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Career Sustainability

by Ryan Nitz, Head Editor, INALJ Alaska

Career Sustainability

ryannitz_photoMonique Valcour over at Harvard Business Review recently wrote a piece entitled Craft a Sustainable Career. This is a thought-provoking read and one that provides a great framework for analyzing the way in which you think about your career. And in terms of sustainability, we’re not talking about green jobs here; we’re talking about creating a vision for your professional life that is sustainable for you as an individual.

 

In a tough job market, it’s so easy to find yourself adopting a take-whatever-you-can-get mindset. Losing sight of the bigger picture is commonplace, so it’s important to remind ourselves that we should be striving to strike a balance between gainful employment and personal fulfillment. Now in a largely public service-oriented filed like LIS, that may or may not be quite as tricky as in the world of, say investment banking, but it’s still worthwhile. Over the course of your career, the amount of time you spend at work will be substantial to say the least, so you might as well feel good about what you do.

 

It’s definitely worth your time to bop on over and give Monique’s article a read:  http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/07/craft_a_sustainable_career.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29

 

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. 

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