Job hunt, credit crunch, big freeze, top threes…

Well, the job hunt seems to be rolling along now – if you measure it by the number of interviews, I’d say I’m definitely up to speed.

I have more interviews than I really know what to do with. I suppose I was a little unsure of myself to start with; not clear what kind of response I’d get. So this minor deluge is very heartening. Now I need to prioritise and aim my mental and physical efforts at the jobs I see myself enjoying and excelling at.

The credit crunch does not seem to make it more difficult for me personally to get interviews; when will we see it hit librarians / information professionals, I wonder?

The big freeze or “uksnow” as I believe it’s being dubbed, may well affect my ability to attend the interviews, though!

One strange side effect of my job hunt at the moment is that I’m putting off and re-booking interviews all over the place; I’m having difficulty prioritising them. It’s a bit of a kid-in-a-candy store effect, maybe, but even with a colour-coded spreadsheet (great info-pro skills) of all the pro and con points, I am still hard pressed to do it!

I’ve got it in a sort of hierarchy now; academic, then Government, then special libraries; various IT and uncategorisables go in the fourth place. And that’s pretty much how the interviews are shaping up too. Hmmm, blogging this has really helped me realise how well I’m doing! Thanks, blogging.

Interviews!

This is certainly going to be a season of interviews for me.

I have 3 lined up already, some of which I’m more enthusiastic about than others.

For the first, I need to produce a presentation on Information Literacy, which is good, because I’ve done that before and I just wrote a Masters dissertation on it!

Welcome to my world.

It’s almost Christmas 2008. I finished my postgraduate MSc in Information and Library Management last month, I am starting a temporary library position next month, and I’m getting ready to (hopefully) pass my driving test (first time).

Welcome to my world! You find me also in the middle of a job hunt. I am calling it a win-win situation. I have this rather good offer of an academic library post set up, and I’m looking forward to that. Plus, I have several other interviews and applications in the pipeline.

I intend to use this blog as a bit of a scratch pad for reflection on the job hunt, but also to record thoughts of books I’m reading and research into information work.

Today I finished watching a two-part video on TCP/IP, the basic building blocks of Internet communication. What struck me was how similar IT becomes to library and information work above a certain level – once you move up to the level of applications and networks, a lot of it is about databases, constructing protocols and allocating, retreiving and using the right contact addesses and so forth. Librarians’ minds work in much the same way!