What skills do we need in the 21st century?
Have you seen this great post from Meredith Farkas, on Skills for the 21st century librarian?
To summarise, Meredith argues that the library schools aren’t really teaching the “big picture” topics, and suggests the following “basic tech competencies” that should be covered:
- Ability to embrace change
- Comfort in the online medium
- Ability to troubleshoot new technologies
- Ability to easily learn new technologies
- Ability to keep up with new ideas in technology and librarianship (enthusiasm for learning
Don’t be intimidated by technology and new ideas and ways of doing things – experiment, play, try it out! (I’d guess this is partly why we’re all here? 
)
In terms of “higher level competencies” she suggests:
- Project management skills
- Ability to question and evaluate library services
- Ability to evaluate the needs of all stakeholders
- Vision to translate traditional library services into the online medium
- Critical of technologies and ability to compare technologies
- Ability to sell ideas/library services
Do read the whole post – and the comments too, where readers have suggested more topics that could be covered by library school, like communication and basic accounting skills.
Update: Free Range Librarian has made her own list (for any century!) to complement Meredith’s. I particularly like:
Impatience. Patience is vastly overrated. Librarians love to process stuff to death, and are often all too willing to spend way too much expensive staff time deliberating very tiny matters in lieu of getting to “go.” (We don’t need no steenkin’ users…) At MPOW our style manual requires serial commas–as in salt, butter, cheese, and eggs–because it’s non-debatable. Keep your eyeballs peeled for time-sinks. Develop timelines and try to beat them. Live by deadlines.
Feed