This document discusses how librarians can highlight their core competencies and align them with CILIP's Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB). It encourages librarians to identify skills learned through information literacy instruction that are also considered key employability skills, such as initiative and problem solving, communication, teamwork, and self-management. The document notes that the PKSB can be used to demonstrate librarians' unique skill sets to potential employers and that information literacy skills can help students develop employability skills. It concludes that the PKSB is a tool librarians can use to showcase the value of their skills within their institutions.

1. Don’t hide your skills under
a bushel:
Librarians and our own
employability
Gillian Siddall

3. Aims
• Identify some of your core competencies
• Align these to CILIP’s Professional
Knowledge and Skills Base
• Highlight key employability skills that can
be directly supported by Librarians and
information literacy instruction

4. Hi, my name is …

5. Group work
• Choose a sector e.g. further education
• Discuss and write down the core
competencies or skills that you think are
essential to the role of Librarian within the
sector

6. Discussion
• Core competencies . . .
– Sector and competency

8. CILIP
PKSB

9. PKSB
• Professional Knowledge and Skills Base
– Ethics and values,
– Professional expertise and generic skills
• Self assessment tool
• “It can be used to demonstrate your
unique skill set to employers”

10. Group work
• Looking back at your core competencies,
can you link your skills to the PKSB?
• Can you identify any that you think could
also be considered as employability skills?
– Put an asterisk * next to the relevant ones

11. Information literacy
“Information literate people will demonstrate
an awareness of how they gather, use,
manage, synthesise and create information
and data in an ethical manner and will have
the information skills to do so effectively”
(SCONUL, 2011).

12. Employability Skills

13. Employability skills
Oxford University
• Initiative & problem
solving
• Communication
• Team-work
• Leadership
• Commercial awareness
• Organisation & planning
• Self-management
– Computing and IT
– Languages
– Cultural awareness

14. Discussion
• Are there links between information
literacy skills and employability skills?

15. “gather, use, manage, synthesise
and create information and data”
–Planning and organising
–Initiative and problem solving
–Commercial awareness
–Communication
–Analysing and investigating

16. How do we contribute to the
development of employability skills?

17. Conclusion
• PKSB can be used to highlight our skills
and demonstrate our value to the wider
institution
• Information literacy skills can help
students to develop employability skills

18. Thank you
for listening

19. Any questions?

20. References
Cole, D. and Tibby, M. (2013) Defining and developing your approach to employability. A framework for
higher education institutions. York: the Higher Education Academy
Cox, A. M. and Corrall, S. (2013) Evolving academic library specialties. Journal of the American
Society for Information Science and Technology, 64 (8). pp. 1526-1542. Available from: http://d-
scholarship.pitt.edu/18951/1/asi22847-post-print.pdf [Accessed 10th March 2015].
Oxford University [n.d.] Employability skills. University of Oxford. The Careers Service [online].
Available from: http://www.careers.ox.ac.uk/internship-office-and-work-experience/employability-skills/
[Accessed 18th March 2015].
SCONUL (2011) The SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy: Core Model. SCONUL [online].
Available from: http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf [Accessed 19th
March 2015].
Sen, B. (2014) A “jack of all trades”? The key skills of health information professionals. HLG
Conference, July 2014.
Sen, B.A., Chapman, E. and Villa, R. (2014) Working in the Health Information Profession:
Perspectives, Experiences and Trends: the results of an EAHIL-funded 25th anniversary project. In:
Proceedings of the 14th EAHIL 2014 Conference. 14th EAHIL 2014 Conference, 11th - 13th June
2014, Rome, Italy. EAHIL
Full report: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/78521/
University of Kent [n.d.] What are the top ten skills that employers want? Careers and employability
service [online]. Available from: http://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/sk/top-ten-skills.htm [Accessed 18th
March 2015]

21. References continued
Images:
Photographs by James Heppell at Heppdesigns
CILIP (2013) My Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB). London:
CILIP. Available from: http://www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/jobs-and-careers/professional-
knowledge-and-skills-base/what-professional-knowledge-and-skills
University of Kent [n.d.] Employability skills map. Careers and employability
service [online]. Available from: http://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/sk/skillsmap.htm
[Accessed 18th March 2015].