Seeds of Support

When the pandemic began, Marzena Ermler knew job seekers would need help beyond the résumé critiques and mock interviews that New York Public Library’s (NYPL) Career Services team previously offered. “I began brainstorming for a new pandemic-friendly job search service,” she says. Ermler launched what she calls resilience coaching, helping job seekers manage their stress and mental health. Volunteers have provided over 2,500 hours of coaching, she says. Ermler mentors the coaches to be more effective.

Ermler says a career coach is a combination of sports coach and cheerleader, working with people while offering support. She lives by this maxim: Keep planting seeds because you don’t control the weather. This “releases our mind from worrying about things we do not have control over, so we can concentrate on what we can accomplish.”

She also switched the library’s industry workshops to webinars, “which expanded their reach and scope tremendously,” Ermler says, drawing more than 21,000 participants between April 2020 and March 2021.

Ermler loved libraries as a newcomer to the United States, taking English conversation classes at an NYPL branch, and when she discovered a need for Polish- and German-speaking librarians, she got her library degree. Today Ermler (who also speaks Russian and English) hopes her career path inspires others, especially English-language learners.

Ermler seeks out more collaborators to help the un- and underemployed. She hopes to reach more women, as they’ve suffered the most job losses during the pandemic.

She says what she does wouldn’t be possible without her team and volunteers: “All these wonderful individuals are the true 2021 Movers and Shakers.”