Making information literacy relevant in employment settings. 1. InformAll is a coalition that promotes the value of information and research data literacy in higher education and beyond. 2. It provides networking opportunities and expertise to help advance these skills. 3. Recent work has investigated how information literacy is perceived by employers and found it is important but often not explicitly recognized.

1. 1
Making information literacy relevant
in employment settings
Stéphane Goldstein – Research Information Network / InformAll
Charlie Inskip – University College London / InformAll
Jane Secker – London School of Economics and Political Science / InformAll /
CILIP IL Group
Geoff Walton – Northumbria University / InformAll / CILIP IL Group
LILAC2015
University of Newcastle – 9 April 2015

2. • A coalition of partners working together to promote the value of information and
research data literacy in HE and beyond
• A collectively-run programme to enable activities which help to advance LIS
knowledge and skills
• Grant-funded by Higher Education Funding Council for England until early 2015,
managed by the Research Information Network
• Changed its name from RIDLs June 2014
Important premise:
• Partners not limited to the library world: others players have a stake!
• Important to build a network that capitalises on different outlooks
• Academic librarians, data management specialists, career & professional development
experts, information sciences researchers… and now reaching out to stakeholders
beyond academia
What is InformAll?
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3. InformAll programme 2014
• Providing networking opportunities and collective source of
expertise for its members
• Criteria for describing, reviewing & assessing training interventions
• Information literacy and employment: investigating how IL is
perceived by players at the interface between HE and employment
– Basis for widening the dialogue about IL to sectors where information literacy is less well
recognised
• International engagement
– ECIL, UNESCO, IFLA, European Commission…
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4. Some recent developments on IL and employment
• Report on IL as a transferable attribute for individuals moving from HE into employment
(Goldstein, 2014)
– Views from sample of players at the interface between HE and employers: careers advisers, professional bodies,
accreditation agencies, employers, trade unions and other employment-related bodies
• Annotated bibliography on IL in the workplace (Williams, Cooper and Wavell, 2014)
• Literature review on IL as an attribute of employability (Inskip, 2014)
• Roundtable on information competencies in the workplace, organised jointly by CILIP and
InformAll, March 2015
• New project on the value of IL for employers, commissioned by the CILIP IL Group and
undertaken by InformAll in association with the University Manchester, March-June 2015
• This work reflects an emerging dialogue between interlocutors at the interface between HE
and employment to consider jointly how IL relates to their policies and practices
How might we capitalise on this work?
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6. Three overlapping questions to consider
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• What are the purpose and merits of engaging
with stakeholders at the interface between higher
education and employment with regards to IL?
• What are the best practical ways of engaging with
these stakeholders, in a way that makes IL
relevant to their needs and priorities – and do
some of them warrant particular attention?
• What role can be played by the CILIP IL Group,
InformAll and other interested parties in moving
this agenda forward?
The following factors might help with addressing these questions

7. IL is relevant to employment settings…
…even if not recognised explicitly
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“Librarians, college educators and accrediting agencies are placing increased
emphasis on promoting the development of information literacy skills in their
students. At the same time, the business community has acknowledged the
importance of the “knowledge worker”. The problem is that corporations do not
yet formally recognize information literacy as a core competency for their
workers, even though these same corporations do in practice require information
literacy skills on the job”
Klusek and Bornstein, 2006
This was true nine years ago, and it probably still is…

8. Information literacy by another name
On the basis of annotated bibliography by Williams, Cooper and Wavell (2014)
• Workplace IL places an emphasis on:
– social, informal, contextualised processing of information
– the transformation of information into knowledge
– information creation, packaging, and organisation
– data sharing
• In the workplace, people are key information sources; information processing
is a shared activity
• Differences from how IL is viewed in HE
– less emphasis on search skills and finding information
– relatively little use of libraries
– no need for everyone to have all IL skills (because, as suggested above, different aspects of
information processing are shared between employees with different responsibilities)
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9. Business challenges that might
be addressed by IL
• Business communications
• Workplace learning
• Dealing with information overload
• Coping with uncertainties
• Decision-making
• Ensuring evidence-based practice
Scholarly literature in recent years suggests
that all these factors are influenced by IL
in the workplace
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10. The value of information literacy to businesses?
• Operational efficiency and business opportunities, through the promotion of
company-wide knowledge creation, sharing and using
• Underpinning important workplace processes, including information processing,
information/records management, R&D, professional ethics/code of conduct
• Organisational competitiveness and profitability, through:
– the competence to use information effectively
– a strategic approach to information
• Success in the marketplace, through recognising the impact and significance of
accurate and timely information
• Critical business value, through the fostering among staff of confidence and
competence in interacting with information
• Conversely, lack of IL has a significant financial cost, through time wasted as a
result of inefficient information search strategies
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11. Some thoughts from the recent roundtable
Roundtable in March: players from different communities, including employers
and careers advisers, considered the relevance of IL to their policies, strategies
and practices; and how to promote that relevance in the workplace. Some
suggestions from the discussion:
• Curate existing good practice resources
• Develop case studies for individuals and organisations
• Associate IL with cybersecurity, for which there are often clear expectations
• Find ways of advocating for IL
• Integrate IL into school curriculum, alongside digital literacy
• Adapt CILIP PKSB (Professional Knowledge and Skill Base) for workplace
Can we add to that list?
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12. Digital literacy: a means of promoting IL?
• Digital literacy and skills increasingly recognised as a policy issue over the
past year:
– UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Strategy (April 2014)
– UK Digital Taskforce report, Digital Skills for Tomorrow’s World (July 2014)
– House of Commons report on Responsible Use of Data (November 2014)
– Go ON UK’s definition of digital skills (2014)
– House of Lords report on the UK’s Digital Future (February 2015)
– and at a European level, Framework for Digital Competence, under the auspices of
the European Commission (Ferrari, 2013)
• Digital literacy often perceived by policymakers as a ‘tecchie’ issue: ICT skills,
computing skills, coding… This perception needs to be corrected!
• Digital literacy overlaps with IL, and because of its currency, perhaps it can
be used as a vehicle for carrying messages about IL
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14. So let’s return to our three questions…
• What are the purpose and merits of engaging with stakeholders at the
interface between higher education and employment with regards to IL?
• What are the best practical ways of engaging with these stakeholders, in a
way that makes IL relevant to their needs and priorities – and do some of
them warrant particular attention?
• What role can be played by the CILIP IL Group, InformAll and other
interested parties in moving this agenda forward?
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15. References
• Ferrari, A., 2013. A Framework for Developing and Understanding Digital Competence in Europe. Joint Research Centre, for the
European Commission. Available at http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC83167.pdf
• Go ON UK, 2014. Basic Digital Skills Definition. Available at http://www.go-on.co.uk/basic-digital-skills/
• Goldstein, S., 2014. Transferring information know-how – Information literacy at the interface between higher education and
employment. InformAll. Available at http://www.researchinfonet.org/infolit/ridls/transferable-skills/transferable-il/
• HM Government (Cabinet Office), 2014. Digital Inclusion Strategy. Available at
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-digital-inclusion-strategy/government-digital-inclusion-strategy
• House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, 2014. Responsible Use of Data. Available at
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmsctech/245/24502.htm
• House of Lords Select Committee on Digital Skills, 2015. Make or Break: the UK’s Digital Future. Available at
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/digital-skills-committee/news/report-
published/
• Inskip, I., 2014. Information literacy is for life, not just for a good degree: a literature review. CILIP. Available at
http://www.cilip.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/IL%20in%20the%20workplace%20literature%20review%20Dr%20C%20I
nskip%20June%202014.%20doc.pdf
• Klusek, L. and Bornstein, J., 2006. Information literacy skills for business careers. Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship,
11(4), pp. 3-21. Abstract at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J109v11n04_02#.VRQH_-G2rGw
• UK Digital Skills Taskforce, 2014. Digital Skills for Tomorrow’s World (interim report). Available at
http://policy.bcs.org/sites/policy.bcs.org/files/Interim%20report.pdf
• Williams, D., Cooper, K and Wavell, C., 2014. Information Literacy in the Workplace: an annotated bibliography. Robert Gordon
University Institute for Management, Governance & Society (IMaGeS) in association with InformAll. Available at:
http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Workplace-IL-annotated-bibliography.pdf
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16. Thank you for taking part!
Interested in joining InformAll? Go to
www.informall.org.uk - #informall
Stéphane Goldstein – stephane.goldstein@researchinfonet.org
Charlie Inskip – c.inskip@ucl.ac.uk
Jane Secker – j.secker@lse.ac.uk
Geoff Walton – geoff.walton@northumbria.ac.uk
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