The other side of GLAM-our: Building strengths, expertise, and resilience
Ellen works in the difficult-to-get-into field of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) and shared with us the importance of leveraging strengths, developing expertise, and building resilience.
We recently spoke with Ellen Oredsson, Digital Projects Officer at The UK National Archives. Her leaps have included multiple moves to not just different countries, but continents, without a job in hand. She also made the leap to commit to staying in her extremely competitive field of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) versus going into academia or leaving her field altogether like most people with her background. Our conversation focused specifically on how Ellen was able to maintain her commitment to staying in the field, albeit changing roles and focus areas, and how she was able to successfully find a job when moving to a new country without any prior relationships or broad support. Three steps guiding her success were:
· Leveraging strengths
· Developing expertise
· Building resilience
Leveraging strengths
Ellen found that as she was moving between roles and looking for work, that leveraging and building her strengths, even if unrelated to her job at hand, was valuable and set her up for professional success. For example, she loved art history and loved to write, and so she started her own website, “How to talk about art history” where she’d take questions about art history and research the answers to them. By doing this, she was able to stay relevant in the field, showcase her history and communication skills with a side of digital and educational expertise. She didn’t create this website with the explicit intent to find a job, but these strengths set her up perfectly for her role now working on Digital Projects within Education arm of the National Archives.
There is a body of research dedicated to the positive impact that focusing on one’s strengths can have on an individual’s personal life and professional career. Not only are people who take a strengths-based approach happier and less stressed, they experience faster growth and development and find more meaning in their work. If you’re unsure of how to begin, a personal highlight reel might be a good place to start.
Developing expertise
Underpinning Ellen’s strengths in writing and communication was her expertise in art history. Her website was the perfect excuse to also help her deepen her expertise, researching answers to questions she didn’t already know the answer to. Her job roles also involved developing expertise – she built and developed her experience and expertise with digital as part of a prior role. And then she leveraged those skills in creating her own website, continuing to learn and push herself. This expertise was critical in establishing her credibility in her field, especially as she was networking to find opportunities to work in an extremely competitive space.
By developing expertise, you position yourself as the go-to person for a topic or issue and can highlight how valuable, unique, and possibly irreplaceable you are, helping you stand out in a competitive job market. There is a lot of debate and conversation about “I-shaped” versus “T-shaped” professionals – in short, experts versus generalists, but there is still consensus that some amount of expertise is required in at least one discipline, if not multiple. Simultaneously developing expertise and following your curiosity in different areas may lead to future opportunities to combine them even if the combination isn’t immediately apparent.
Building resilience
Take a leap is never without its share of risk and the possibility of rejection. Upon each of Ellen’s moves to Bangkok, Hong Kong, and then London, she didn’t have a job. She worked multiple side jobs, taking unpaid opportunities to meet and network in her field, maintained her website to leverage her strengths and continued to develop expertise. All the while, she applied to roles and in all cases, ultimately found paid work in her field. She entered each of these situations with the understanding that it wouldn’t be easy, but also with the commitment to continue to persevere and knowing that her long-term objective was to work in GLAM, balancing that with, in some cases, the short-term objective of finding a paid job. Her resilience in persevering past more difficult and challenging professional (and at times, personal) circumstances helped her maintain a positive outlook and orientation toward her long-term goal.
“Be resilient” is much easier said than done, and much is written about how to build resilience as a skill and muscle that strengthens and deepens over time. Regardless of the leap, we can never anticipate the moments when we’ll need resilience but we can be confident that resilience will provide support on the leaps, decisions, and circumstances outside of our control that don’t go as planned.
Image courtesy of Ellen Oredsson
