{"id":18056,"date":"2018-04-21T12:01:07","date_gmt":"2018-04-21T16:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/?p=18056"},"modified":"2018-04-23T16:39:51","modified_gmt":"2018-04-23T20:39:51","slug":"supporting-childrens-services-through-career-transitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/supporting-childrens-services-through-career-transitions\/","title":{"rendered":"Supporting Children\u2019s Services through Career Transitions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, I re-read the ALSC Blog post, Why Children\u2019s Librarians Should Run the World (or at least the library)<\/a>, which asked why more children\u2019s librarians weren’t moving into management positions. One explanation was that they prefer not to give up the job satisfaction received by working directly with children. I\u2019ve certainly heard that reluctance from children\u2019s librarians who would make excellent supervisors.<\/p>\n

If you are on the fence about testing out a leadership role, know that you can shape your job to still feel linked to your original mission. I know firsthand – I was a children\u2019s librarian for nearly seven years before deciding to explore supervision. I\u2019ve now served as an assistant managing librarian, the children\u2019s services coordinator, the youth services manager and a managing librarian. In that time, I\u2019ve learned that you can support children\u2019s services in a meaningful way even as job titles and responsibilities change.<\/p>\n

Give your staff planning, prep and reflection time needed for high-quality children\u2019s programming.<\/strong> Knowing that your families are in good hands makes it easier to not be the one regularly sharing stories.<\/p>\n

Substitute for storytime.<\/strong>\u00a0Staff absences (planned or unplanned) are an opportunity to provide that much needed dose of kid time.<\/p>\n

Mentor future children\u2019s staff.<\/strong>\u00a0Learn more about their interests, share your experience, write recommendation letters or offer to speak to students at your local library school.<\/p>\n

Become a simultaneous translator.<\/strong> In my organization the leadership team speaks in the language of outcomes and quantitative data, while the children\u2019s staff tends to tell stories using more qualitative measures.<\/p>\n

Offer yourself as a training resource.<\/strong> Since moving back to a community library (and away from centralized children\u2019s services), I\u2019ve led multiple trainings for our library district\u2019s children\u2019s staff.<\/p>\n

For those of you who are in a supervisory or administrative role, what else has worked for you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, I re-read the ALSC Blog post, Why Children\u2019s Librarians Should Run the World (or at least the library), which asked why more children\u2019s librarians weren’t moving into management positions. One explanation was that they prefer not to give up the job satisfaction received by working directly with children. I\u2019ve certainly heard that reluctance from children\u2019s librarians who would make excellent supervisors. If you are on the fence about testing out a leadership role, know that you can shape your job to still feel linked to your original mission. I know firsthand – I was a children\u2019s librarian for nearly seven years before deciding to explore supervision. I\u2019ve now served as an assistant managing librarian, the children\u2019s services coordinator, the youth services manager and a managing librarian. In that time, I\u2019ve learned that you can support children\u2019s services in a meaningful way even as job titles and responsibilities change. Give…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":226,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[702,1264,1],"tags":[266,381],"class_list":["post-18056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogger-managing-childrens-services-committee","category-leadership","category-uncategorized","tag-leadership","tag-supervision"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/226"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18056\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}