"Tough Times: Thoughts on the Library Job Market from a Department Head Who Just Hired a Reference Librarian"

~From a recent blog posting on ricklibrarian. Here are some highlights (or perhaps I should say, lowlights):

• "...I was still surprised by the huge response to the posting of a full time reference librarian's position at my library. In the past, we had never gotten more than about forty applicants for a job that we posted...After I posted our position in April, I received seventy-eight applications."

• "From my reading of the letters and resumes, I sense that under-employed is the new norm for young librarians...New graduates from library school have these now experienced librarians competing for the same few jobs."

• "This is not the time to push prospective librarians to attend library school. Only those people who know the current conditions and who either have a job already lined up or are willing to risk spending a few years under-employed should start working for a degree."

Well...great. That's just great. It hardly qualifies as news, and didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but still...it really hit home. In six months of near-frantic searching for a library job, I've received exactly two interviews (one of which was over a phone). Perhaps it's time for me to move on, but to what? As time passes, I'm feeling increasingly disconnected, for lack of a better term. Since completing my undergraduate education, I've drifted from job to job, never staying very long in anything. I've never really had a "career". Now I find myself speaking less and less with my friends and relatives, because every conversation, every interaction, somehow wends its way back to employment, what one is "doing"...and that's where it gets awkward. Awkwardness is not conducive to further or future interaction.

I don't really understand how I've ended up here. I had/have all the benefits: great family, excellent education, car, no debt. Things that billions of people would be thrilled to attain, and indeed, I'm very grateful. But I can't shake the idea that I really should be doing better as a way of returning this cosmic favor. I ought to be a young professional, perhaps starting a family of my own. Or perhaps I should be an entrepreneur or self-employed, building a business and reputation. Instead, I feel as if I'm in stasis, not going anywhere, and not growing as a person. I'm confused as to whether I'm currently doing the right thing ("everyone's in the same situation, just hang in there!"...and hang...and hang...and hang...), or whether I simply lack the willpower to actually take a chance and try something else, as by doing so I would be wasting my increasingly-less-valuable investment.

So what are my options? I can continue to do what I'm doing, chasing down leads, filling out applications, sending out resumes...but perhaps, as the above posting and a disturbing wealth of related information indicates, perhaps that is not the best option for me right now. I've just gotten out of school again (or at least I did six months ago), and I'm not exactly keen to go back, but perhaps I should take a look at what work is actually available, instead of trying to chase down something well-suited for me that does not actually exist.

Sometimes I get the urge to just get in my car and drive off in a random direction (presumably not east, as my vehicle is not amphibious) until I find something worth doing, but I'm pretty sure such an urge comes from having read too many works of fiction. After all, unless you make one up, there is no actual plot-line to life. Besides, gas is expensive.