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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][/quote]

Yep, former librarian here. I was lucky enough to land a job right out of library school, but the pay is ridiculously low and the chance of advancement is just depressing. I cannot stress how much of my masters program (which I otherwise enjoyed!) was focusing on the crummy job market. People keep saying that there is going to be a massive retirement wave, but that hasn't happened. I really enjoyed the digital aspects of the job but was constantly finding that any training I wanted had to be done on my own time (and budget). And I got tired of justifying my job.

Also, the glass escalator effect is terrible, so if you are a woman looking to advance you have that working against you as well!

Oh, and why did I become a librarian? Simple...because both my parents were lawyers and they spent my entire childhood complaining, ha. [/quote]

Library school?? Never heard of it. What would you learn by getting a librarian degree. Not trying to make fun but seriously interested in learning. [/quote]

Most professional librarians have Master's degrees.  "Library school" is where they get these degrees.  They study:
How to catalog books and materials so people can find them.
How to index materials for online databases so people can find them
How to create searches so that they can find answers to specific questions or create comprehensive literatures searches, all in the most time- and cost-efficient ways possible (You can easily rack up bills of $1,000s of dollars on a single question on WestLaw if you don't know what you're doing.)
How to teach people (whether children or adults) how to conduct their own searches
Learning to discern--and teaching other to discern--what are accurate and unbiased information sources
How to choose the books and other resources that meets the needs of their unique community.  
How to budget and plan 
For children's librarians, literacy and reading comprehension are topics.  For law librarians, basic legal research.  For public librarians, dealing with challenging populations like the homeless.

A lot of library school is practical, but there is quite a bit of theory and intellectual thought, particularly in areas like censorship, diversity and information bias.

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