MLIS x 2, what to do?

August 12, 2011 12:38 PM

Two people, one career field. How feasible is this?

Long ago, I decided to become a librarian. Met a guy who decided he wanted to become an archivist. Married said guy. $40,000 later, we have the same degree but only he has a career right now.

I have quite a bit of good paraprofessional experience under my belt; husband now has moved past entry-level positions. When he interviewed for his current position, he was assured that they look out for spouses and try to get them into professional positions for which they are qualified. 2 1/2 years later, I'm still waiting.

I love being a librarian. I'm good at it. I also love my husband. I no longer am satisfied with working as a paraprofessional to get by. Have any of you been in a similar position? I'd be especially interested to hear your experiences if you're in our field (but I welcome comments from anyone). How did you manage? Did one of you end up going into a different field? (For the past 7 years, I've only worked in libraries). Did you have to do a LDR for awhile? Has it worked out in the end? Thank you in advance.


tl;dr: How have you made your career and relationship work when you're both in the same (fairly saturated) field?

posted by sugarbomb to Work & Money (18 answers total)

So what exactly is the problem? Is it a jealousy thing? If he already has a job, then surely you aren't competing for the same positions, so it's not that. If it is just that there are not many jobs in your field in your area, and you feel like you need to be geographically flexible, but he doesn't want to relocate, then that has nothing to do with being in the same field, that's just a general working married couple problem.

My wife and I work in the same field (veterinary medicine) but in completely different parts of it (she's a tech, I'm in client service/administration). Maybe getting into a different specialization is a way to minimize your conflict?
posted by Rock Steady at 12:43 PM on August 12, 2011

My marriage is not like this, but my brother's is. He and his wife both have PhDs in psychology. They have specialized in different areas (brother teaches, sister in law does clinical practice) and they live in a place where there are jobs available for both of them.

On preview, exactly what Rock Steady suggests.
posted by jon1270 at 12:48 PM on August 12, 2011

I know a librarian/librarian couple but different specialities. They both found professional jobs in libraries - one had to go to another library to get a professional job but I believe the other was promoted from a para position, but they live in a metro area with a lot of libraries (corporate, public, academic, law, etc). How big is your market so to speak?

I am not married but am a librarian that works in a non-library setting. I use most of my reference librarian skills on a daily basis. I encourage peopel to look at non-library options if they think they would like it.
posted by pointystick at 12:48 PM on August 12, 2011

Libraries aren't the only place you can work (as I'm sure you know, but it bears repeating). I know a lot of law librarians, data managers, even online course designers who have your background.

If you have an MLIS, you can also get into many other positions that require either an academic background or a master's/terminal degree. Many academic positions, such as advising, department or grants management, student services, etc. could use your expertise.
posted by Madamina at 12:49 PM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

Agreeing with Rock Steady that we need some clarification as to why your husband's degree is affecting your career. You mentioned having to have a long distance relationship, so is it all about moving vs staying put?
posted by soelo at 12:50 PM on August 12, 2011

Mr. BuffaloChickenWing and I are in similar fields (engineering). We have worked at the same company 2x. Twice now we have received layoff notices from the two separate companies. It is now a "rule" that we do not work for the same company and/or in the same industry.

It is a hard rule to follow because typically the conversation at a company we work for goes from - we are looking for someone - to ..."oh, your husband is an engineer?" We also found conversations at dinner are more pleasant now because we are not talking about work anymore.

He is a stay-at-home Dad now running our small business.

Perhaps you could work for a large company that has an internal library and he could work for a university library?
posted by BuffaloChickenWing at 12:52 PM on August 12, 2011

Like Rock Steady, I don't quite understand the problem. If you were both looking for work and, therefore, competing for the same positions then I can understand how this might cause tension in the relationship. It sounds to me like your problem has very little to do with working in the same field as your husband and more to do with the fact that you're (maybe) jealous that he is working in his chosen field and you aren't.

If you're having trouble finding work in public/academic libraries then BuffaloChickenWing's suggestion of looking for a job with a large company that has an internal library/archive sounds like a good one. You may also try getting a job at the government. They typically need someone to manage their libraries and/or archives.
posted by asnider at 12:55 PM on August 12, 2011

I had a teacher in high school who was himself also married to a teacher in my same school system, and he stated once that he believed that you should always marry someone in your field "because your brains both deteriorate in exactly the same way."

I understand your concerns about both of you being in a highly competitive field, but since your husband's all settled in with a job already, I'm not sure that your being married to each other would affect your own job search in the same field. The odds of you both someday being candidates for the exact identical position seem somewhat remote, despite this plot coming up a lot in situation comedies.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:56 PM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

I work with an archivist who is married to a gov docs librarian. They've moved about and both been able to find jobs in their fields. It sounds like the problem specific to your situation is that you've never had a professional position before, and when library jobs are as scarce as they are these days, I imagine newbies are getting overlooked for more experienced librarians. Hell, I've got a few year under my belt and took a job about a year ago requiring an MLS and paying $7.25 an hour! Have you considered working part-time, or volunteering to be a librarian somewhere? The field is so competitive that having anything on your resume saying "Librarian" is always a good thing. As an aside, that $7.25/hour job I took helped me get a more legit job, which turned into something full-time within six months. Good luck!! It's a tough time for lots of us.
posted by jabes at 12:58 PM on August 12, 2011

Response by poster: To clarify:

This is a problem for me because it seems like I have to choose between having the career I want, and living with my husband. I want both. So far, we have not been able to do that successfully, but we are looking in much bigger markets now (we live in a smallish college town. I know, that's not helping our problem). I'm looking for tales of how people have managed. It sounds like some people have made this work, so it's good to know that we may not be doomed to a lifetime of trading satisfaction in our careers.

jabes--you're right, my limited professional experience isn't helping. I held a temporary professional position right after I graduated, but then the economy really tanked and they instituted a hiring freeze and didn't renew any contracts.

Thank you all.
posted by sugarbomb at 1:04 PM on August 12, 2011

Best answer: This is a problem for me because it seems like I have to choose between having the career I want, and living with my husband. I want both. So far, we have not been able to do that successfully, but we are looking in much bigger markets now (we live in a smallish college town. I know, that's not helping our problem).

Well, this is the problem then, and it has nothing to do with working in the same field, it's just a consequence of having both members of a couple who work in fields where one has to be willing to move for the right job. In my previous career, this was very much the case, and since my wife could get a job anywhere, she followed me around for a little bit. If she had worked in a much more specialized field, that could have been a problem.

Your options for this situation are basically:

1. Live apart. I've known several couples who have done this for varying lengths of time. It has worked out for them, but I think you have to be the right kind of person in the right kind of relationship for this to be feasible. It would not be possible for my wife and I, for example. Only you can know if you and your marriage can handle such a thing.

2. Sacrifice your career. This is what I did once I realized I did not want to drag my family around the country chasing jobs. It is a hard thing to do, and -- again -- may not be something you are capable of doing if you are going to remain happy and content. After seeing how easy it was for my wife to get jobs in her field, I decided to switch to that field and I have not regretted it for a minute.

3. Move together. This is complicated, because it requires you to both be job hunting in a new area at the same time, while you find a place to live and all that. One thing that can make this easier (and I have seen some couples do) is have one member of the couple go back to school for an advanced degree in the new area while the other person works. In Library Science this may not be as feasible as it is in other fields, due to the limited number of programs that you might want to go to for further education. The important thing about this option is that it requires you both to be committed to the move. If your husband is going to dig in his heels about staying put, this option becomes vastly more difficult.

The first step, I think, is to have a serious discussion with your husband about these options, and see if you can find a way to agree on one of them.
posted by Rock Steady at 1:20 PM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

Echoing Rock Steady's third point, it looks like you're in Laramie -- have you guys considered moving to Cheyenne? He would have a commute of maybe an hour, but your job market would open up a lot, including Boulder, Fort Collins, northern Denver. A long commute for you too, of course, but lots of people commute an hour or more each way. And after a few years you'd probably have gained enough experience to be looked at more closely when applying for local gigs, or he might be able to find something closer to where you work.
posted by jabes at 1:27 PM on August 12, 2011

I am a librarian who is married to a librarian of relatively the same vintage. We've worried about this too, but we've also managed pretty well. At the moment, we're both academic librarians at different schools in the same smallish city. Before that, she was a public librarian and I was an academic librarian and we both worked for the same giant city.

I'm not saying it was easy either time, but I have heard waaaaaay worse horror stories from professor friends and folks in other fields. When we first moved to our current city, she was unemployed for quite a while, but was able to pick up small teaching job (with only the MLS-- teaching research skills at a small business college) and part time reference work at the academic library that eventually hired her full-time. She also had an opportunity to work as a substitute public librarian, but it never came to that. Within a year, she was full time again.

There are also other librarian couples where I work, and the one that seems to have the best of luck with jobs is the one where the wife is a librarian and the husband is an archivist. In an academic setting, there seem to always be project archivists being hired, and after a few project jobs, this archivist husband became a full-time employee at the wife's institution.

In another case, a librarian in my library's librarian wife works as a freelance indexer, and a has done proxy research in our library's special collections for folks in other countries.

There are actually a few more cases I could describe, but I think you get the point. It might not be easy, or immediate, but it really is quite possible to both have fulfilling jobs in the same place. Feel free to memail me if you have specific questions about any of this, in the course of our most recent move, we tried everything.
posted by activitystory at 1:48 PM on August 12, 2011

Echoing Rock Steady's third point, it looks like you're in Laramie

Heh. One of the reasons I left my previous career was that one of my grad school classmates took a job in Cheyenne, and I was like, well, there is no way in hell we are moving to Wyoming, so maybe I need to rethink some things.
posted by Rock Steady at 1:55 PM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

Librarian here. Not in the same situation as you, but had to leave a great town to get a full-time MLS-related job three years ago. Since then I've also applied to several other positions in different parts of the country, and as you know, it's a tough job market out there for us.

Based on what you've said, my advice is not to live apart. It only works for some couples, and like you, I know it wouldn't work for me and my partner. Forget about working in the same system as your husband, and consider Rock Steady's options 2 and 3.

The ironic thing is, since our salaries tend to be so dismal relative to our education, you'd be hard-pressed to make less money in another field.
posted by Rykey at 1:58 PM on August 12, 2011

Best answer: I'm a grad student with staying-in-academia aspirations and have been worrying about this problem a lot lately. My two most recent relationships ended at least in part because of our worries over "how will we ever make both of our careers work at once?". So I totally sympathize.

Although it's aimed at dual-academic couples, I think you'd probably find some reading of interest on this website:

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/careerprep/jobsearch/dualcareer.html

It's a compilation of links to other websites and essays and such, with brief descriptions of each so you should be able to get a sense of which will be relevant to you. It sounds like you've ended up as the "trailing spouse" in your marriage; as I recall the most interesting things I found through that website were some frank discussions of the hard realities of being a trailing spouse.

Is there any chance that he might be able to put some pressure on those people who promised to look out for his spouse when they hired him? Is he easily replaceable, or would his boss(es) prefer to keep him around? In the latter case, he may have some amount of leverage. If he starts mentioning casually that regretfully he may soon be forced to relocate if you can't find a job, maybe all of a sudden they'll be needing a new entry-level librarian...
posted by ootandaboot at 4:39 PM on August 12, 2011

As others have identified, the fundamental problem seems to be that you're two people with pretty specialised skills and there aren't enough jobs in your area – the fact that you both have exactly the same skills is a little tangential (but also undoubtably makes you feel more jealous of your husband's success in the field).

Mrs damonism and I both have PhDs (in different, but related fields), and we've both worked in academia at various points. She now has a job in the private section and makes a lot more money than me, but it's also a position pretty specific to the small city in which we live.

Until very recently I had an academic job that I eventually began to hate (for reasons I won't go into here). Having spent all those years doing a PhD, I wanted to continue working as an academic, but there are only two universities in this city, and neither of them have many positions doing the sort of things I'm interested in.

Mrs D enjoys her job, and we both have no great desire to leave this city, so I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that the most sensible approach was for me to abandon an academic career ("for the time being", I probably said, but the reality is once you're in a position where you aren't publishing, it's bloody hard to get a job further down the track). I spent a bit of time mourning my academic career, but on the whole I'm pretty happy where I am now.

I imagine your choice is ultimately the same as mine was – move where the jobs are, or if you don't want to move, find something else to do. Not that putting it that bluntly makes it any easier, but I think that's what it boils down to.

Actually, all of the above is premised on the assumption that your relationship is more important than your career. It certainly was for me. But that's another variable to consider, I guess.
posted by damonism at 7:45 PM on August 12, 2011

Half of a librarian couple here. Get thee to a city. It's how we did it. If you want to stay in the field, it's what you have to do.
posted by davismbagpiper at 11:06 AM on August 14, 2011