{"id":276,"date":"2011-11-14T11:07:07","date_gmt":"2011-11-14T19:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/?p=276"},"modified":"2011-11-14T11:07:07","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T19:07:07","slug":"professional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/2011\/11\/professional\/","title":{"rendered":"On Being a Professional"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was taken aback, recently, when a friend asked, essentially, “Does your job have to be your hobby, as well, for you to be a professional?” I’m paraphrasing, a little. But he was telling me about his (newish) job, how all of his coworkers, in their spare time, read stuff about business and about the market they’re in, their competitors, the state of the art in the technology they deal with… and he doesn’t really want to. He’s not dis<\/em>interested, exactly, but he already has hobbies, and none of those have to do with his work.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if I gave him a satisfactory answer. I kind of needed to mull it over, I guess. Because I’ve been on both sides of that discussion: ever since beginning to seriously consider librarianship as a career (so, sometime in 2007), I have been a consistent reader of library blogs and listservs (I’m inconsistent in which<\/em> ones I read, but consistently reading something<\/em> on the topic of libraries or librarianship). I do a lot of that reading in my spare time. Though, to be fair, I spend some work time on Google Reader, Facebook, and Twitter, some of which is networking\/continuing education and some of which has nothing to do with librarianship at all. So, as a librarian, my field is one of my many hobbies. But, as an engineer, I did pretty much no professional reading. I mean, when a new wireless standard came out, I probably caught wind of it and read other engineers’ comments on it, but I didn’t go out of my way to follow the field. I wasn’t involved in IEEE or ACM or any other professional organizations. I worked long hours, and then I went home and either answered more work email or did activities that had nothing to do with engineering. Continuing education in my field was not one of my major concerns. Nor was networking.<\/p>\n

But here’s the thing: I’m not a practicing engineer anymore. I switched out of that field, in no small part because I wasn’t that interested in it. I knew that keeping up with the state of the art in the field was one of the expectations of an engineer–not an unreasonable one, either!–and I wasn’t really willing to do it, certainly not on top of the time I was already spending at work. (Now, if I had found my first engineering jobs on the west coast, or anywhere more laid back than DC, would I have found the time? Maybe. … There’s a reason I favored the Pacific Northwest in my library job search, though: I do enjoy having hobbies other than my work.)<\/p>\n

I suggested to my friend that maybe I do so much reading about my field in part because I’m an academic. (OK, well, an academic librarian. I see a distinction between those two monikers.) But even as I was saying it, I was dissatisfied with that answer. If I were a public librarian, I would still want to stay up on what’s happening in the field. The idea that there might be librarians who don’t<\/em> follow at least a couple of blogs & listservs, or something like Library Journal<\/em>, upsets me. There’s so much change afoot, in our field, that I can’t imagine letting it all pass me by. There’s so much that needs to change<\/em>, that we should all have some sort of view of the world outside our own libraries. Also, just by the very nature of our field, you’d think we would all be information junkies. So the idea of a professional librarian not staying at least somewhat up to date makes me pretty angry.<\/p>\n

To get back to my friend’s question, though, I still find myself wondering: do I hold librarians up to these standards because we are professionals<\/em>, or because of the nature of librarianship? Clearly, society needs doctors and engineers to stay up to date on their fields. While I wouldn’t call it a societal need, lawyers also have to stay up to date. As do scientists, veterinarians, academics, IT professionals, designers, consultants. … And librarians. Is that the distinction between “a profession” and “a job,” the need to stay up to date? What do you think? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was taken aback, recently, when a friend asked, essentially, “Does your job have to be your hobby, as well, for you to be a professional?” I’m paraphrasing, a little. But he was telling me about his (newish) job, how all of his coworkers, in their spare time, read stuff…<\/p>\n

Continue readingOn Being a Professional<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-employment","category-librarianship","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}