GSLIS students, graduates meet growing corporate need

Kesley Heffren, GSLIS master's student and intern at W. W. Grainger, Inc. (photo courtesy of Erwin Cruz/Grainger)

Information management in a corporate setting can take many forms. For Shannon Roberts (MS ’12), it involves working as a price and market analyst for John Deere. For GSLIS master’s student Kelsey Heffren, it means conducting oral history interviews of longtime staff at W. W. Grainger, Inc., and working to organize, preserve, and expand the company’s intellectual property collection. And for GSLIS master’s student Steve Sprieser, an intern and terminology analyst at Intelligent Medical Objects, Inc. (IMO), it consists of working with Python and SQL to map medical terminology for the healthcare industry.

GSLIS students with an interest in corporate information management graduate with a strong foundation for work in this diverse field, but knowing how to set oneself apart, and even deciding which direction to go, can be a challenge. “People with our skill set are good in marketing, business development, strategy, and pricing,” said Roberts. “There are so many options that people just aren’t really aware of.”

Preparation for work in the realm of corporate information management often involves more than classroom learning. In fact, practical experience in a corporate setting is an essential part of the education of any student who hopes to start his or her career at a company like Deere, Grainger, or IMO.

Roberts, who interned at Deere’s Research Park office in Champaign before being hired to work at the company’s headquarters, knows the value of real-world experience combined with a conceptual background formed at GSLIS. “As good as the classes are, they can’t really give you the day-to-day understanding of what a corporate office is like,” she said.

Even students who are early in their graduate studies can apply the ideas presented in introductory courses to practical experience. Both Heffren and Sprieser, first-year graduate students who completed their internships this summer, found that the higher level concepts learned at GSLIS prepared them for work in a corporate setting, and they were able to build on that foundation with skills gained from working in the real world.

“The higher level concepts, to look at information from a different point of view, those are things that I’m using almost on a daily basis,” Sprieser said. “In terms of the conceptual level of understanding, the skills coming out of GSLIS are directly pertinent to what I’m doing here at IMO.”

Heffren’s understanding of the best practices of digital preservation, and her ability to translate that into practical applications at Grainger, has been one of her major contributions as an intern, according to Erwin Cruz, director of intellectual property strategy and management. Heffren believes that her experience at GSLIS was the primary reason she was selected for the Grainger internship. “My manager obviously knew the value of GSLIS when he hired me,” she said.

Lessons gleaned from internship experiences can also be brought back to campus by those students who are still working on their degrees. For Sprieser, the opportunity to see what production-ready code really looks like was eye-opening and has changed the way he’ll approach coding projects in his classes. After being notified that she had been selected for her internship, Heffren chose classes that she thought would be most useful in her upcoming position, and she’s now working toward a degree that focuses on both data curation and corporate librarianship.

Tailoring one’s courses in preparation for a particular career plan is nothing new, and it’s not the only way to start on a path to getting that dream job. Roberts recommends looking at job descriptions to get an idea of what employers are looking for and then finding ways to improve one’s skills accordingly through real-world and classroom experience.

Networking is another way for students and graduates to discover opportunities, and an internship can be a great place to start building connections. The experience for new interns at Grainger includes exposure to a number of people in different areas of the company, which motivated Heffren to perfect her elevator speech. “In my first week I think I was introduced to well over 200 people,” she said.

Joining professional associations, such as the Special Libraries Association, and attending networking events, conferences, and presentations can also provide avenues for finding an internship or employment position. GSLIS’s Corporate Roundtable meetings provide opportunities to connect with corporate representatives who may be recruiting.

“If you really want to make yourself stand out, don’t just go to the ones in Champaign,” Heffren recommends. “Take the trip and go to the ones in Chicago.” In her experience, the attendees from corporations often far outnumber students at the Chicago roundtables, while she’s found the opposite situation at the Champaign meetings.

Events at Champaign’s Research Park and outside-the-box venues like Engineering Career Fair can be good ways to learn about potential employers and make connections. Sprieser attended the Engineering Career Fair last fall as an undergraduate in the College of Business and then again as a GSLIS student this past spring.

“To be able in the spring to put down that I was a GSLIS student, I received a much different response,” he recalled. “It was a very, very welcoming response, because companies are looking for students who can reach out and say, ‘We can look at information and data from a different perspective than the computer science students or the business students.’”

Information science professionals are highly valued throughout the corporate realm, as are GSLIS graduates. Sprieser is optimistic about his post-graduation prospects; his experience at IMO and his overall knowledge of the healthcare information industry has reaffirmed this. “I have coworkers in everything from linguistics to community health, and that’s an interesting combination, but I think the focus on recruiting from library science has become a lot stronger for the firm in the last year or two,” he reported.

Recruiting from library and information science is a developing trend. “Our digital environment is rapidly changing and requires the skills the GSLIS program is geared to provide,” Cruz said of Grainger’s growing need for long-term, systematic intellectual property management. “The corporate sector may not fully understand LIS at the moment, however, if GSLIS students invest their time to better understand the challenges corporate/business organizations face with ‘information,’ there will be opportunities to enter this field providing viable solutions they have learned through the library and information science program.”

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