Mid-Career: What’s It All About?

Welcome to our first post in the mid-career reflections series. We hope you enjoy and will comment below!

Reflection Questions: What is mid-career? When do we consider ourselves mid-career?

Nancy: A lot of folks have written about how nebulous the “mid-career” idea is (including Wendy Pothier on this very blog!). As an early career librarian, I didn’t have to think about what career seniority I was or what it meant. Then, as I observed the 4th and 5th anniversaries of my library school graduation, and as I keep seeing academic years slip by, I’m now finding this question something to contemplate.

For me, “mid-career” carries a sense of acquired proficiency, knowledge, and skill. I’ve gained enough experience and memories that I can readily answer common reference questions and even more complex ones sometimes. I’ve got a library of developed lesson plans, both written down and in my head, and the familiarity with information literacy content that allows me to teach seemingly off the top of my head. I’ve got the fundamentals of my job down. “Mid-career” means it’s time to look for new challenges and learning opportunities. In the last couple of years for me, this has looked like designing and teaching a graduate library science course and taking on leadership roles in BLINC. Even more recently, due to staffing changes at my library, I’m needing to dive more into data platforms (hello, LSEG Workspace) and social sciences data topics as a new political science liaison. I consider that I’ve been working in libraries for a decade now, and that perhaps also mid-career means that work belongs at work and ought not take precedence.

Reece: In 2019 I started my dream job as a business librarian after many years of trying different types of librarianship in contract positions. I can mark when I became mid-career because despite loving being a business librarian I started to seriously think about another role, which is the role I started last year as Head of Learning Services. I started feeling like I wanted to influence how things worked in the library at a larger scale, and found I had ideas about how to do that. I don’t think that mid-career looks the same for every librarian, but it does seem to be a time for reflection and a shift in rhythm. I’ve seen some of my mid-career colleagues start PhDs, move into teaching library studies, increase mentoring earlier career librarians, focus on their own research or make other changes. Mid-career marks a degree of mastery and comfort, and for some people that’s enough in itself and not a time for change, especially when there may be responsibilities outside work as well (eldercare seems to have been added to the plate of so many people I know in the past year or two).

Finally, I’ve met a handful of librarians where their mid-career shift was to become librarians after years as adjunct faculty, pastry chefs, or consultants. They bring immense knowledge from their former careers. Can you be mid-career in a new field? What do you think?

Angel: When I transitioned from the public library to my current position in an academic library, I felt completely new-career. Despite having worked in the public library since 2011 and holding a librarian-like support position for over six years, the transition to academia post-MLIS graduation in May 2018 felt like uncharted territory. By February 2019, I found myself in a new work environment, one with expectations of deeper engagement with research, service to the profession, scholarship, and high level instructional responsibilities. Those expectations and navigating the world of academia left me feeling “new-career” for sure. This shift made me hesitate to label myself as mid-career, despite my eight years working in libraries.

While public and academic libraries share similarities, as I write this, I am hesitant to call myself “mid-career” because I am still learning so much about academic libraries and feel that I need maybe two more years, before feeling comfortable calling myself an academic librarian. I often joke that I’m just a public librarian in disguise. Despite my uncertainty, what makes me feel mid-career is considering the network I have built in the last five years as an academic, the scholarship opportunities I’m planning (even contemplating applying for a grant or an award), setting clear three to five year goals, and being approached to mentor others in the field. What defines your sense of mid-career status? Are you comfortable with these labels, or do you share similar uncertainties?