Careers
From Montreal to The Hague, SIS graduates are engaged in dynamic careers around the globe.
Our employment surveys reveal that a majority of our MLIS students enjoy a professional position within a year of graduation. As well, a majority of our PhD graduates have been hired by other information schools. See results of the latest survey: Graduate Placement Survey - 2011 Graduates [.pdf].
Looking for employment opportunities at the School? Please visit our Employment Opportunities page. Current student? Visit the Working page.
MLIS/MISt careers
Graduates of the Master of Library & Information Studies (MLIS) and Master of Information Studies (MISt) programs are equipped to work as information professionals in a variety of settings. See below for examples of practice settings, primary responsibilities, job titles, and potential employers.
Archival Studies/Records Management
Practice settings
Archivists and records managers work in a variety of traditional and non-traditional settings, including cultural heritage institutions (archives, museums, historical societies, and special libraries), records and information centers in government agencies, corporations, colleges and universities, religious organizations, and non-profit organizations.
Primary responsibilities
Archivists and records managers manage records in both paper and electronic formats as organizational memory and information assets through several activities. Archivists mainly deal with historical records and do activities, including acquisition, appraisal, selection, arrangement, description, conservation, and preservation. Records managers play their roles in the management of forms, reports, correspondence, email and electronic records, workflow analysis, records center operations, inventory, classification, filing, retention, and disposition. Archivists and records managers develop and manage recordkeeping systems and provide access to records used for organizational memory, strategic management, decision-making, research and development, and legal compliance.
Examples of job titles
Archivists, preservation librarians, special collections librarians, manuscript curators, records managers, records analysts, document managers, forms managers, reports managers, computer system managers, information managers, records center supervisors, digital resources managers.
Potential employers
Archives, museums, historical societies, special libraries, university archives, special collections or rare books division in university libraries; records centers or records management department in government agencies (Library and Archives of Canada, Canadian Heritage Information Network, Treasury Board of Canada), IT companies, financial institutions (banks, insurance companies), manufacturing companies, law firms, school boards, nonprofit organizations and religious organizations.
Knowlege Management
Practice settings
Knowledge Management (KM) is the systematic management of an organization’s knowledge resources – those found in people and those found in documents, databases, and other repositories of valuable content. KM specialists work in a wide variety of settings including consulting, pharmaceutical, financial institutions in the private sector, government agencies and departments and in the non-profit sector (arts, volunteer organizations). Higher education institutions have also started to employ KM managers specializing in the areas of knowledge taxonomies and communities of practice.
Primary responsibilities
Knowledge managers are involved in both human resource and information technology required to help share and preserve knowledge. An example is succession planning to ensure knowledge is transferred to new employees and to ensure its input into the organizational memory system. Responsibilities involve the design and management of KM systems, and the knowledge asset management to support organizational goals and to gain and maintain competitive and innovative advantage. This includes the design of corporate information and KM policies on access and quality control, maintenance of proprietary information and mapping intellectual assets. KM also involves training, coaching, mentoring, communities of practice start-up and lifecycle support, and incorporating feedback into training content such as best practices and lessons learned. KM specialists may help users to gather, evaluate, analyze, synthesize and summarize as well as to advise and guide on knowledge sources (explicit content and experts). They may also manage the competitive intelligence cycle and related assignments.
Examples of job titles
Knowledge managers, knowledge journalists, knowledge taxonomists, ontologists, content editor/managers, portal managers, community of practice (CoP) librarians, knowledge support officer (KSO) team members, and competitive intelligence specialists.
Potential employers
Publishers, database creators and providers, press/mass media, information collectors such as Reuters, database vendors such as DIALOG, networks, service providers, consulting firms; IT companies; information organizations, access and preservation units e.g., corporate libraries, research libraries, other special libraries such as hospital libraries; research and information-gathering units, competitive intelligence units; governmental agencies; intelligence community; law firms, medical and pharmaceutical companies, large scientific agencies.
Librarianship
Practice settings
Librarians work in a great variety of settings. From an academic institution (schools, colleges, universities), or a public environment (municipalities, hospitals, government agencies and departments) to the private sector (corporations, law firms, research centres), librarians are employed as information professionals.
Primary responsibilities
Librarians are expert at mediating access to the vast amount of information available in order to respond to their clients/library users needs. Responsibilities comprise the management (identification, retrieval, organization, and dissemination) of information in all formats (electronic/digital, audio/video, print. More specifically, according to the clientele being served, librarians provide access to a wide array of information sources. They organize their intellectual contents through various cataloguing and classification processes, conduct reference interviews and offer training information sessions in order to facilitate the linkage between the information sources and the client.
Examples of job titles
Academic librarians, business information specialists, cataloguers, health sciences librarians, indexer/abstracters, information architects, law librarians, public librarians, special librarians, and youth services public librarians.
Potential employers
Universities, municipal libraries, school boards, government agencies (Business Development Bank of Canada, National Film Board of Canada, Library and Archives Canada) and government departments (Fisheries and Ocean Canada, Justice Canada), the Business Sector (Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Alcan, SNC Lavalin, KPMG) to name a few.
SIS-JOBS listserv
SIS-JOBS list is a moderated mailing list maintained by the School for posting jobs in North America for graduates and students of the McGill School of Information Studies.
Click through for instructions on subscribing or emailing jobs to the list.
Career Fair
Established in 2003, the McGill SIS Career Fair is a major recruiting and networking event held every spring and organized by the students of McGill University's School of Information Studies (SIS).
The Career Fair is an event that gives library, archive and business employers from in and around Quebec the chance to showcase their career opportunities and summer employment positions to talented students and upcoming graduates of the MLIS programs at McGill and other participating institutions.
Are you an employer or student looking for more information on the Fair? Please visit the McGill SIS Career Fair 2014 site.
McGill CaPS
Access services tailored to graduate students, including 1-on-1 consultations with Graduate Career Advisors and CV drop-in sessions through the McGill Career Planning Service (CaPS). Visit the CaPS Masters & PhDs page for more information.
Did you know? Full CaPS services are available to alumni one year after graduation, and for a small fee for two years thereafter. Alumni have lifetime access to the "myFuture" job search and career tools suite free of charge.
Job search links
- University of Toronto FIS JobSite
- University of Western Ontario FIMS JobWeb
- CLA Job Search
- SLA Career Center
- SLA Eastern Chapter Jobs
- ALA JobLIST - primarily US
- Association of Research Libraries Job Announcements - Canada & US
- Society for Applied Learning Technology (SALT) Jobs Board - US
- METRO Job Search: Metropolitan New York Library Council Job Bank - US
More employment links can be found on the CLA and SLA Student Chapter pages on the SIS Student Associations website.
