Job Trends in the Information Market: A Q&A with Hazel Hall
Jinfo Blog

By Hazel Hall

Abstract

Anyone working in the information industry knows jobs are constantly changing to keep up with the technology. TFPL, Ltd., which provides recruitment, training and advisory services to the sector, recently commissioned a report on the 'e-information' job market, which spans many disciplines not generally associated with traditional information roles.

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Anyone working in the information industry knows jobs are constantly changing to keep up with the technology. TFPL, Ltd., which provides recruitment, training and advisory services to the sector, recently commissioned a report on the 'e-information' job market, which spans many disciplines not generally associated with traditional information roles.

Hazel Hall, senior lecturer in the School of Computing at Napier University, Edinburgh, and associate advisor at TFPL, was a member of the research team. This month she presented the preliminary findings at a meeting of the Industrial and Commercial Librarians Group (ICLG) at the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). FreePint asked Hall about what went into the study and what TFPL discovered about new employment opportunities.

FreePint (FP): What prompted this research project? Did TFPL approach you, or was it something you proposed with the collaborative team?

Hazel Hall (HH): The initial idea for the research came from TFPL, stimulated by a number of trends in the information market. For example, as technology became the norm for handling and exploiting information, many new and interesting roles emerged. These could have been filled by information professionals, but often people from other disciplines occupy these posts. It isn't that IP [information professional] candidates lose the contest for the posts. It is generally because the profession is not on the employer's radar, or that IP skills are not seen as relevant.

TFPL is also convinced that there is a significant blurring of boundaries between disciplines, and this affects the education and personal development needs of IPs. The IP/IT boundary is already porous and the synergies are now far more obvious that the conflict. However, other disciplines, such as human resources, communications, organisational design, etc., are increasingly becoming significant in the development of effective information management.

And, finally, the e-world is developing and changing so rapidly that it is difficult to maintain an in-depth understanding of the scope of e-information roles. TFPL wanted to create a picture of this world, and had decided to undertake some research to underpin an 'e-information roles framework'.

When we learnt that I had been awarded a secondment grant from the Royal Academy of Engineering, TFPL saw an opportunity to involve me in the research as an experienced academic researcher. The original project aims were expanded to accommodate a series of new ones of particular relevance to higher education, such as to uncover real evidence that can be used to generate higher interest in IM and KM as attractive domains of study and employment.

FP: How did you go about gathering the information for the study? How long did it take?

HH: We collected six sets of data for the study. These included data collected from:

1. Desk research - advertised job data (internal placements offered through TFPL in the period September 2004 to March 2006, plus a range of roles advertised in other sources in March 2006)

2. Internal consultations with TFPL advisors, recruitment staff and one of the TFPL networking groups

3. A web-based survey targeted at a sample of people to include 'traditional' information specialists and other industry stakeholders

4. Interviews with a subset of survey respondents

5. A focus group held in Glasgow

6. A feedback seminar held in London to discuss findings that were beginning to emerge from the data collected in the other five exercises.

The survey gave us some very useful quantitative data which helped pinpoint some trends, and input from the interviews and consultative groups proved invaluable in helping steer the research initially and later in adding context and insight to the survey data.

We collected the data between the beginning of March and mid-June 2006, so it took three and a half months.

FP: In an evolving field, it's sometimes difficult to know how to even frame the questions for research because we don't yet have a shared vocabulary for the field, let alone benchmarks. How did you begin to create the terms of the study? Did you find that your questions shifted as you got more involved with the project? Were there areas of study you had to abandon or rethink along the way?

HH: We spent quite a lot of time working out how to limit the scope of the study, and the internal consultations were very helpful with this. We agreed that the TFPL definition of an e-information role as "a role which is directly related to the development and application of those processes which facilitate the creation, acquisition, capture, organisation, security, flow and sharing of electronic information AND comprise a significant element (50 per cent+) of knowledge or information management in their responsibility". We needed to be careful with this definition or we would open ourselves up to considering a large part of the labour market, including pure IT roles or business roles that require high information use - such as software engineers and insurance brokers - as well as any roles which involve handling information, such as call centre operators and data entry clerks.

We also felt that our focus should be on role function, rather than skills, although, inevitably, we were interested in skills to a certain extent. We would have liked to have looked more closely at the levels of the roles identified by respondents to our web-based survey, but feedback from the pilot revealed that this added a level of complexity that would probably not be tolerated by respondents. As it was, we felt that we were asking a lot of the people we approached to fill in the questionnaire and provide examples of e-information roles and their main function in their organisations.

As with all work of this nature, we would have liked to involve more people - we had the input of about 120 all together - and it would have been good to have a stronger representation of some industry sectors. For example, we felt that education was under-represented in our study.

FP: Your research summary indicates that e-information represents a tremendous opportunity, with some barriers to realising that opportunity. Both traditional and non-traditional information professionals clearly have a lot to learn from each other along the way. What do you think traditional information professionals uniquely bring to e-information roles? What new skills and ways of thinking/working might they need to develop? How might they create collaborative opportunities?

HH: It is a unique blend of skills (rather than the skills per se) that IPs bring to these roles, e.g. IM skills, understanding of context and the environment, ways of thinking. This is reflected to an extent in the research results in that IM skills are seen as core, but heavily linked to business and - to a lesser extent - computing skills. Part of the TFPL rationale for the project was that while people from other disciplines end up in IM roles and are effective, many are not. This is because they lack the IM way of thinking. (CILIP's body of knowledge document has more to say about what is unique about the profession).

As far as new skills are concerned, the TFPL research results tell us that core IM skills, particularly those related to building information architectures and managing electronic information content, are most in demand. Thereafter general IT literacy and personal attributes such as flexibility, confidence and enthusiasm are important. We spotted an interesting pattern of preferences for skills sets across the two main sectors of survey respondents: private sector respondents appeared to indicate that they are more interested in individuals who are all-rounders than the public and voluntary sector respondents.

Our research results do not indicate how collaborative opportunities may be created. However, other TFPL work suggests that multi- disciplinary team working is a powerful way of developing skills and opportunities. In fact any opportunity to work across disciplines builds opportunities for collaboration.

FP: You say 'new technologies' are driving job opportunities, but can you talk about what these new technologies are?

HH: We didn't collect data on specific technologies but instead asked survey respondents to rate the importance of particular drivers, and collected data from other sources on why technology may be considered a driver. So, new technology was most frequently rated as 'important' by the respondents. There are various reasons why it is a strong driver: because there are new information-intensive professions that need support in handling electronic data; because new tasks related to the handling of electronic information have emerged in established jobs; because work previously regarded as specialist has been brought in-house, e.g. high-quality document production. One set of technologies did attract frequent mention in the study. These were social computing technologies such as blogs and wikis.

FP: Has your research dimensionalised the potential e-information workforce, in terms of numbers, salary ranges, geographies, industries? What can an individual do to quantify and qualify e-information opportunities in his or her region or field?

HH: No the time available meant that we haven't considered these issues -- but if FreePint would like to fund such as study we would be happy to do so!

As far as individuals interested in developing careers in e-information work are concerned the TFPL research results would indicate that they should: seek out job opportunities across a range of media; look beyond job titles to identify e-information role opportunity; recognise that there is competition for jobs from others with 'non-traditional' information backgrounds. In preparation for job changes they need to: keep up to date with 'hot topics' of concern to target employers (for example, we found that public and voluntary sector respondents to our survey were preoccupied with government targets, whereas private sector organisation seemed to be more concerned with new technology); develop desirable skills sets (as mentioned earlier) and provide clear demonstrations of their suitability for advertised posts in their job applications.

FP: The 'conclusion' of any study often suggests the next possible routes for research and analysis. What's the next layer of research for e-information? What insights from the study suggest next steps for further understanding the field?

HH: TFPL is currently developing a generic framework of current and emerging e-information roles, which then can be developed for certain sectors.

We will also be making further presentations on this work at the ASIST conference in Texas in November, and possibly at Online 2006. (The abstract is currently under review.)

Although we have been able to predict the job functions where there is most likely to be employment growth, we have not been able to do an analysis by sector, other than to say that there appear to be more opportunities in the public and voluntary sectors. A development of this work would be to deliberately target particular sectors with the goal of identifying which offered the greatest opportunities.

More information on the study can be found at <http://www.tfpl.com/>.

TFPL is a Jinfo agency; search TFPL jobs across a range of e-information and traditional needs, in the Jinfo database: <http://www.Jinfo.com/>

Related FreePint links:

• 'Employment/Recruitment/HR' articles in the FreePint Portal <http://www.freepint.com/go/p43>
  
  
• Post a message to the author, Hazel Hall, or suggest further resources at the FreePint Bar <http://www.freepint.com/bar>
  
  
• Read this article online, with activated hyperlinks <http://www.freepint.com/issues/270706.htm#feature>
  
  
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