Cadmore media player playing video Career Progression in Academic Publishing: A Skills-Based Approach
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
Career Progression in Academic Publishing: A Skills-Based Approach
Description:
Career Progression in Academic Publishing: A Skills-Based Approach
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/c77130e9-7c60-4558-8217-ba3adf6be048/videoscrubberimages/Scrubber_1.jpg
Duration:
T00H59M20S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/c77130e9-7c60-4558-8217-ba3adf6be048
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/c77130e9-7c60-4558-8217-ba3adf6be048/session_5f__career_progression_in_academic_publishing__a_ski.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=NOYWSgqolEFFCu%2FLYJpaBin8WJqSpZeexV8P%2BSAnZgY%3D&st=2025-04-29T19%3A46%3A53Z&se=2025-04-29T21%3A51%3A53Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2024-12-03T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
130 so let's get started. Just as I start, I just wanted to draw your attention to a Bitly link down at the bottom of the slide here. And also this QR code. And this connects you to the slides, which will, of course, also be available on Hoover. But in case you want you want to be able to look at things more carefully. You might want to copy that down.
I'm Charles Watkinson, I'm director of University of Michigan press and past president of the Association of University presses. And today, we're here to report on a joint initiative between the Society for scholarly publishing and my colleague Kate Heaney has been the co-chair. Kate is there and also and Oh presses and also alpsp and Abigail Barclay from alpsp couldn't make it today but I but they are the third partner.
And we've been working for about 18 months on a project that we're going to introduce to you. Working on a problem and a methodology that you're going to learn about around career progression and career progression from a skills based approach. The colleagues on screen who are going to be presenting will introduce themselves as they start their section. But I would particularly like to call out two new colleagues to publishing.
Kiran Krishnan and Kripa Srinivasan. And I've had the pleasure of working with them and traveling with them today from Ann Arbor. And Kiran and Kripa are here, and they are students from the School of Information, and they just graduated two weeks ago from their undergraduate course. And they'll be talking about a capstone project they did connected to this work, creating an interactive dashboard.
I should point out that both of them have graduated, and so they're now interested in jobs. And I'm trying to I'm trying to persuade them that scholarly publishing is a place for brilliant data scientist to progress into. So anyhow, they're here. Yay so I should also acknowledge somebody else who's been really instrumental in this project, and that's Jack Farrell, and you'll have seen him in the exhibit Hall.
Jack provided a number of the position postings that we used in our analysis. Just some. So here's the SSP code of conduct and the core values, and we asked this question online as a little bit of connection to the topic.
And the question was, how did you fall into the world of scholarly publishing. And I've got 22 answers from you in the audience. Thank you so much. And I'll just read a couple of them, worked on a graduate journal during PhD publishing, looked cool and academia academia adjacent. A job ad in the New York Times circa 1991. Been here ever since.
Moved away from lab work, happened to live near a publishing company. And applied accidentally. Former journalist working in local newspapers and magazines, now in production for a publisher. Connections through friends. My first job after grad school was a feature writer for a small publisher in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, so I think you can see a pattern here, which is very few people started with the idea that they would be a publisher, and that is a situation that many of us who came into publishing in the past faced.
But as you see on the slide here, today's graduates and young professionals are much more intentional about publishing careers that paths into the field are often opaque. So with that, I'm going to pass over to John, who's going to talk a little bit more about that situation. All right. So most of me, but if not John Warren, I'm director of the graduate program in publishing at the George Washington University.
And as Charles said, many of us have fallen into publishing sort of accidentally. I could tell you my story over a drink sometime. A lot of the students coming into our program are interested in publishing. Typically they want to be a Ya editor for Penguin Random House or Simon Schuster. They don't really understand necessarily what scholarly publishing is or what roles there are.
And it is kind of opaque industry. So what we sought out to do with this project is figure out what skills do you need to enter the industry. How do the skills and responsibilities, how do they vary from role to role. How is acquisitions different than production different than marketing. And then within a certain job position or set of skills, what other roles might be similar.
So if you're good at, say, acquisitions, what might be another good role. And then how do the skills and responsibilities change as you go up in the field. So Charles mentioned Jack Farrell. He deals with a lot of high level executive search director level, CEO level. So how do you get there from entry level. How are the skills, different.
So those were what we were looking at to do. Yeah this is not easy right. Where's a Mack when you need one. So one thing that I'm sure you all I'm not telling you anything you don't know here. Job titles in the industry vary greatly from trade to scholarly University presses, but even from one institution to another.
And you'll see a lot of different roles. What they mean. One of the things that I try to educate our students about is all these different positions and what the different roles entail. So sales, there's a lot of different roles from sales assistant business development. Key accounts manager. Sales manager.
Sales director. Marketing sales. Marketing coordinator. Marketing manager. And then. Editorial of course. You have managing editors. Copy editors, acquisitions editors. The publisher.
So from one company to another, one job title might mean a kind of totally different thing. So we set out to analyze these with data analysis that the data people get into and just a bit. And then of course, there's a lot of other roles which exist in publishing and outside publishing, like the business manager or accounting manager, customer service rights and permissions. So as there are many different roles in publishing.
So if you're in a role right now and you might want to get into a different role, this project is to help you decide what the path might be. Is this mine still. Are we going You OK. My name will come up. All right. So, one thing we did for this project is we took a little over 1,000 job descriptions.
Many of these came from Jack Farrell, but many of these came from individuals that submitted them, from other companies that submitted them. And these were. Analyzed from years of experience, what the job function was, what the level was. We looked at everything from entry level up to Director CEO level, what the requirements for the position were, what the relevant skills that were listed.
And we tried to figure out what the skills are relevant for a job. So if, let's say, have really good writing skills. Really good speaking skills. What would be the best role for you in publishing. What skills do you need to have if you want to be a director of a press. What skills do you need to have if you want to be a marketing director.
What if you are in marketing and you want to go to editorial. Are your skills the same. And then as we said before, as I said before, going from entry to mid to senior levels, a lot of the skills are going to be the same, but there's going to be new skills that you'll need. So that was the overall goal of this analysis. And now I'll turn it over I think to Jackie.
Hi, everybody. Nice to meet you. Thanks, John. My name is Jacqueline Lord. I'm SSPs, marketing and operations manager. And for this project, I oversaw our methodology. There are three main sections, and I'm going to do a lot of pointing and there's a lot of detail on my slides, so please bear with me.
Very first thing we did was source job descriptions. And we did that by just asking people to submit job descriptions. Charles mentioned Jack Farrell. They provided a lot of our additional texts, and then we used all of our career progression task force volunteers to take those job descriptions and do some qualitative coding, which looks at text data and turns it into numerical data.
And then after that, we handed it over to some very intelligent, smart grad students who ran it through some iterative Python scripts to clean up the data and what they did, they removed typos. They flagged any time the data was in the wrong category in our forms. Once that was cleaned up, we had a nice clean data set. We anonymized it so that it could go out for public viewing. And then we used it also to create some visualizations and summaries that I'm going to share in a few more slides.
So a short description of how we collected our data. First of all, we had to define scholarly publishing. We tried to define it as broadly as possible. Any profession that involves creating and distributing scholarly materials, books, journals, online media, wherever you were in that process that counted how we got the job descriptions we posted on social media, we sent out press releases. People did word of mouth with their contacts.
Everybody, when they went to various conferences, handed out cards saying, tell us about your job. Let us know what you do for work. So a lot of our job descriptions came from these individual submissions. But then we did have these bulk submissions as well from two organizations. There's two things I want to point out about this data set. The majority of the texts came from publicly available job descriptions rather than internal job descriptions.
Internal job descriptions are often far more detailed and focused on the minutiae of a position. Job descriptions are a little bit more like an advertisement. Here are the highlights. Here's the good stuff, not the nuts and bolts of it. So keep that in mind. And then also because of the contributions from organizations like Jack Farrell, a lot of our data set does skew towards the higher tiers in the track of the profession.
So just keep that in mind as we're going through everything. So qualitative coding very fast rundown. We looked for 15 position attributes. And those are things like how much decision making authority do you have. What area are you working in. Are you in marketing acquisitions editorial. Then we asked about 118 work attributes and I will get into where those came from.
But big groups, those were skill types, leadership styles, contextual knowledge. And we used a very clearly defined code book that allowed our coders to take what was free text, raw text, and translate that into multiple choice data. Ones and zeros that we could then do some good comparisons to. So all of our coders were experienced in the publishing industry.
We had some students from gwu. It was also members of our career progression task force. They were instructed to first read the job description as thoroughly as you can. Don't make any judgments and then go back and using our code form and the code book, turn that data into a bunch of questions as clearly as you can without assuming anything about that information. So, for example, if an acquisitions editor position didn't say anything about reading comprehension, don't code that even though we can assume an editor would need reading comprehension.
So general questions those first 15. Those were things like position title, functional area, product area. So are you in books or journals. And what kind of education do you need. Do you need any education work skills. Those are things like critical thinking, negotiation, data analysis. Knowledge areas are specific areas like do you need to know about English.
Do you need to know about philosophy or chemistry. Work activities. What are you doing. Are you doing data analysis. Are you answering emails all day. Work styles. Do you need to be self-motivated? Do you need to be deadline driven, things like that. And then context.
What is the actual environment that the job occurs in. And so we worked with all of our members to codify all of these areas in these job descriptions. So functional area. I'll give you a little bit more detail on all of these variables. And I realize it's getting into the weeds. But this was the bulk of this project. We had a list of functional areas.
First we started out with a predefined list, and then we let some categories organically come to the top by allowing our coders to enter a free text area if it wasn't obvious where they should go. So we instructed them to use if a position or a functional area was in the title. If it said acquisitions editor, they should go in acquisitions use some of the descriptions as much as possible.
Don't try to infer if they did say other. We later on, sorry. Later on, we processed that and we did some emergent analysis on those other categories. So decision making authority. This I understand since it goes from 0 to 5, that feels a little different than how we might intuitively think about positions and who's in charge, but in our structure.
We asked them to think about how serious would it be if the person in this job made an error that could not be fixed. So tier zero. That is the director. If they make a mistake, it's very critical. Tier five that's your entry level position. If they make a mistake, it's not the end of the world. It's inconvenient, but we can fix it.
So then all of those work skills that I talked about, those were all informed by something called O*NET, which is the US Labor Department's standardized descriptions of more than 1,000 occupations across our country. This is the leading source of occupational information used in social science research. The responses. What happens is they conduct a general survey of any kind of occupation you can think of.
And people are asked to rate a lot of skills based off of. Is it important. Kind of important. Medium very or extremely important. We needed to reduce that. There were just far too many questions. Far too many variables. What we did was we eliminated any questions about attributes or skills that seemed irrelevant to publishing.
So there were a lot of questions since the start of this, O*NET asks about all kinds of jobs. There were lots of skills that don't apply to publishing, like needing medical knowledge or needing to know how to change oil or work with heavy machinery. So we eliminated lots of questions like that. And then we also shrunk the important scale down from 5 to 3 to make it a little bit easier on our coders, we were finding it hard to determine the gradations for a 5 point scale.
So then we got to the processing and output phase. First, we did some really simple correcting typos, standardizing the names of organizations or how people listed education, the free text responses, and there were several places for that were all reviewed manually, and we cleaned them up looking for any identifiable information or anything that just needed to be corrected before we got into the processing phase.
So then all of the functional areas that I mentioned earlier that were coded as other, this is where we started looking for keywords in the free text. And the graduate students we were working with used some. I forget exactly what they used, but they compared they did some keyword counting on all of our job descriptions, and they looked for the counts of keywords that are associated with what was in that free text. And then we reviewed it and decided, OK, let's put these others.
Actually in this category that should actually be in marketing because that's where all of its keywords are coming from. So then after we did all of that, we had an anonymized data set and we were ready to start doing some analysis. So what's the summary. As John said, we had just over 1,000 job unique descriptions. It encapsulated 666 different positions across these areas.
So you can see we had 19 accounting positions, 136 manuscript editorial, 203 marketing. Some of these are not surprising to have such high numbers, but you can see that it was not equally balanced across functional areas. So a little bit more about the corpus, as I mentioned before, about the difference between publicly available postings versus internal postings, most of it almost 80% was those publicly available advertisements.
78% were full time versus part time. We noted that 34% were on site roles. Half did not specify if they were on site or remote. We think that is a artifact in the data. You can see a little further down how over half of our job descriptions that had a date were 2005 to 2023. So, and we had only 30% just under from 2021 to 2022 when remote work really was exploding.
So I would anticipate that would change as we go forward, hopefully. We looked at minimum education level. That is a very contentious area. So we wanted to see how much is going on there. 56% of the positions we looked at required a bachelor's degree at a minimum. The minimum listed experience for these positions was 0 to 15 years as that the response experience.
Sorry, I phrased that wrong experience was listed for 64% of the positions ranging from 0 to 15 years. The most common requirement was five years. That one was the one that stood out most. So there's some preliminary results. This is I understand this is going to be hard to see. Our slides are available and I apologize for the orientation of the numbers.
But the numbers are not what's important. The shading is what you want to look at. So what we decided was that decision making authority and functional area were the two variables we wanted to look at and cross look at compared to everything else. So what we've done here is create a heat map that shows us where the most let's say tier 5 and marketing positions are coming together, or tier 1 and manuscript editorial positions are coming together.
So what you can see is that and actually, let me quickly point out there ordered going down this left side in number of where we had the most responses. So you can see marketing, we had the most responses of any functional area. And you can see we had the most in tier one. So right below the top position in that department you can also see another interesting heat area would be administration with 52% of our response sorry, 52.
Those are counts, not percents. 52 job descriptions were up in tier one. I want to draw your attention to some of the ones on the bottom. We have accounting rights and permissions and other. Those were job descriptions we just could not classify into any meaningful categories to have a quantity of consideration. So you would expect that one to be mostly zeros. But rights and permissions or accounting we might expect those numbers to be more right.
We know those positions exist but we didn't reach them. So looking at each of those variables, those main variables, we wanted to look at them by those skills, those 118 different skills we have. We could do this for every single skill. I'm just going to highlight speaking skills. And if you want to know more or see more heat maps you can ask us. So if I've got good speaking skills, what functional area should I work in.
Again, this is another heat map. The darkest is not at all. I'm sorry, I think I have it backwards. Darker the darker is, the higher. That's right. So the absolute darkest is. That's the very important. And we see sales. The most important skill you need in according to in comparison to these others, we also see that manuscript editorial has speaking skills rated really highly.
That's not very surprising. Something like administration or manuscript editor speaking skills maybe not such a big deal when we look at the same skill, speaking in terms of authority. So if I want to be a manager, how important are speaking skills. You can see very easily in that far right column. It goes from so-so at tier four. Tier 5 to this skill is critical at tier 0, which is that CEO top person position.
So you can see. The next thing I'm going to show you is something that takes all of the skills and pulls them in comparison by tier to save space. I've only showed tier 5, which is the top tier 3, middle and tier one. Nope I've got it reversed. Tier 5 is the entry level. Tier one is very high up, and you can see this really nice curve coming through the data where a skill let's say writing, it's staying up there at the top no matter what level you're at for marketing, writing is very important.
But then we see a skill like social perceptiveness tier 5 so-so and then it shoots way up. You really need how to chat with other people. And then we can see the something like monitoring has not at all important for tier 5. When you get up to tier one shoots way up. That tracks with what you might assume because tier 1 is higher up there. Probably a manager.
They need to monitor the work that's being seen. So we have charts for every functional area. And all of these skills they will be. If you would like to see them drop us a line. We're happy to share the data and it will all be hopefully out in a publication later this summer. Oh, so I'm going to stop there because I'm going to hand it off to my colleagues and let them tell you about the taking all this data and making it searchable and findable.
So Hello, to introduce myself again, I'm Kiran Krishnan and I along with Kripa and two other students from the University of Michigan School of Information, were connected with this task force through our capstone project, which is basically meant to give us experience with clients, understanding their needs, devising a solution.
So that's what we did. We worked together towards imagining, designing and ultimately building an interactive component that would improve users awareness regarding careers in scholarly publishing. Oh, OK. Sorry so our team's mission was to build an interactive tool that would empower users career development within scholarly publishing, thus demonstrating the ability of such a tool to spread awareness.
So we had two major components, which was obviously building the dashboard. And then we also really wanted to emphasize the importance of user testing. Getting feedback on what users felt like they could use this for if they saw other use cases. And just feedback they had for future iterations. So a little bit of project process. We started with data processing, cleaning the data, reformatting it in a way where it could support the underlying structure of the dashboard.
Then we went through design. We did some Figma mockups and prototyping. We identified use cases and user personas. And then just went through iterations to enhance usability. Then for the interactive prototype, we used Plotly, dash, and D3 blocks to create the dashboard and support the visualizations. And then also an accessibility audit. And then we moved to user testing.
We did interviews just to get some feedback. So now we'll start to walk you through the dashboard. Unfortunately, it's not on a public server yet, so it's just screenshots. But so through our work with the task force, we identified three distinct user personas. The first was individuals interested in scholarly publishing who have awareness of their current skills, but maybe don't know how those skills map to careers within the industry.
The second was individuals with distinct career interests who wanted to develop the skills to be successful in their career search and then in those careers. And then finally, individuals who were currently in the field who are interested in career advancement pathways. So these three user personas are represented in each of our three pages in the dashboard and the home page. Serves as a place for users to self-select into those, into the appropriate user persona based on their needs.
So first, we have the career exploration page. So this allows users who want to understand their current skills, want to understand how their current skills map to various. Jobs or career areas. So first they'll input up to 10 of their current like most relevant skills. And then click that button. And a bubble chart is generated where the size of the bubble correlates to the match of that career area.
So in this screenshot, you can see that marketing was the best match based on the skills that they inputted. And then in that bottom left corner, there's also a summary of those results. And then we had the skills exploration page, which will allow users who have a career area in mind to explore skills that are most important to develop in order to be considered for and succeed in jobs in that area.
So here they'll put a career area of interest in a position level, which is kind of like those decision making authorities. That's where that kind of correlates. So like early career all the way up to senior level position and then skill category just kind of helps them because there's a lot of skills in here. It's more of a user interface feature. But then similar to the previous slide the bubbles indicate how important certain skills are to that job function or career area at that given level.
And so we used a decision tree to display that. And then again, in the bottom left corner, we have a summary of the most important skills. And then Kripa is going to take over. So just introduce myself again I'm Kripa I'm also a senior just graduated from the University of Michigan and I'll continue to talk about the dashboard.
So moving on to persona three. So as Kieran mentioned, this is going to be primarily focused on those who are already in the industry and are looking to level up or scale up within their current functional area or switch to a different functional area. So that could look like someone who's already in sales and is in a senior executive role with the current skills of administration and management and analytical thinking, but wanting to switch to something like marketing or administration or design and production.
And so these cards will auto populate based on what you plug-in for your specific career area, position level and skill set. And we also have some information below on job description data based on what was populated with these cards. And we also do have what your current excuse me, what your current information is in the first card.
So that's what you can see with the sales card in the beginning. And we think this will be really helpful for those who are looking to level up and know that they already want to stay in publishing, but just want a little bit of a switch up. So this will definitely be good for that. And then something I just wanted to touch on here is relating more to the project process, which is an accessibility checking and audit, which is something that we conducted very thoughtfully.
And the purpose of this audit was to produce a very thorough deliverable, as we knew that this deliverable isn't going to be the absolute final version of our project, but we did know that this would essentially be something that would be used to carry out this project in a later phase and make a more final version of the deliverable. And so what we did is make sure that we have covered all the essentials of the accessibility aspect.
So we checked for color scheme and contrast issues. We researched into what ADA certified color schemes were. These are things that we weren't really familiar with, but we realized that since we wanted to create something that was accessible for everyone in publishing, we really wanted to make this extra step to create something that was accessible to everyone. We also went through text and Alt text issues and making sure that the layout was also very digestible.
And we can also get feedback from you guys on that in case that didn't work out. But Yeah. And then so speaking of feedback, we ended up getting a lot of user testing feedback to see if our proposed dashboard actually was effective and if how people in scholarly publishing would perceive this dashboard. So some things that we got from that feedback was one that there could be more improved navigation and user interface.
I guess like navigation, people thought that scrolling issues kind of interfered with their ease of use of the device or of the platform. So they decided to suggest a more easier scroll bar. And also some clearer labels and visual elements that would indicate when you're indicating, when you're moving to a new element or when you're moving to a new page. Just because in the beginning it wasn't as clear.
So we made some of those changes and it's a little bit better now, hopefully. But I think that's also something that can be improved in the future. Another thing that we wanted to improve on was just clarity and definitions. Just because sometimes terminology can be kind of a prohibitive factor in people using a new tool, especially one that's meant to help you guide through your process of figuring out what your career is going to be.
So in this case, I think making sure that everything is clear and there aren't really anything that's very, I guess, limited to things that only people who are in specific roles would specific skill sets that are very limited to those in a certain role or something like that. We just wanted to eliminate things like that, and we wanted to add add more descriptions on again, just to avoid some vague descriptions, add some clear descriptions and distinctions between different options.
And the last thing was just to have more enhanced interaction and clickable elements just so that the dashboard was easier to filter through and also more engaging overall. And yeah. And so leading into future work, there were a few things that we wanted to recommend to the team, and one of which is to redefine skills. Just because we knew that we were working with a really large skill set, over 100 skills, and not all of them were directly related to publishing or the scholarly publishing industry even.
So we just wanted to ensure a focus on those skills that are most relevant to scholarly publishing and rescale the rating factor as well, just because it was limited from negative 1 to 1 in the current system. And we think rescaling it to a larger system would allow for more nuance to be incorporated there. And we also did want to integrate some real, real time job opportunities based on the user's skill and interest.
And that's something that we think can be a really useful feature, just because people who are using this tool don't really want to be using it in a bubble, but rather if we use real time job opportunities that are linked to all of the opportunities that we are suggesting could be possibilities in scholarly publishing, that would lead to a much more comprehensive dashboard and result for our users.
And the last thing we suggest is incorporating AI. Now, this could be in a numerous in a numerous set of ways. But one thing in particular that we wanted to do was use it for resume screening help. Just because AI is already being used in so many different industries and by so many different employers to do resume screenings, and so people who are looking to switch jobs or go into scholarly publishing will ultimately be subject to these AI resume screenings.
And so using that to our advantage to align the skills from those resume screenings to the skills in our dashboard and provide the help that our users may want to use, would really be, think the best use of AI in this case. And OK, just before I move on, I just wanted to say with these recommendations, we really want to say that this tool could be even more powerful and useful to our user base.
And from our user testing, we've really found that everyone has been receptive to this tool, and we think that this is going to be a massive success. Yes Thank you. Thank you. And Kate, please. Hi So my name is Kate Heaney. I am a product manager at Clarivate.
As Charles said at the beginning, I have been a co-chair of this joint task force from the SSP side. I've been involved with it pretty much since its inception. So it's been really, really exciting to actually see this all come together. So after all that, the obvious question is, what's next. There's a tremendous amount of potential for the data from this project.
Our team is largely coming at it from two different angles, one using it for HR purposes to more clearly place publishing professionals in the context under the wider library or University setting, and for tools to guide early or mid-career publishers looking to determine where to go next from the HR perspective. One potential outcome is to submit the job descriptions into databases of organizations and companies that inform University career development, such as the educomp compensation survey and the QPR HR job description index.
This can help place publishing professionals within the broader context, where they fall under the umbrella of a non publishing institution, like a library or a University. Titles and responsibilities can be a bit muddled with the data that's currently available and our data set can help clarify what the publishing professionals actually do to get a publication out the door and into the hands of scholars.
This is a particular focus for Au presses. Charles actually wrote about this in a scholarly kitchen article in September of 2022, which just goes to show how long we have been working on this, talking about this project as a whole, and how this data can serve the publishing community that is outside of your traditional standalone publishers. On the other end, there is significant potential for creating tools that can be used by job seekers, obviously, especially those early in their career who haven't yet had the exposure to other roles in the industry.
I've been active in SSPs mentorship program for a number of years, and every mentee I have had has come immediately with the question what's next. I've been an editorial assistant. I've been an assistant editor. Where do I even go next. Where do I start. What do I look for. Where do I even go from here.
And I remember that so vividly from my own job search. I've been in the industry for 17 years, and I just remember that so clearly, where I was like, where do I even go I've been a managing editor, development editor, acquisitions editor, content manager, and now a product manager, and those are not titles that I would have even known to look for. Those were opportunities that happened to come my way.
So a tool like this could have been just absolutely phenomenal when I was younger. So the hope is that the visualization of this data and the creation of a workflow tool can help publishing professionals find their own possible trajectory, even just to see what's out there, what can be done. So you've already heard from Kieran about the dashboard that they've built an incredible job by the way.
So a goal for SSP, particularly the career development committee, which Jackie and I are both on, is to take this and build it out even further. So you heard the two of them talk about Kira and Kripa, talk about some of the feedback that they've gotten. So we can take that and take that forward. This also dovetails nicely with our skill survey, which hopefully you are all familiar with. That surveys folks in the industry about their actual day to day.
So this project took official job descriptions and mapped skills to titles. Whereas the skills survey asks current employees what their job actually consists of. And what skills you need to be successful in a given position. The most recent skills map was actually released last week, so if you haven't looked at it, please do circulate it. Send it to all your especially early career mid-career folks. Let them know that this exists.
So these two together can be a very powerful resource for publishing professionals at all levels, and hopefully make the profession a bit more transparent and accessible to those who want to work in the industry. And we have a lot of information on what can be better. Real, true, actionable items for what we can do to take that dashboard even further. The data can also help inform a framework for training future publishing professionals and targeted skills that would help them advance in their careers.
Now, there are some limitations to the data we've collected. It's not perfect, but so while there is plenty to mine Yeah, it's not perfect. There was an underrepresentation of lower tier positions, which Jackie talked about. And the job description skewed heavily toward the US, which is kind of just based on how we were able to collect the job descriptions, what we were able to gather.
But there are some really driven, bright people out there who want to work in this industry, who want to continue to work in this industry. And I think this project is a really amazing step to helping them find their next steps. So our hope is that this project lays a solid foundation for all of these goals. So that's submitting the description to the databases and for education institutions and helping clarify where publishing professionals fall and those non standalone traditional publishers building out the workflow tool and then helping train future publishing professionals.
So like I said, there's a tremendous amount of potential here, and the results could serve as a springboard for a number of things going forward. So stay tuned. And just to say this has been a project of volunteers and you can see them listed here. It's been a project where our colleague Jackie has been particularly significant in moving it forward.
So a real Thank you to her. And early in the project, we had a tragedy, which was the loss of a dear colleague, Sarah András. And it was wonderful that Kate was able to step in. And because that was something that really set us back as a team. So this whole presentation is in memoriam of Sarah. The next steps.
As Kate mentioned, we do have and Jackie mentioned also we have a journal article describing all this methodology under consideration. The data set will be released openly in a data repository, and we do hope to be building a little bit out the interactive dashboard to be on a more robust platform server. And we're just looking forward to continuing to iterate with this data.
I think one thing that really strikes me is that we spent a lot of time on methodology, and I think that was the right thing to do, because as we take this data out and try and influence people, maybe connected to the publishing profession slightly outside it, like universities and University presses, we really need to be able to tell a very robust story about the evidence based work in which we've done.
It's not just perceptual, it's evidence based, so I think that was very worthwhile. I'd like to now stop and take some questions or comments. And if I could ask you to give your name and affiliation when you start. But anybody want to say anything. Oh Thank you. Yes Oh, Thank you, John, very much.
Oh Well, sorry. I'm Catherine Connolly, editorial production manager with the American Economic Association. But up until fairly recently, I was an English professor and left to pursue an alternative academic career. I couldn't I mean, I was just like, on the edge of my seat listening to all of this because something I spent a lot of time in doing was coaching students on careers.
The English major question is, what am I going to do if it's not working at Starbucks. Which is a myth, but that's another topic. You mentioned reaching out to University career centers. I know they help a lot of students, but they tend to be very ill equipped to help students in traditional liberal arts degrees, and most of the career coaching that takes place there is done by faculty members who have no idea how to look through job ads.
I mean, when you pulled up the list of all of those job titles that are essentially kind of the same thing, but the terminology is utterly opaque. So I wanted to Thank you for this. I think it's a fantastic tool. I wish I'd had it years ago. I think in addition to University career centers reaching out to organizations like the Modern Language Association, that would be able to get this tool in the hands of faculty members who are going to be directly able to plug this in to students and early career professionals.
So I just kind of want to say Thank you and suggestion, and I'm really excited to see when this comes out. Thank you so much. Thank you. As a former English major that hit home that hit. Other questions. Other questions. Yes I'm not going to stand because I have a bad knee, but I'm from I'm from Brigham Young University, and I run the institutional repository, which actually hosts over 50 online campus journals.
So I manage all of those journals. So I'm like publishing adjacent. But I have always said if I left the library world, it would be to work for a publisher. And I'm just wondering, what skills would you like to see in somebody who's coming from the library side of things. Kate go ahead.
I'll just say so. I'm also situated within a library context. I think one of the questions we had to consider early on is who's a publisher. As Jackie mentioned. And I think if you self-identify as a publisher, you're a publisher. And for me, repository management is a publishing activity.
And so I think that's important. So we did. That's how we defined the universe. But that's just one point I'd make. But Kate. No, I was actually I was going to say something similar. I think a lot of the skills are the same. And, we did take a very broad view of what counts as a publisher, kind of specifically for that reason.
Because there are so many small corners, not every publisher works at Elsevier or Springer Nature. And there are a lot of functions especially within the library within the University as a whole. And over the course of my career, I've worked with departments and small societies that are basically just a small group of academics working out of their department and they're publishing a journal, and that counts just as much as any of the publications that I worked on at a commercial publisher.
So that's very much why we decided to take a very broad view of what counts. I think also one other thing there. And then I'll go to John is within the library environment. I think those of us who are sort of not traditional librarians, I mean, those of us in roles that are emergent in libraries are sometimes struggling to articulate our little universe. And it's just really interesting to think in a library context, large library context, you have it.
People who are definitely oriented also into a world of information technology. You've got development people oriented there. And I think the publishing field within a library context is a really important one for us to have reference data, to be able to refer to data that isn't arl, data that isn't traditional library data. So hopefully this might get some of us in spaces like scholarly communication, a bit more respect with our library colleagues.
So that's a hope, John. OK I just wanted to suggest, if you're not already a member of the library publishing coalition, that you look into that organization because that does intersect between libraries and publishing. And I've been involved with that organization. I don't think that we had any job descriptions from that area in this.
But it is as Charles said, there's a lot of intersection between them. Yeah I think institutional repository is one title we didn't see on that. Yeah that's interesting. So I did work in that area for a while. And it's definitely related, we could talk if you want. I'm sorry. Hi I'm Sarah from the American Council of learned Societies, and I just wanted to say I love your suggestion of reaching out to MLA or others.
I think if I could help with that, I would be happy to help reach the societies. But I was also curious, sort of a related question about did you collect any data that might be specific to digital publishing, the skill sets that are required for sort of translating between digital humanities work and moving into digital publishing. There's some publishers who are engaged with that, but not many.
And it was occurring to me that this type of dashboard could actually be really helpful to publishers who are thinking about getting into that space, but maybe aren't even quite sure how to structure a job description. And so it could potentially provide a little information going the opposite direction too. So I was just curious if you had thoughts about that. I'm happy to take that. Please so that's actually something SSP would like to work on in the future, is using this data set and future iterations of it when we can get more represent more of a representative sample to create a sort of template of what a job description might look like.
And then we can share it out so that there is some continuity between being a manager and managing editor and associate editor and a marketing manager and a marketing specialist trying to get some continuity between those roles. So we're not there yet, but we are trying and we really want to get there. So thank you for your offer of support. One other thing on that, we do point out in the article, and something that came up in our analysis is how job descriptions are kind of inherently dated.
Usually a lot of times, many organizations, they use the job description from four or five years back or 10 years back, and the skill survey is what people are doing now. So part of what we are looking at is, do people need to update job descriptions more frequently. And your example of e-publishing is a good example of that. I'm just behind you. Is Weinstein to your right.
John Wayne is a representative of alpsp. In fact, the executive director. Is there anything you'd like to add about where you see this going, potentially in the context of alpsp? Just a couple of points. I mean, one is that we have got an EDI special interest group, and they are actually doing quite a lot of work in looking at this to make sure that there's the right language being used, especially when you're coming to writing your job adverts.
I would also just give out a plug-in the UK, for example, there is an organization called cilip which obviously looks after the librarian side. They are also very interested in making sure that going back to the previous point about from librarians and information workers, that there is a very clear their jobs are clearly articulate it so that librarians do feel they can move around, as it were. And just to reassure everybody, before I took on this role, I was a director of library services.
So librarians, you can move across the aisle. It is possible. But that's specifically that's what we would like to be. Well, that's what we are going to be doing through the special interest groups. And I said there is, as between AUP and out there's various special interest groups at the moment. So I would encourage you to look at our website and to get involved.
It's open to everybody. You don't have to be an APS member. Anyway, enough of the plug. And just to add to the chorus there, I have an MLS as well. I don't secret librarians amongst us. I've been in a library. Any last questions or comments. Yes Oh, sorry.
Thank you. Hi, I'm Maria Sergio from the New England Journal of Medicine. You had said that you looked at job descriptions over a span of quite a few years. Did you notice any trends in like, what types of job descriptions are being posted now versus the kinds that were being posted then. Like, are there any positions that are on their way out.
We haven't. We actually didn't do that kind of analysis, but that is something we've considered also because due to exactly what you're talking about, of something being phased out and new ones coming in, we saw a dearth of I mentioned in this data set, that is precisely because it just happened in the last year, right. So I think if we have a reliable amount of date information, we can start doing that.
And, we only have about 50% That's still something we can look at. And there is something I wanted to point out that I forgot to mention during the methodology section. Please understand that none of this is statistically significant. These have all been weighted so that we can make comparisons equally. But, you saw how wildly overrepresented some functional areas were compared to others.
And I think as we get more data we can add here in those areas, we can start to see what you're talking about, of what's going out and what's coming in. I think it's a really fascinating question. And the other point about the methodology is it is replicable and documented. So the ideal is this becomes a bit of an observatory and one can track going forward and spot the emerging areas because I think that would be absolutely fascinating.
Yeah OK. I think probably we should draw ready for the last plenary. Thank you very much to the presenters. And Thank you to all of you for attending.
Segment:0 .
130 so let's get started. Just as I start, I just wanted to draw your attention to a Bitly link down at the bottom of the slide here. And also this QR code. And this connects you to the slides, which will, of course, also be available on Hoover. But in case you want you want to be able to look at things more carefully. You might want to copy that down.
I'm Charles Watkinson, I'm director of University of Michigan press and past president of the Association of University presses. And today, we're here to report on a joint initiative between the Society for scholarly publishing and my colleague Kate Heaney has been the co-chair. Kate is there and also and Oh presses and also alpsp and Abigail Barclay from alpsp couldn't make it today but I but they are the third partner.
And we've been working for about 18 months on a project that we're going to introduce to you. Working on a problem and a methodology that you're going to learn about around career progression and career progression from a skills based approach. The colleagues on screen who are going to be presenting will introduce themselves as they start their section. But I would particularly like to call out two new colleagues to publishing.
Kiran Krishnan and Kripa Srinivasan. And I've had the pleasure of working with them and traveling with them today from Ann Arbor. And Kiran and Kripa are here, and they are students from the School of Information, and they just graduated two weeks ago from their undergraduate course. And they'll be talking about a capstone project they did connected to this work, creating an interactive dashboard.
I should point out that both of them have graduated, and so they're now interested in jobs. And I'm trying to I'm trying to persuade them that scholarly publishing is a place for brilliant data scientist to progress into. So anyhow, they're here. Yay so I should also acknowledge somebody else who's been really instrumental in this project, and that's Jack Farrell, and you'll have seen him in the exhibit Hall.
Jack provided a number of the position postings that we used in our analysis. Just some. So here's the SSP code of conduct and the core values, and we asked this question online as a little bit of connection to the topic.
And the question was, how did you fall into the world of scholarly publishing. And I've got 22 answers from you in the audience. Thank you so much. And I'll just read a couple of them, worked on a graduate journal during PhD publishing, looked cool and academia academia adjacent. A job ad in the New York Times circa 1991. Been here ever since.
Moved away from lab work, happened to live near a publishing company. And applied accidentally. Former journalist working in local newspapers and magazines, now in production for a publisher. Connections through friends. My first job after grad school was a feature writer for a small publisher in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, so I think you can see a pattern here, which is very few people started with the idea that they would be a publisher, and that is a situation that many of us who came into publishing in the past faced.
But as you see on the slide here, today's graduates and young professionals are much more intentional about publishing careers that paths into the field are often opaque. So with that, I'm going to pass over to John, who's going to talk a little bit more about that situation. All right. So most of me, but if not John Warren, I'm director of the graduate program in publishing at the George Washington University.
And as Charles said, many of us have fallen into publishing sort of accidentally. I could tell you my story over a drink sometime. A lot of the students coming into our program are interested in publishing. Typically they want to be a Ya editor for Penguin Random House or Simon Schuster. They don't really understand necessarily what scholarly publishing is or what roles there are.
And it is kind of opaque industry. So what we sought out to do with this project is figure out what skills do you need to enter the industry. How do the skills and responsibilities, how do they vary from role to role. How is acquisitions different than production different than marketing. And then within a certain job position or set of skills, what other roles might be similar.
So if you're good at, say, acquisitions, what might be another good role. And then how do the skills and responsibilities change as you go up in the field. So Charles mentioned Jack Farrell. He deals with a lot of high level executive search director level, CEO level. So how do you get there from entry level. How are the skills, different.
So those were what we were looking at to do. Yeah this is not easy right. Where's a Mack when you need one. So one thing that I'm sure you all I'm not telling you anything you don't know here. Job titles in the industry vary greatly from trade to scholarly University presses, but even from one institution to another.
And you'll see a lot of different roles. What they mean. One of the things that I try to educate our students about is all these different positions and what the different roles entail. So sales, there's a lot of different roles from sales assistant business development. Key accounts manager. Sales manager.
Sales director. Marketing sales. Marketing coordinator. Marketing manager. And then. Editorial of course. You have managing editors. Copy editors, acquisitions editors. The publisher.
So from one company to another, one job title might mean a kind of totally different thing. So we set out to analyze these with data analysis that the data people get into and just a bit. And then of course, there's a lot of other roles which exist in publishing and outside publishing, like the business manager or accounting manager, customer service rights and permissions. So as there are many different roles in publishing.
So if you're in a role right now and you might want to get into a different role, this project is to help you decide what the path might be. Is this mine still. Are we going You OK. My name will come up. All right. So, one thing we did for this project is we took a little over 1,000 job descriptions.
Many of these came from Jack Farrell, but many of these came from individuals that submitted them, from other companies that submitted them. And these were. Analyzed from years of experience, what the job function was, what the level was. We looked at everything from entry level up to Director CEO level, what the requirements for the position were, what the relevant skills that were listed.
And we tried to figure out what the skills are relevant for a job. So if, let's say, have really good writing skills. Really good speaking skills. What would be the best role for you in publishing. What skills do you need to have if you want to be a director of a press. What skills do you need to have if you want to be a marketing director.
What if you are in marketing and you want to go to editorial. Are your skills the same. And then as we said before, as I said before, going from entry to mid to senior levels, a lot of the skills are going to be the same, but there's going to be new skills that you'll need. So that was the overall goal of this analysis. And now I'll turn it over I think to Jackie.
Hi, everybody. Nice to meet you. Thanks, John. My name is Jacqueline Lord. I'm SSPs, marketing and operations manager. And for this project, I oversaw our methodology. There are three main sections, and I'm going to do a lot of pointing and there's a lot of detail on my slides, so please bear with me.
Very first thing we did was source job descriptions. And we did that by just asking people to submit job descriptions. Charles mentioned Jack Farrell. They provided a lot of our additional texts, and then we used all of our career progression task force volunteers to take those job descriptions and do some qualitative coding, which looks at text data and turns it into numerical data.
And then after that, we handed it over to some very intelligent, smart grad students who ran it through some iterative Python scripts to clean up the data and what they did, they removed typos. They flagged any time the data was in the wrong category in our forms. Once that was cleaned up, we had a nice clean data set. We anonymized it so that it could go out for public viewing. And then we used it also to create some visualizations and summaries that I'm going to share in a few more slides.
So a short description of how we collected our data. First of all, we had to define scholarly publishing. We tried to define it as broadly as possible. Any profession that involves creating and distributing scholarly materials, books, journals, online media, wherever you were in that process that counted how we got the job descriptions we posted on social media, we sent out press releases. People did word of mouth with their contacts.
Everybody, when they went to various conferences, handed out cards saying, tell us about your job. Let us know what you do for work. So a lot of our job descriptions came from these individual submissions. But then we did have these bulk submissions as well from two organizations. There's two things I want to point out about this data set. The majority of the texts came from publicly available job descriptions rather than internal job descriptions.
Internal job descriptions are often far more detailed and focused on the minutiae of a position. Job descriptions are a little bit more like an advertisement. Here are the highlights. Here's the good stuff, not the nuts and bolts of it. So keep that in mind. And then also because of the contributions from organizations like Jack Farrell, a lot of our data set does skew towards the higher tiers in the track of the profession.
So just keep that in mind as we're going through everything. So qualitative coding very fast rundown. We looked for 15 position attributes. And those are things like how much decision making authority do you have. What area are you working in. Are you in marketing acquisitions editorial. Then we asked about 118 work attributes and I will get into where those came from.
But big groups, those were skill types, leadership styles, contextual knowledge. And we used a very clearly defined code book that allowed our coders to take what was free text, raw text, and translate that into multiple choice data. Ones and zeros that we could then do some good comparisons to. So all of our coders were experienced in the publishing industry.
We had some students from gwu. It was also members of our career progression task force. They were instructed to first read the job description as thoroughly as you can. Don't make any judgments and then go back and using our code form and the code book, turn that data into a bunch of questions as clearly as you can without assuming anything about that information. So, for example, if an acquisitions editor position didn't say anything about reading comprehension, don't code that even though we can assume an editor would need reading comprehension.
So general questions those first 15. Those were things like position title, functional area, product area. So are you in books or journals. And what kind of education do you need. Do you need any education work skills. Those are things like critical thinking, negotiation, data analysis. Knowledge areas are specific areas like do you need to know about English.
Do you need to know about philosophy or chemistry. Work activities. What are you doing. Are you doing data analysis. Are you answering emails all day. Work styles. Do you need to be self-motivated? Do you need to be deadline driven, things like that. And then context.
What is the actual environment that the job occurs in. And so we worked with all of our members to codify all of these areas in these job descriptions. So functional area. I'll give you a little bit more detail on all of these variables. And I realize it's getting into the weeds. But this was the bulk of this project. We had a list of functional areas.
First we started out with a predefined list, and then we let some categories organically come to the top by allowing our coders to enter a free text area if it wasn't obvious where they should go. So we instructed them to use if a position or a functional area was in the title. If it said acquisitions editor, they should go in acquisitions use some of the descriptions as much as possible.
Don't try to infer if they did say other. We later on, sorry. Later on, we processed that and we did some emergent analysis on those other categories. So decision making authority. This I understand since it goes from 0 to 5, that feels a little different than how we might intuitively think about positions and who's in charge, but in our structure.
We asked them to think about how serious would it be if the person in this job made an error that could not be fixed. So tier zero. That is the director. If they make a mistake, it's very critical. Tier five that's your entry level position. If they make a mistake, it's not the end of the world. It's inconvenient, but we can fix it.
So then all of those work skills that I talked about, those were all informed by something called O*NET, which is the US Labor Department's standardized descriptions of more than 1,000 occupations across our country. This is the leading source of occupational information used in social science research. The responses. What happens is they conduct a general survey of any kind of occupation you can think of.
And people are asked to rate a lot of skills based off of. Is it important. Kind of important. Medium very or extremely important. We needed to reduce that. There were just far too many questions. Far too many variables. What we did was we eliminated any questions about attributes or skills that seemed irrelevant to publishing.
So there were a lot of questions since the start of this, O*NET asks about all kinds of jobs. There were lots of skills that don't apply to publishing, like needing medical knowledge or needing to know how to change oil or work with heavy machinery. So we eliminated lots of questions like that. And then we also shrunk the important scale down from 5 to 3 to make it a little bit easier on our coders, we were finding it hard to determine the gradations for a 5 point scale.
So then we got to the processing and output phase. First, we did some really simple correcting typos, standardizing the names of organizations or how people listed education, the free text responses, and there were several places for that were all reviewed manually, and we cleaned them up looking for any identifiable information or anything that just needed to be corrected before we got into the processing phase.
So then all of the functional areas that I mentioned earlier that were coded as other, this is where we started looking for keywords in the free text. And the graduate students we were working with used some. I forget exactly what they used, but they compared they did some keyword counting on all of our job descriptions, and they looked for the counts of keywords that are associated with what was in that free text. And then we reviewed it and decided, OK, let's put these others.
Actually in this category that should actually be in marketing because that's where all of its keywords are coming from. So then after we did all of that, we had an anonymized data set and we were ready to start doing some analysis. So what's the summary. As John said, we had just over 1,000 job unique descriptions. It encapsulated 666 different positions across these areas.
So you can see we had 19 accounting positions, 136 manuscript editorial, 203 marketing. Some of these are not surprising to have such high numbers, but you can see that it was not equally balanced across functional areas. So a little bit more about the corpus, as I mentioned before, about the difference between publicly available postings versus internal postings, most of it almost 80% was those publicly available advertisements.
78% were full time versus part time. We noted that 34% were on site roles. Half did not specify if they were on site or remote. We think that is a artifact in the data. You can see a little further down how over half of our job descriptions that had a date were 2005 to 2023. So, and we had only 30% just under from 2021 to 2022 when remote work really was exploding.
So I would anticipate that would change as we go forward, hopefully. We looked at minimum education level. That is a very contentious area. So we wanted to see how much is going on there. 56% of the positions we looked at required a bachelor's degree at a minimum. The minimum listed experience for these positions was 0 to 15 years as that the response experience.
Sorry, I phrased that wrong experience was listed for 64% of the positions ranging from 0 to 15 years. The most common requirement was five years. That one was the one that stood out most. So there's some preliminary results. This is I understand this is going to be hard to see. Our slides are available and I apologize for the orientation of the numbers.
But the numbers are not what's important. The shading is what you want to look at. So what we decided was that decision making authority and functional area were the two variables we wanted to look at and cross look at compared to everything else. So what we've done here is create a heat map that shows us where the most let's say tier 5 and marketing positions are coming together, or tier 1 and manuscript editorial positions are coming together.
So what you can see is that and actually, let me quickly point out there ordered going down this left side in number of where we had the most responses. So you can see marketing, we had the most responses of any functional area. And you can see we had the most in tier one. So right below the top position in that department you can also see another interesting heat area would be administration with 52% of our response sorry, 52.
Those are counts, not percents. 52 job descriptions were up in tier one. I want to draw your attention to some of the ones on the bottom. We have accounting rights and permissions and other. Those were job descriptions we just could not classify into any meaningful categories to have a quantity of consideration. So you would expect that one to be mostly zeros. But rights and permissions or accounting we might expect those numbers to be more right.
We know those positions exist but we didn't reach them. So looking at each of those variables, those main variables, we wanted to look at them by those skills, those 118 different skills we have. We could do this for every single skill. I'm just going to highlight speaking skills. And if you want to know more or see more heat maps you can ask us. So if I've got good speaking skills, what functional area should I work in.
Again, this is another heat map. The darkest is not at all. I'm sorry, I think I have it backwards. Darker the darker is, the higher. That's right. So the absolute darkest is. That's the very important. And we see sales. The most important skill you need in according to in comparison to these others, we also see that manuscript editorial has speaking skills rated really highly.
That's not very surprising. Something like administration or manuscript editor speaking skills maybe not such a big deal when we look at the same skill, speaking in terms of authority. So if I want to be a manager, how important are speaking skills. You can see very easily in that far right column. It goes from so-so at tier four. Tier 5 to this skill is critical at tier 0, which is that CEO top person position.
So you can see. The next thing I'm going to show you is something that takes all of the skills and pulls them in comparison by tier to save space. I've only showed tier 5, which is the top tier 3, middle and tier one. Nope I've got it reversed. Tier 5 is the entry level. Tier one is very high up, and you can see this really nice curve coming through the data where a skill let's say writing, it's staying up there at the top no matter what level you're at for marketing, writing is very important.
But then we see a skill like social perceptiveness tier 5 so-so and then it shoots way up. You really need how to chat with other people. And then we can see the something like monitoring has not at all important for tier 5. When you get up to tier one shoots way up. That tracks with what you might assume because tier 1 is higher up there. Probably a manager.
They need to monitor the work that's being seen. So we have charts for every functional area. And all of these skills they will be. If you would like to see them drop us a line. We're happy to share the data and it will all be hopefully out in a publication later this summer. Oh, so I'm going to stop there because I'm going to hand it off to my colleagues and let them tell you about the taking all this data and making it searchable and findable.
So Hello, to introduce myself again, I'm Kiran Krishnan and I along with Kripa and two other students from the University of Michigan School of Information, were connected with this task force through our capstone project, which is basically meant to give us experience with clients, understanding their needs, devising a solution.
So that's what we did. We worked together towards imagining, designing and ultimately building an interactive component that would improve users awareness regarding careers in scholarly publishing. Oh, OK. Sorry so our team's mission was to build an interactive tool that would empower users career development within scholarly publishing, thus demonstrating the ability of such a tool to spread awareness.
So we had two major components, which was obviously building the dashboard. And then we also really wanted to emphasize the importance of user testing. Getting feedback on what users felt like they could use this for if they saw other use cases. And just feedback they had for future iterations. So a little bit of project process. We started with data processing, cleaning the data, reformatting it in a way where it could support the underlying structure of the dashboard.
Then we went through design. We did some Figma mockups and prototyping. We identified use cases and user personas. And then just went through iterations to enhance usability. Then for the interactive prototype, we used Plotly, dash, and D3 blocks to create the dashboard and support the visualizations. And then also an accessibility audit. And then we moved to user testing.
We did interviews just to get some feedback. So now we'll start to walk you through the dashboard. Unfortunately, it's not on a public server yet, so it's just screenshots. But so through our work with the task force, we identified three distinct user personas. The first was individuals interested in scholarly publishing who have awareness of their current skills, but maybe don't know how those skills map to careers within the industry.
The second was individuals with distinct career interests who wanted to develop the skills to be successful in their career search and then in those careers. And then finally, individuals who were currently in the field who are interested in career advancement pathways. So these three user personas are represented in each of our three pages in the dashboard and the home page. Serves as a place for users to self-select into those, into the appropriate user persona based on their needs.
So first, we have the career exploration page. So this allows users who want to understand their current skills, want to understand how their current skills map to various. Jobs or career areas. So first they'll input up to 10 of their current like most relevant skills. And then click that button. And a bubble chart is generated where the size of the bubble correlates to the match of that career area.
So in this screenshot, you can see that marketing was the best match based on the skills that they inputted. And then in that bottom left corner, there's also a summary of those results. And then we had the skills exploration page, which will allow users who have a career area in mind to explore skills that are most important to develop in order to be considered for and succeed in jobs in that area.
So here they'll put a career area of interest in a position level, which is kind of like those decision making authorities. That's where that kind of correlates. So like early career all the way up to senior level position and then skill category just kind of helps them because there's a lot of skills in here. It's more of a user interface feature. But then similar to the previous slide the bubbles indicate how important certain skills are to that job function or career area at that given level.
And so we used a decision tree to display that. And then again, in the bottom left corner, we have a summary of the most important skills. And then Kripa is going to take over. So just introduce myself again I'm Kripa I'm also a senior just graduated from the University of Michigan and I'll continue to talk about the dashboard.
So moving on to persona three. So as Kieran mentioned, this is going to be primarily focused on those who are already in the industry and are looking to level up or scale up within their current functional area or switch to a different functional area. So that could look like someone who's already in sales and is in a senior executive role with the current skills of administration and management and analytical thinking, but wanting to switch to something like marketing or administration or design and production.
And so these cards will auto populate based on what you plug-in for your specific career area, position level and skill set. And we also have some information below on job description data based on what was populated with these cards. And we also do have what your current excuse me, what your current information is in the first card.
So that's what you can see with the sales card in the beginning. And we think this will be really helpful for those who are looking to level up and know that they already want to stay in publishing, but just want a little bit of a switch up. So this will definitely be good for that. And then something I just wanted to touch on here is relating more to the project process, which is an accessibility checking and audit, which is something that we conducted very thoughtfully.
And the purpose of this audit was to produce a very thorough deliverable, as we knew that this deliverable isn't going to be the absolute final version of our project, but we did know that this would essentially be something that would be used to carry out this project in a later phase and make a more final version of the deliverable. And so what we did is make sure that we have covered all the essentials of the accessibility aspect.
So we checked for color scheme and contrast issues. We researched into what ADA certified color schemes were. These are things that we weren't really familiar with, but we realized that since we wanted to create something that was accessible for everyone in publishing, we really wanted to make this extra step to create something that was accessible to everyone. We also went through text and Alt text issues and making sure that the layout was also very digestible.
And we can also get feedback from you guys on that in case that didn't work out. But Yeah. And then so speaking of feedback, we ended up getting a lot of user testing feedback to see if our proposed dashboard actually was effective and if how people in scholarly publishing would perceive this dashboard. So some things that we got from that feedback was one that there could be more improved navigation and user interface.
I guess like navigation, people thought that scrolling issues kind of interfered with their ease of use of the device or of the platform. So they decided to suggest a more easier scroll bar. And also some clearer labels and visual elements that would indicate when you're indicating, when you're moving to a new element or when you're moving to a new page. Just because in the beginning it wasn't as clear.
So we made some of those changes and it's a little bit better now, hopefully. But I think that's also something that can be improved in the future. Another thing that we wanted to improve on was just clarity and definitions. Just because sometimes terminology can be kind of a prohibitive factor in people using a new tool, especially one that's meant to help you guide through your process of figuring out what your career is going to be.
So in this case, I think making sure that everything is clear and there aren't really anything that's very, I guess, limited to things that only people who are in specific roles would specific skill sets that are very limited to those in a certain role or something like that. We just wanted to eliminate things like that, and we wanted to add add more descriptions on again, just to avoid some vague descriptions, add some clear descriptions and distinctions between different options.
And the last thing was just to have more enhanced interaction and clickable elements just so that the dashboard was easier to filter through and also more engaging overall. And yeah. And so leading into future work, there were a few things that we wanted to recommend to the team, and one of which is to redefine skills. Just because we knew that we were working with a really large skill set, over 100 skills, and not all of them were directly related to publishing or the scholarly publishing industry even.
So we just wanted to ensure a focus on those skills that are most relevant to scholarly publishing and rescale the rating factor as well, just because it was limited from negative 1 to 1 in the current system. And we think rescaling it to a larger system would allow for more nuance to be incorporated there. And we also did want to integrate some real, real time job opportunities based on the user's skill and interest.
And that's something that we think can be a really useful feature, just because people who are using this tool don't really want to be using it in a bubble, but rather if we use real time job opportunities that are linked to all of the opportunities that we are suggesting could be possibilities in scholarly publishing, that would lead to a much more comprehensive dashboard and result for our users.
And the last thing we suggest is incorporating AI. Now, this could be in a numerous in a numerous set of ways. But one thing in particular that we wanted to do was use it for resume screening help. Just because AI is already being used in so many different industries and by so many different employers to do resume screenings, and so people who are looking to switch jobs or go into scholarly publishing will ultimately be subject to these AI resume screenings.
And so using that to our advantage to align the skills from those resume screenings to the skills in our dashboard and provide the help that our users may want to use, would really be, think the best use of AI in this case. And OK, just before I move on, I just wanted to say with these recommendations, we really want to say that this tool could be even more powerful and useful to our user base.
And from our user testing, we've really found that everyone has been receptive to this tool, and we think that this is going to be a massive success. Yes Thank you. Thank you. And Kate, please. Hi So my name is Kate Heaney. I am a product manager at Clarivate.
As Charles said at the beginning, I have been a co-chair of this joint task force from the SSP side. I've been involved with it pretty much since its inception. So it's been really, really exciting to actually see this all come together. So after all that, the obvious question is, what's next. There's a tremendous amount of potential for the data from this project.
Our team is largely coming at it from two different angles, one using it for HR purposes to more clearly place publishing professionals in the context under the wider library or University setting, and for tools to guide early or mid-career publishers looking to determine where to go next from the HR perspective. One potential outcome is to submit the job descriptions into databases of organizations and companies that inform University career development, such as the educomp compensation survey and the QPR HR job description index.
This can help place publishing professionals within the broader context, where they fall under the umbrella of a non publishing institution, like a library or a University. Titles and responsibilities can be a bit muddled with the data that's currently available and our data set can help clarify what the publishing professionals actually do to get a publication out the door and into the hands of scholars.
This is a particular focus for Au presses. Charles actually wrote about this in a scholarly kitchen article in September of 2022, which just goes to show how long we have been working on this, talking about this project as a whole, and how this data can serve the publishing community that is outside of your traditional standalone publishers. On the other end, there is significant potential for creating tools that can be used by job seekers, obviously, especially those early in their career who haven't yet had the exposure to other roles in the industry.
I've been active in SSPs mentorship program for a number of years, and every mentee I have had has come immediately with the question what's next. I've been an editorial assistant. I've been an assistant editor. Where do I even go next. Where do I start. What do I look for. Where do I even go from here.
And I remember that so vividly from my own job search. I've been in the industry for 17 years, and I just remember that so clearly, where I was like, where do I even go I've been a managing editor, development editor, acquisitions editor, content manager, and now a product manager, and those are not titles that I would have even known to look for. Those were opportunities that happened to come my way.
So a tool like this could have been just absolutely phenomenal when I was younger. So the hope is that the visualization of this data and the creation of a workflow tool can help publishing professionals find their own possible trajectory, even just to see what's out there, what can be done. So you've already heard from Kieran about the dashboard that they've built an incredible job by the way.
So a goal for SSP, particularly the career development committee, which Jackie and I are both on, is to take this and build it out even further. So you heard the two of them talk about Kira and Kripa, talk about some of the feedback that they've gotten. So we can take that and take that forward. This also dovetails nicely with our skill survey, which hopefully you are all familiar with. That surveys folks in the industry about their actual day to day.
So this project took official job descriptions and mapped skills to titles. Whereas the skills survey asks current employees what their job actually consists of. And what skills you need to be successful in a given position. The most recent skills map was actually released last week, so if you haven't looked at it, please do circulate it. Send it to all your especially early career mid-career folks. Let them know that this exists.
So these two together can be a very powerful resource for publishing professionals at all levels, and hopefully make the profession a bit more transparent and accessible to those who want to work in the industry. And we have a lot of information on what can be better. Real, true, actionable items for what we can do to take that dashboard even further. The data can also help inform a framework for training future publishing professionals and targeted skills that would help them advance in their careers.
Now, there are some limitations to the data we've collected. It's not perfect, but so while there is plenty to mine Yeah, it's not perfect. There was an underrepresentation of lower tier positions, which Jackie talked about. And the job description skewed heavily toward the US, which is kind of just based on how we were able to collect the job descriptions, what we were able to gather.
But there are some really driven, bright people out there who want to work in this industry, who want to continue to work in this industry. And I think this project is a really amazing step to helping them find their next steps. So our hope is that this project lays a solid foundation for all of these goals. So that's submitting the description to the databases and for education institutions and helping clarify where publishing professionals fall and those non standalone traditional publishers building out the workflow tool and then helping train future publishing professionals.
So like I said, there's a tremendous amount of potential here, and the results could serve as a springboard for a number of things going forward. So stay tuned. And just to say this has been a project of volunteers and you can see them listed here. It's been a project where our colleague Jackie has been particularly significant in moving it forward.
So a real Thank you to her. And early in the project, we had a tragedy, which was the loss of a dear colleague, Sarah András. And it was wonderful that Kate was able to step in. And because that was something that really set us back as a team. So this whole presentation is in memoriam of Sarah. The next steps.
As Kate mentioned, we do have and Jackie mentioned also we have a journal article describing all this methodology under consideration. The data set will be released openly in a data repository, and we do hope to be building a little bit out the interactive dashboard to be on a more robust platform server. And we're just looking forward to continuing to iterate with this data.
I think one thing that really strikes me is that we spent a lot of time on methodology, and I think that was the right thing to do, because as we take this data out and try and influence people, maybe connected to the publishing profession slightly outside it, like universities and University presses, we really need to be able to tell a very robust story about the evidence based work in which we've done.
It's not just perceptual, it's evidence based, so I think that was very worthwhile. I'd like to now stop and take some questions or comments. And if I could ask you to give your name and affiliation when you start. But anybody want to say anything. Oh Thank you. Yes Oh, Thank you, John, very much.
Oh Well, sorry. I'm Catherine Connolly, editorial production manager with the American Economic Association. But up until fairly recently, I was an English professor and left to pursue an alternative academic career. I couldn't I mean, I was just like, on the edge of my seat listening to all of this because something I spent a lot of time in doing was coaching students on careers.
The English major question is, what am I going to do if it's not working at Starbucks. Which is a myth, but that's another topic. You mentioned reaching out to University career centers. I know they help a lot of students, but they tend to be very ill equipped to help students in traditional liberal arts degrees, and most of the career coaching that takes place there is done by faculty members who have no idea how to look through job ads.
I mean, when you pulled up the list of all of those job titles that are essentially kind of the same thing, but the terminology is utterly opaque. So I wanted to Thank you for this. I think it's a fantastic tool. I wish I'd had it years ago. I think in addition to University career centers reaching out to organizations like the Modern Language Association, that would be able to get this tool in the hands of faculty members who are going to be directly able to plug this in to students and early career professionals.
So I just kind of want to say Thank you and suggestion, and I'm really excited to see when this comes out. Thank you so much. Thank you. As a former English major that hit home that hit. Other questions. Other questions. Yes I'm not going to stand because I have a bad knee, but I'm from I'm from Brigham Young University, and I run the institutional repository, which actually hosts over 50 online campus journals.
So I manage all of those journals. So I'm like publishing adjacent. But I have always said if I left the library world, it would be to work for a publisher. And I'm just wondering, what skills would you like to see in somebody who's coming from the library side of things. Kate go ahead.
I'll just say so. I'm also situated within a library context. I think one of the questions we had to consider early on is who's a publisher. As Jackie mentioned. And I think if you self-identify as a publisher, you're a publisher. And for me, repository management is a publishing activity.
And so I think that's important. So we did. That's how we defined the universe. But that's just one point I'd make. But Kate. No, I was actually I was going to say something similar. I think a lot of the skills are the same. And, we did take a very broad view of what counts as a publisher, kind of specifically for that reason.
Because there are so many small corners, not every publisher works at Elsevier or Springer Nature. And there are a lot of functions especially within the library within the University as a whole. And over the course of my career, I've worked with departments and small societies that are basically just a small group of academics working out of their department and they're publishing a journal, and that counts just as much as any of the publications that I worked on at a commercial publisher.
So that's very much why we decided to take a very broad view of what counts. I think also one other thing there. And then I'll go to John is within the library environment. I think those of us who are sort of not traditional librarians, I mean, those of us in roles that are emergent in libraries are sometimes struggling to articulate our little universe. And it's just really interesting to think in a library context, large library context, you have it.
People who are definitely oriented also into a world of information technology. You've got development people oriented there. And I think the publishing field within a library context is a really important one for us to have reference data, to be able to refer to data that isn't arl, data that isn't traditional library data. So hopefully this might get some of us in spaces like scholarly communication, a bit more respect with our library colleagues.
So that's a hope, John. OK I just wanted to suggest, if you're not already a member of the library publishing coalition, that you look into that organization because that does intersect between libraries and publishing. And I've been involved with that organization. I don't think that we had any job descriptions from that area in this.
But it is as Charles said, there's a lot of intersection between them. Yeah I think institutional repository is one title we didn't see on that. Yeah that's interesting. So I did work in that area for a while. And it's definitely related, we could talk if you want. I'm sorry. Hi I'm Sarah from the American Council of learned Societies, and I just wanted to say I love your suggestion of reaching out to MLA or others.
I think if I could help with that, I would be happy to help reach the societies. But I was also curious, sort of a related question about did you collect any data that might be specific to digital publishing, the skill sets that are required for sort of translating between digital humanities work and moving into digital publishing. There's some publishers who are engaged with that, but not many.
And it was occurring to me that this type of dashboard could actually be really helpful to publishers who are thinking about getting into that space, but maybe aren't even quite sure how to structure a job description. And so it could potentially provide a little information going the opposite direction too. So I was just curious if you had thoughts about that. I'm happy to take that. Please so that's actually something SSP would like to work on in the future, is using this data set and future iterations of it when we can get more represent more of a representative sample to create a sort of template of what a job description might look like.
And then we can share it out so that there is some continuity between being a manager and managing editor and associate editor and a marketing manager and a marketing specialist trying to get some continuity between those roles. So we're not there yet, but we are trying and we really want to get there. So thank you for your offer of support. One other thing on that, we do point out in the article, and something that came up in our analysis is how job descriptions are kind of inherently dated.
Usually a lot of times, many organizations, they use the job description from four or five years back or 10 years back, and the skill survey is what people are doing now. So part of what we are looking at is, do people need to update job descriptions more frequently. And your example of e-publishing is a good example of that. I'm just behind you. Is Weinstein to your right.
John Wayne is a representative of alpsp. In fact, the executive director. Is there anything you'd like to add about where you see this going, potentially in the context of alpsp? Just a couple of points. I mean, one is that we have got an EDI special interest group, and they are actually doing quite a lot of work in looking at this to make sure that there's the right language being used, especially when you're coming to writing your job adverts.
I would also just give out a plug-in the UK, for example, there is an organization called cilip which obviously looks after the librarian side. They are also very interested in making sure that going back to the previous point about from librarians and information workers, that there is a very clear their jobs are clearly articulate it so that librarians do feel they can move around, as it were. And just to reassure everybody, before I took on this role, I was a director of library services.
So librarians, you can move across the aisle. It is possible. But that's specifically that's what we would like to be. Well, that's what we are going to be doing through the special interest groups. And I said there is, as between AUP and out there's various special interest groups at the moment. So I would encourage you to look at our website and to get involved.
It's open to everybody. You don't have to be an APS member. Anyway, enough of the plug. And just to add to the chorus there, I have an MLS as well. I don't secret librarians amongst us. I've been in a library. Any last questions or comments. Yes Oh, sorry.
Thank you. Hi, I'm Maria Sergio from the New England Journal of Medicine. You had said that you looked at job descriptions over a span of quite a few years. Did you notice any trends in like, what types of job descriptions are being posted now versus the kinds that were being posted then. Like, are there any positions that are on their way out.
We haven't. We actually didn't do that kind of analysis, but that is something we've considered also because due to exactly what you're talking about, of something being phased out and new ones coming in, we saw a dearth of I mentioned in this data set, that is precisely because it just happened in the last year, right. So I think if we have a reliable amount of date information, we can start doing that.
And, we only have about 50% That's still something we can look at. And there is something I wanted to point out that I forgot to mention during the methodology section. Please understand that none of this is statistically significant. These have all been weighted so that we can make comparisons equally. But, you saw how wildly overrepresented some functional areas were compared to others.
And I think as we get more data we can add here in those areas, we can start to see what you're talking about, of what's going out and what's coming in. I think it's a really fascinating question. And the other point about the methodology is it is replicable and documented. So the ideal is this becomes a bit of an observatory and one can track going forward and spot the emerging areas because I think that would be absolutely fascinating.
Yeah OK. I think probably we should draw ready for the last plenary. Thank you very much to the presenters. And Thank you to all of you for attending.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode