Long retrain coming

[j4]

My job is so meaningless. I mean, I know they all are, in the end, but this one is definitely more so than many. Less than the previous one, though. I suppose that's something to be thankful for. That, and the very reasonable salary.

And, I mean, it's indoors, which is a good thing.

But anyway.

[Poll #712898]

Comments

[aldabra]

Not a librarian. Library school is unutterably dull, for *years*. And there aren't interesting jobs in libraries. The UL is one of the best libraries in the world. I love it. But working there was dull (apart from the teabreaks), and I was the only person I knew who had a shelfful of interesting books I'd collected. Librarians don't read books, because they get fed up of hoicking them around all day and want to do something different in the evenings. And it doesn't pay very well either.

I'd say don't go for teaching, you don't want to end up teaching, but I think not ending up at library school is much more improtant...

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

The people I know teaching at private schools are, on the whole, happier than the people teaching in the state sector - usually due to better support from the school they're at. There are exceptions both ways, mind, but I could picture j4 at a private girls' school. It could be like a female version of Dead Poets Society, only with more badgers and Shakespeare and fewer scary beardy men no pictures of Walt Whitman on the wall.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I could picture j4 at a private girls' school

Of all the people I didn't expect to have those sorts of thoughts!

But seriously, dude, I went to a private girls' school. I know what goes on in those places. *shudder*

[j4.livejournal.com]

Years? Since when? It's a one-year MA, and you can do it part-time in 28 months. And I've seen plenty of interesting jobs that require Information Science qualifications (jobs which, er, in fact, I could clearly do, so possibly should actually ask the people advertising them "do you really need me to have this qualification?").

As for wages, well, Owen gets paid almost exactly the same as I do; I'll let him say more about how good the job is if he feels like it, but I see him come home smiling and relaxed, and -- unlike me -- he doesn't feel the need to rant for an hour non-stop. Okay, that's partly a question of individual personalities, but still. (And he reads more than I do.)

And I worked in a library for 9 months (while waiting to have the second attempt at my finals year after remitting), and really enjoyed it.

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

"do you really need me to have this qualification?"

If they like you but really do want the qualification, you could always see if they'll let you study for it on the job and / or put you through it or contribute to it. Shows enthusiasm and initiative, and potentially gives you a more varied (maybe full / stressful) workload.

[j4.livejournal.com]

That's a good idea, and ... actually, I wonder if I could persuade my current employers to let me study part-time for the Information Management qualification, as it's actually very relevant to what I'm theoretically supposed to be doing in this job (and likely to be supposed to be doing more of if I stay here).

Hmmmm. *ponders* *reads up on flexible working policy*

[rmc28]

If there are interesting-looking jobs you feel you could do without the magic qualification, it's probably worth ringing/emailing and asking if the qualification is actually vital, or if your proven experience in x,y,z will do.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

It's not that bad. (Consider this two cheers for librarianship.)

For a long time I was jealous of my best friend for working as a library assistant in UCL, while drumming in a band, and telling me about his colleagues who were ex-punks or working-class avant-gardists.

So there are some interesting librarians, but more importantly, there are interesting jobs related to libraries: jobs at the intersection of computers and literature and systems and psychology and buzzwords.

I think the downsides of librarianing for j4 would be the hierarchy and the inertia (both of which I'm broadly comfortable with).

[j4.livejournal.com]

the hierarchy and the inertia

My previous job had so much inertia you could have scraped it off the walls and built some kind of evil golem with it; it also had a sufficiently inflexible hierarchy that they couldn't actually let me do the job they wanted me to do because there wasn't a name for it on the org chart ("computer says no").

This job has less inertia, and a theoretically more flexible hierarchy ... which is sufficiently complicated that to a first approximation it stops anybody getting anything done.

I suspect all the jobs I'm likely to ever be qualified to do and/or interested in doing suffer from these problems to a greater or lesser extent. But having colleagues who bothered to turn up to work were in sympathy with my aims a bit more, and having enough work to do that I wasn't reduced to Super-Evil No Really We Mean Really Fucking Difficult Sudoku Vol. XIV by 10am on an average day (or a context in which constructive extra-curricular stuff was valued, or where it was openly accepted that a de facto part-time job only required part-time attendance) ... [stops to collect threads of sentence] ... might make it a bit more bearable.

Also, you're less keen on the sort of library jobs where you have to talk to people. I, to coin an interview cliché, like meeting people. No, really. It frustrates me when I'm surrounded by people who are barely literate, but a) if they were different people every day then at least there'd be a bit of variety, and b) I'm slightly more forgiving of a lack of functional literacy when it doesn't come from PEOPLE WHO HAVE FVCKING DOCTORATES AND GET PAID FOUR TIMES MY SALARY.