THE job market grabs attention, attracts analysis and generates information for employers and their potential employees. Despite being an exhilarating and life-changing career point, it takes place on a well-trodden, relatively transparent path.

New professionals inhabit a more subtle environment, and however welcoming their new employers may be, not everything will be obvious. The effort to work out their new patch may divert them from the big picture and their original goals. So how do new information professionals find their feet and stay focused on their career paths?

Extraordinary times

Wherever they may have chosen to go, new professionals, and the organisations that they work for, exist in extraordinary times. Simon Burton is Director and co-founder of CB Resourcing, an information professional recruitment firm which he set up in 2014. He has worked in the information sector since 2009 and was in IT recruitment before then. He remains positive about the state of the information sectors. “Whether you look at events in recent years from Brexit to the end of furlough, everyone holds their breath for two months, but we didn’t see the mass redundancies on the scale some may have feared. A lot of the disasters haven’t emerged. In fact, what we’ve ended up with now is a talent shortage and buoyant jobs market.” However, he concedes there may be more changes ahead as the market finds its new equilibrium. “I think we’re going to have a period where we’re not in growth mode,” but he tempers this, saying: “There is still a talent shortage across the board and people aren’t sure how it’s going to work out”.

For Simon, one source of optimism is that organisations are better prepared for disaster, both psychologically and financially. “I’m not saying it’s going to be rosy – it is going to be challenging. But I think one of the worst things that happened in 2009 was that people got into a despair cycle, and if you believe nothing is going to go well for you, then you start to behave as such. But I don’t think there’s a disaster coming. Because of everything that’s happened in the last few years, organisations have more agility, the ability to change their operations, negotiate with suppliers when they’re facing challenging economic situations. Also, a lot of businesses, particularly SMEs have had to be really on top of their finances. People are much more clued up now – we’ve all had to be. And it’s the same with a lot of the law firms and professional services firms, they’ve all been looking at resilience.”

Challenges and opportunities

In September last year Information Professional published a piece called “Navigating the jobs market in the eye of a storm” – the storm being the uncertainty of the post-covid world. Rather than abating, that storm has intensified. At the time, one of the contributors, Sue Wills MBE spoke specifically about the challenges facing the public library sector. She said that initial hopes that the era of austerity for public services was over, were already looking unlikely. Instead she said: “The general direction has been reducing local authority grants while the financial pressures that had been there before Covid remain, and then councils had to step in as a response to the pandemic. So, the underlying problems have never gone away, and the financial situation still has to play out.” She has updated her views, saying: “Financially things are even more challenging in local authorities. Inflation is beginning to bite, the cost of living is now cutting into budgets and that includes the rising cost of fuel and the impact on staff travelling costs.”

And while resources become more scarce due to inflation, Sue sees the demand for library resources from their communities intensifying with “pressure on our residents who need us to help them as much as we can, helping them get on line to access benefits, signposting to resources including food banks and providing a friendly face and a listening ear in their local library.”

But she says there are opportunities for people who are up for the challenge. “What I am looking for in new professionals is a can-do attitude”, adding that employers need to look after their recruits and give them opportunities with “new professionals wanting a rewarding job in a service that has a clear purpose and sense of direction with training and learning opportunities so staff choose to stay with us. I believe we are seeing a change in the profession slowly emerging as we build on the profile of libraries and the amazing things we did through the pandemic.”

Pressure from below

The impact of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis are most obvious in the new professionals job market. Simon says: “I think particularly at the junior end is where it hurts. If you’re a senior manager on £50,000, although that’s not an amazing salary for a senior manager in a big city with the level of responsibility you have, you can get by on that kind of money. Partly because people at that level are more likely (but not always) to be established, they are more likely to have a home. It is often people at the earlier stage in their career, who are graduating, moving to new places to work, trying to get together flat deposits who struggle. They are expecting to have something left over to socialise, especially if they’ve been messed around by Covid. So, it’s hard to offer a salary of £18,000 to £20,000 in central London or any other big cities, to people who have done degrees and masters. Because it gets really difficult for people to live, and they see other roles paying more and take the logical decision.”

Uneven rises

Pay is going up in most places, but it’s not uniform. “In the corporate and public sectors, we’ve seen salaries going up where they’ve acknowledged they’re not getting the applicants they need. The academic sector is struggling more with a lot of governance around every decision, particularly things like raising salary bands. So, they are really struggling to fill some posts because they are now so far off what is being offered in other places.” The changes at this level puts pressure on organisations to look at the wages of all their employees. “There are people who have been in post for maybe four years in firms where the salary hasn’t moved on. When they see what people are being paid externally, they almost can’t believe it. Some places have moved, some haven’t. The bigger firms have to move because their bigger teams have a higher attrition rate. But if you’re a smaller team and you’ve not had to replace anyone for a while, you might have heard that there’s salary inflation, but it can be a bit of a shock when you have to replace someone – we are in a totally new market.”

Strange dynamic

These big pay discrepancies based on higher living costs, already exist, but are often geographical rather than generational. Simon adds: “It can be a strange dynamic, but it’s not new and happens when we hire people in America, in New York and the West Coast. Which is always difficult if you have UK-based managers. When you show them what they have to pay someone based in Manhattan it’s always a shock. But the West Coast and New York have an incredibly high cost of living so the salaries are significantly higher, probably double what you’d pay in London. But those employees probably still wouldn’t be feeling wealthy because it’s so expensive to live there. It’s a different world.”

Find mentors

These external economic factors add complexity to the workings of organisations. And Simon believes that New Professionals need help navigating their employers’ modus operandi, even during calmer times. He says mentors are not a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘need to have’ even when employers don’t have a mentoring programme. So why are mentors important? Simon reveals: “To help you through all the unwritten rules of the working world, all the stuff that no one really tells you, other than discreetly: how to behave in an organisation; how to get ahead; how the appraisal process really works; how the interview process really works; how to navigate colleagues; how to navigate promotion rounds; how to win budget for your own development for personal training; how to manage relationships with senior colleagues and get the best out of them.

“It is particularly important if you’re in a partnership environment, like a law firm or a consulting firm. A mentor in that kind of environment where stakeholder management can be so critical to your success can be really beneficial to you, your career and your overall development. All those soft skills that you can get out of mentors are important and it’s hard to learn them without having people to guide you through it when you’re in the workplace. “A lot of this stuff is hard to get from anywhere else. It can also be things like what books you should be reading, what events you should be going to, who are the other key people you should be meeting in your sector. It’s all that soft stuff that’s really important.”

Leadership

Digital transformation, often accelerated by Covid, has increased the visibility and communication about leadership at all levels. So, for new professionals, alongside the more tangible value of learning new technical skills, another strand in career development is leadership. “Ultimately the information profession is about enabling users with resources and information. Here leadership skills are not necessarily about leading a department but more of an integral part of what you are doing. “You may be running programmes, activities, doing training, and these require leadership skills: engaging people; influencing them; getting them to buy into things and also interpreting feedback. It’s not always large groups and may also be leading upwards within an organisation. “So, if you are a digital champion you might be influencing senior stakeholders down that path. That is a leadership skill to me. But it is a softer skill area, so it can be hard to quantify, it’s not like ‘I’m a really good coder’.” He says that using professional bodies, “getting involved, micro volunteering at first, that’s one of the best and ready made ways to develop leadership skills”.

The KM coherence

Simon believes that all the skills and initiatives required to find a way through the early stages of a profession relate to those required for knowledge management. It also fits in with how people find and communicate with mentors. “You cannot make KM work without leadership skills, that is impossible, because a huge part of KM is about getting knowledge out of the people in your organisation’s heads. A lot of it is about getting information from people by helping them to trust you and then collaborate and contribute to KM initiatives. Someone who can do that, get them believing in the desired end outcome of the process, will be using leadership skills.” It is a point reinforced by Sue Wills who recommends new professionals to “network, network, network. Build your networks and share what you are doing, initiate discussions and reply to debates.” She recommends LinkedIn as “a brilliant and free way to do that. I am really happy for professionals at whatever stage in their career to connect with me on LinkedIn and share my network.”