistics and reading books and reading about books. People ask me questions and I can almost always answer them right away. My coworkers are interesting and amazing people. There’s a farmer’s market across the street every Thursday. What’s NOT to be excited about? I love this job!
But that’s not to say there hasn’t been a learning curve. The first day of work, I reported to the library manager to get the skinny on how to approach day one. When I did the same thing on day two, along with a report of the previous day’s progress, she very politely explained that unless I ask her for help on something, she’ll assume I’m doing fine, i.e., I don’t owe her an account of how I spend my day accomplishing my work. On day three, I found out that I wasn’t supposed to be reporting to her at all. The library director is my boss, not the manager.
I’m sure that those already in professional roles might indulge in a huge eye roll at my naiveté, but I previously worked jobs which involved the boss telling you where to be, when and for how long, and what to do in that time/place. At the public library, for instance, there’s an hour-by-hour schedule posted for each person, every workday. It worked really well for the kind of work we did in that role. This is the major difference I’ve found between paraprofessional work and professional work: paraprofessional work in a library setting is typically task-based, whereas professional work is project-based.
This work environment might be a bit disorienting for library school students and rookie librarians like myself. We’re accustomed to getting feedback from classmates on discussion boards or from professors in the form of grades. But in another way, library school well-prepares one for taking on professional work — in that it, too, is project-based. I have a cache of skills to draw on when I’m tasked with managing the library’s fiction collection, for instance, partly because Wayne Disher, my stellar professor of collection development, assigned projects like evaluating library communities in terms of both current and potential users, building budgeted purchase plans, generating circulation statistical reports, and advocating for our collection needs by developing oral presentations.
During my first week, I worried (just a bit) that I might run out of tasks. Week two, I decided that instead of worrying about it, I’d make more work! I’ve taken on added responsibilities, proposed a couple of new ideas, started learning new tools, offered my skill sets to help colleagues, and I’m figuring out how to make my new projects my own. Because of the work I did in grad school, it hasn’t taken me very long to acclimate. There is liberation in working with people who trust that you know what to do and will succeed at the work you put your hands to. That’s probably where this daily euphoria about starting my workday originates. A job that makes a person happy is one that affords a measure of autonomy, allows you to use your existing strengths, and to gain new skills.
Me & this librarian thing? I think it’s going to work out!
Heather Bailey Terrell 