Premium skills
I subscribe to Book Freak, a substack newsletter by Mark Frauenfelder. In short, each newsletter summarizes a few main takeaways from “great books and thinkers to help improve yourself, boost productivity, build the life you want, and generally live better.” I’ve found it a concise way to consider new ideas from authors I would otherwise not have time to read (as my teetering bedside stack of similar books gathers dust in lieu of fantasy/sci-fi).
In a recent issue, Frauenfelder covered some key points from So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work. According to Book Freak, Newport advises that the best path to a tailored and meaningful career is via “the accumulation of ‘career capital’ — rare and valuable skills that can be traded for greater autonomy and impact.”
I mention Book Freak a) because I like it, and b) because I want to clarify that I have not read So Good They Can’t Ignore You—only a very short summary of some of its points. I’m sure there’s plenty of nuance I can’t speak to. That said, the advice to “Identify the core skills in your field that are both rare and valuable” and “Make a concrete plan to systematically improve these skills” spurred some thought about what those skills might be for an academic librarian. I asked a few mentors. Their response was mostly that specific valuable skills would depend on whichever area of librarianship one found themselves in, given the disparateness of academic library specializations; or perhaps that rare and valuable skills, like knowledge of scholarly communication intricacies in my case, is what qualifies one for specialized library positions in the first place. I’m curious what readers might posit as rare and valuable skills in their areas, or whether there are skills whose rarity and value would span all academic library positions.
Skills for whom?
Yet, a disheartening counterpoint to all of this is that rare and valuable skills won’t help you thrive or even save your job if your library is being stripped for parts. Brilliant librarians are being laid off at universities around the country (e.g. Duke, Northwestern, UC San Diego, Western Illinois). Some of these layoffs were the result of direct attacks on higher education; some were probably due to structural economic changes to the information landscape; all of them represent a devaluation of library work. In this climate, grinding for new skills doesn’t guarantee job security, although it may help with a career transition. Tressie McMillan Cottom has said in many places that the “institution does not/cannot love you.” Institutions exist to maintain themselves at whatever cost. I feel that a lot these days.
The logic of pursuing skills that might endear us to loveless institutions is a concrete example of how soft power influences the way we move through the world: what is valuable for us to spend our time learning is defined by what is useful to the institution, or to those in power within the institution, or in an even broader sense, by those with power through the generations. But, in a classic structure vs. agency paradigm, we retain some degree of human agency within and despite the visible and/or discursive structures that order our lives. Here, I’ll invoke some (probably tacky) Foucault, or rather a more digestible interpretation of his theory on “technologies of the self” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Subjects are not simply constructed by power; they themselves partake in that construction and modify themselves through practices of the self. They are not just docile bodies, but actively refuse, adopt and alter forms of being a subject. One way of contesting normalizing power is by shaping oneself and one’s lifestyle creatively: by exploring opportunities for new ways of being, new fields of experience, pleasures, relationships, modes of living and thinking.”
Threading the needle?
So, I close with two questions: a) what would “technologies of the self” look like for those of us working in academic libraries, and b) could they ever overlap with pursuit of “career capital” skills that are rare and valuable to institutions that cannot love us? In a practical sense, I’m not sure if resisting the institution is the way for more of us to keep our jobs… perhaps you are inherently a subject of the institution when you agree to receive a salary. I generally like what I understand my job to be, and I want to keep doing what seems worth doing. I also want to pursue skills and ideas and actions that align with my interest in stewarding information for the public good, but it’s hard to predict how higher educational institutions may or may not value that ideal in the future.
The best answer I can posit right now focuses on the word “creatively” in the encyclopedia quote above. After reflecting on my individual values and goals, I’d like to explore skills that will allow me to approach my work more experimentally and flexibly in alignment with those goals. Creativity may sound like a cliché thesis, but it’s easier said than done; it’s the highest tier of Bloom’s taxonomy, and it’s challenging to even identify how to increase creative capacity. Some of the skills I may explore through this approach to professional/personal development might be perceived as directly institutionally valuable, and some might not – via a course on fiction writing, for example. The overarching benefit would be my ability to do or create something with those skills that feels novel and generative and aligned with my professional values. The ability to be creative in one’s work tends to help the institution in the long run, even if the goal of shaping oneself creatively would be partly to resist normalizing power, in this case. To the institution’s credit: I’m not sure it counts as love, but I do appreciate the professional development stipend.