Job Hunters Find Library Takes Its Work Seriously

So, did you find anything promising in the classifieds?

If you’re like the 5.7% of Orange County residents who are unemployed, that’s what you probably turned to first. The Angels, Dear Abby and Calvin and Hobbes can wait. You need a job.

But the world of gainful employment--and job searching--isn’t what it used to be. The want ads and the headhunters are still there, but what happens if you’ve been laid off and you’re out there looking for a job for the first time in 20 years? What if you’re fresh out of college and not yet plugged into a particular career network?

What if you’re still in high school and don’t have a clue what you’d like to do or where you’d like to go to college to learn how? Or maybe you’re a veteran of the rat race who wants to chuck it and start something new.

Seldom in the last few decades has the employment atmosphere been so filled with zinging curve balls. Where, you wonder, can you go for help in sorting out the fantasy from the facts and getting your job search firmly on the rails?

One answer may surprise you: the same place you’ve always gone when you wanted to unearth a big body of information. The library.

More specifically, the Orange County Public Library’s regional branch in Garden Grove. There, senior reference librarian Laura Masoner and her staff oversee the library’s Career Center, an extensive collection of printed and electronic resources designed to help you decide on the kind of job you want and start you on the road to getting it.

“Every time we look over at the (Career Center) table there are a few people sitting over there,” said Masoner. “We’ve been getting anywhere from 20 to 50 people a day. It’s been very popular, and we’re getting $10,000 a year just to update the materials. We would buy 24 copies of each (how-to) resume book. We can never have enough of those in the library.

There are even waiting lists for books such as “What Color Is Your Parachute?,” the best-selling career-changers guide.

The Garden Grove branch is the Career Center pilot project among Orange County Public Library branches. Several other branches--possibly as many as eight--will be getting smaller versions of the center by fall, said Masoner, “although they won’t have as many toys as we have.”

Most of the collection, she said, “is geared to helping people who either want to re-enter the job market if they’ve been laid off, or people whose families are grown and want to enter the market for the first time, or others who want to set themselves up in business or make career changes. There are so many people who have worked 20 years with a company and then have gotten laid off and who haven’t done any job hunting since their college days. They find that the world’s changed out there.”

But it’s changed at the library, too. Rather than a handful of vague or general job-search manuals, the Garden Grove branch has several hundred sources in print, 90% of which can be checked out, said Masoner. In fact, she said, many books that are considered standard reference in other libraries--and therefore on the non-circulating list--were purchased in multiple quantities for Garden Grove so that they might be checked out as the demand grew.

There are between 20 and 30 different books devoted to the single subject of writing a resume, which, said Masoner, “is your ticket everywhere these days, and you need to know how to do it.” Also in the circulating collection are books on such esoteric subjects as overseas jobs, “How to Succeed as an Independent Consultant,” “Opportunities in Sports and Athletics,” “How to Get a Headhunter to Call,” “Mail Order on the Kitchen Table,” and even a book on job opportunities for songwriters.

In the extensive periodical collection are such unexpected but valuable publications as the “California Job Journal,” “Federal Jobs Digest” and “Business Employment Weekly,” all of which list specific public and private sector job openings. Also popular among periodicals, said Masoner, are “Career Opportunity Update,” which “talks about individual corporations, what they’re recruiting in and where the opportunities are,” and Technical and Business Career Opportunities”--”a real hot item,” according to Masoner.

Want to work out of your home? Try the periodical “National Home Business Report.” It tells you “how to set up a business at home, how to do mail order and how to write it off,” said Masoner.

The print sources go on and on: how to apply for scholarships and grants, how to write grant proposals, how to assemble a business plan. There is even one source--the California Appointments List--that contains 10,000 pages listing appointments available through the state, most of them honorary.

“If you want to be on the Peach Advisory Board for $1 a year, it’s in there,” said Masoner.

And many of the print sources, she said, are supplemented or complemented by video or audio tapes.

The collection, said Masoner, has been “up and running for about two years. The Santa Ana Public Library very actively set up job postings in ’86 and it got bigger and bigger. Then this whole concept of a job center that should be more than just a posting of jobs emerged. We started planning the collection, and we were given a nice budget to do it with.”

The library studied similar programs on the East Coast before implementing it here, said Linda Smoker, a reference librarian at the Garden Grove regional branch.

The two most prominent items in the Garden Grove toy box are a pair of computers. The first is designed to run a program called Resume Writer, which shows the user how to do exactly that, plus compose a proper cover letter.

Armed with a pre-formatted five-inch floppy disk (preferably one you bring with you) “you can sit down, having never done a computer program before, having never written a resume, and just fill in the blanks,” said Masoner. “It’ll print your resume out in page format.”

The second computer is intended mainly for students choosing careers or for others who are thinking of changing careers, said Masoner. It runs a program called VIEW--Vital Information for Education and Work.

And it is a lot of information. Let’s say you want to be an aircraft mechanic. From that simple declaration, the computer will cross-reference sources that will tell you what tests you’ll want to take to determine your aptitude for the job, the level of education you’re likely to need, where that education is available, what kind of salary and career advancement you can expect in the current climate, what the latest employment outlook is, what related jobs are available in the civilian and military spheres, working conditions, level of physical strength you’ll need, contacts, and how to apply.

You can even formulate your own career menu even if you haven’t decided on a specific job. Just enter such things as the sort of working conditions and starting salary you’d like, the sort of education you expect to have, and several other variables (want to work with people, thrive on deadlines, etc.), and the computer will spit out a list of jobs that fit those criteria, as well as complete descriptions of each job.

“It does all that for hundreds of careers,” said Masoner. “It’s lots of fun.”

The program performs the same function for students searching for colleges. Want to major in social work at an Eastern religious school with a small teacher-to-student ratio and you want the tuition to remain below the Donald Trump level? Enter all that “and the school, or schools, will pop up,” said Masoner.

And if it all gets a bit dizzying, you can even decompress by scanning the library’s copies of the Wall Street Journal and the local classifieds. They’re there, too.