FAQ: MLS Professional Skills and Attributes
Professional Skills and Attitudes: Which ones are valued in SLIS careers?
The MLS Advisory Committee has reviewed this list of skills and attitudes they would like to see in SLIS graduates. They recommend that MLS graduates should be able/prepared to:
- Appreciate and defend core values of the field: providing access to information
- Understand and anticipate users’ needs
- Take an entrepreneurial approach, especially in this increasingly collaborative and interdependent world
- Be willing to take risks (and our institutions should support risk taking, acknowledging the possibility of failure)
- Possess and demonstrate subject expertise
- Talk to others in the community, well beyond the library
- Listen to users
- Collaborate, build coalitions, work on teams (able to optimize one’s own area without sub-optimizing others)
- Engage in public involvement and advocacy, locally as well as with information policy issues
- Be participants and community builders
- Have skills in negotiation and conflict management
- Understand the impact of changing demographics; understand social and cultural environments of library users; engage in outreach
- Develop support for libraries, including fund raising
- Develop and maintain enthusiasm for the profession; this includes learning to be good new librarians, standing up for the kinds of training they need
