You Can Work Anywhere: What That Rhetoric Actually Means for LIS Graduates

"You can work anywhere with this degree."

You probably heard the phrase during your orientation, in a lecturer's pep talk, on a LinkedIn post like this one. It sounds enticing, generous and at thesame time sounds vague enough to mean nothing because they have been saying it and yet graduates still complain of not getting any job with their degrees.

So what does it actually mean?

The phrase doesn't mean your degree automatically hands you a job in any industry. It means the skills your degree built in you — organising information, evaluating sources, managing records, understanding how people search, writing, communcating etc. These skills are not needed by libraries alone, they can be owned by anyone who has information that needs handling, which is to say: almost every serious organisation that exists. And you have the knowledge and skill to render those services.

"Anywhere" isn't a promise of ease. It's a description of where the underlying skill set is in demand. The work changes shape and scope but what stays constant is the thinking and skill you have built over the years. Your degree was never a narrow qualification tied to a library. It was training for a skill set, and that skill set is the actual passport not the word "library" on your transcript.

LIS career is wider than most graduates realise and here is a broader map of where LIS training takes people:

In institutions: Academic libraries, public libraries, special libraries (hospital, law, corporate, government), school libraries.

In records and archives: Records management, archival administration, document control, institutional repositories.

In technology: Digital library development, database administration, metadata management, digital preservation, UX for information systems.

In knowledge management: Corporate knowledge management, competitive intelligence, organisational learning.

In research and education: LIS academia, information literacy instruction, research support services.

In publishing and media: Editorial research, fact-checking, content organisation, information architecture.

In data: Data curation, research data management, open data coordination.

The skills at the centre of LIS are transferable across all of these. Your degree is not a narrow qualification. It is a foundational one. Which of these paths did you not know was open to LIS graduates?

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