LJ's 2019 Placements & Salaries survey looked at grads entering the LIS field for their second careers and the kind of education or experience they were bringing to their new roles.

THE PIPELINE FOR CAREER-CHANGERS

As in prior years, 2018 graduates (46 percent) tend to be career-changers. Just over half of respondents (51 percent) were not working in a library when they began their LIS master’s program. The prevailing career pipeline to LIS for second-career graduates is education (37.9 percent, up slightly from 2017). Business-oriented fields, such as finance, accounting, banking, sales, and logistics, were the first professions for 9 percent of career-changers. Communications also tends to preface LIS studies; 8.3 percent had worked first in marketing, communications, advertising or public relations, publishing, or journalism. Legal and criminal justice careers were the antecedent for 6.2 percent. Technology fields were the starting point for 5.8 percent of the 2018 career-changers, who were IT specialists, programmers, or data analysts. An equal proportion got their start in entertainment or the arts (5.8 percent); they worked in film, theater, visual arts, graphic arts, photography, museums, or interior design.

WHERE THEY COME FROM

Students who enter LIS graduate programs bring to the table very different prior work experiences or education, which affects their experiences in their master’s programs and their professional placement afterward. Similar to 2017, about half (49 percent) of respondents said they had worked in a library prior to beginning their LIS studies. About one-third of 2018 graduates (versus one-quarter of 2017 respondents) held an advanced degree before they started their LIS master’s program. Only 8 percent of 2018 graduates were dual-enrolled in another graduate or certificate program—such as a JD, PhD, or second master’s—while they were working on their LIS degree. This is a small increase over the 2017 results.