Shush-Free Zone - Where librarians get loud!
Sep 4, 2026 · 36 min · 10 segments
In this episode of Shush-Free Zone, host Dawn Brushammar talks with Alison King, career coach, founder of King Career Services, and creator of Leaping Librarians. Alison shares her own journey from…
Alison KingGuest
Dawn BrushammarHost
keep coming back to about Leaping Librarians and the people that I talk to about this particular skill set is why do librarians struggle to recognize the value of their skills outside of libraries? And I think that's something that you probably help your career services clients with a lot, translating these particular library skills into non-library settings.
is we're not good at talking about what we do and part of that is that this is in my opinion a very mission-driven sort of field a lot of people get into libraries because they feel passionate about helping their community or sharing information or you know those types of things so a lot of times we revert to we we talk about in terms of what we as a library do what we as a team do and not so much focusing on the individual so that's Part of the struggle is just getting people to tell me like, no, but what did you do? I know you were part of a team, but what did you do in that role that made that library better, more efficient, whatever positive outcome? So that's part of it.
And then we can get into translating the skills based on what they're going for next, because we could translate skills all day into corporate speak, but Really, you need to know where you're headed and have a target job in mind in order to speak the language of that specific field and to understand the context in which you'd be working.
That, you know, engagement in a public library is very different and measured differently than engagement in a corporate setting.
Some of my favorite transitions that I can think of recently, one was a middle and upper school librarian at a private school.
She networked the heck out of things, joined a local chapter of the Law Library Association, and she did it.
There was another one who was a children's librarian, and she became a Freedom of Information Act officer for a large city.
And then there's been some exciting ones like an adult services librarian who became a prospect researcher for a hospital system.
So she's helping with their fundraising by identifying donors and keeping track of all those things.
So there are lots of exciting places we can go if we know how to first identify our individual contributions, second, translate it, and then make the transition.
What are some of these librarian skills that you use in that copy editor portion of your work?
That really came from a passion since middle school of just like, I loved grammar.
keep coming back to about Leaping Librarians and the people that I talk to about this particular skill set is why do librarians struggle to recognize the value of their skills outside of libraries? And I think that's something that you probably help your career services clients with a lot, translating these particular library skills into non-library settings.
is we're not good at talking about what we do and part of that is that this is in my opinion a very mission-driven sort of field a lot of people get into libraries because they feel passionate about helping their community or sharing information or you know those types of things so a lot of times we revert to we we talk about in terms of what we as a library do what we as a team do and not so much focusing on the individual so that's Part of the struggle is just getting people to tell me like, no, but what did you do? I know you were part of a team, but what did you do in that role that made that library better, more efficient, whatever positive outcome? So that's part of it.
And then we can get into translating the skills based on what they're going for next, because we could translate skills all day into corporate speak, but Really, you need to know where you're headed and have a target job in mind in order to speak the language of that specific field and to understand the context in which you'd be working.
That, you know, engagement in a public library is very different and measured differently than engagement in a corporate setting.
Some of my favorite transitions that I can think of recently, one was a middle and upper school librarian at a private school.
She networked the heck out of things, joined a local chapter of the Law Library Association, and she did it.
There was another one who was a children's librarian, and she became a Freedom of Information Act officer for a large city.
And then there's been some exciting ones like an adult services librarian who became a prospect researcher for a hospital system.
So she's helping with their fundraising by identifying donors and keeping track of all those things.
So there are lots of exciting places we can go if we know how to first identify our individual contributions, second, translate it, and then make the transition.
What are some of these librarian skills that you use in that copy editor portion of your work?
That really came from a passion since middle school of just like, I loved grammar.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
