Workplace Study (October 16, 2012)

Abstract

Qualitative findings are presented about the information-seeking behavior of today’s college graduates as they transition from the campus to the workplace. Included are findings from interviews with 23 US employers and focus groups with 33 recent graduates from four US colleges and universities, conducted as an exploratory study for Project Information Literacy’s (PIL’s) Passage Studies. Most graduates in our focus groups said they found it difficult to solve information problems in the workplace, where unlike college, a sense of urgency pervaded and where personal contacts often reaped more useful results than online searches. Graduates said they leveraged essential information competencies from college for extracting content and also developed adaptive information-seeking strategies for reaching out to trusted colleagues in order to compensate for what they lacked. At the same time, employers said they recruited graduates, in part, for their online searching skills but still expected and needed more traditional research competencies, such as thumbing through bound reports, picking up the telephone, and interpreting research results with team members. They found that their college hires rarely demonstrated these competencies. Overall, our findings suggest there is a distinct difference between today’s graduates who demonstrated how quickly they found answers online and seasoned employers who needed college hires to use a combination of online and traditional methods to conduct comprehensive research.

Preferred citation format: Alison J. Head (October 16, 2012), Learning curve: How students solve information problems once they join the workplace, Project Information Literacy Research Institute, https://projectinfolit.org/publications/workplace-study/

Media coverage

• “The new knowledge worker”: A Radio Berkman podcast interview with Alison Head at Harvard’s Berkman Center with David Weinberger, March 14, 2013 (18:51 minutes).
• “Can the digital generation do anything right?” Jason Tomassini, Education Week, November 12, 2012.
• “Search people, not the internet,” Justin Reich, EdTech Researcher, Education Week, November 12, 2012.
• “Thrown a curve: Our anti-social graduates at work,” Barbara Fister, Peer to Peer Review, Library Journal, October 18, 2012.
• “Project Information Literacy: Inventing the workplace,” Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Education, October 15, 2012.

Related PIL resources

• “Posing the million-dollar question: What happens after graduation?” Alison J. Head, Journal of Information Literacy, June 5, 2017, Vol. 11, No. 1: 80-90 (10 pages).
• “At sea in a deluge of data,” Alison Head and John Wihbey, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 7, 2014.
• “What information competencies matter in today’s workplace?” Alison J. Head, Michele Van Hoeck, Jordan Eschler, and Sean Fullerton, Library and Information Research, May 2013, vol. 37, no. 114: 75 – 104 (29 pages).
• Alison J. Head, Old-school job skills you won’t find on Google, The Seattle Times, December 8, 2012.
• “Information literacy skills in the workplace,” Cristina Colquhoun and Holly Luetkenhaus, Oklahoma State University (OK), Practical PIL, posted: April 27, 2020.