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This week the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) and the Archives and Records Association (ARA) published a series of 24 fact sheets on the demography of the UK workforce in libraries, archives, records, information management, and knowledge management. The data, presented in the fact sheets by sector and region, derive from the findings of the Workforce Mapping Project.

This project was completed in 2014/15 by an Edinburgh Napier University team that comprised three staff from the Centre for Social Informatics (Hazel Hall, Christine Irving and Bruce Ryan) and three from the Employment Research Institute (Robert Raeside, Tao Chen and Matthew Dutton). In November 2015 CILIP and ARA used data from the final project report to publish the headline findings from the study. Continue reading →

The executive summary is available from the CILIP web site

Last week the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) and the Archives and Records Association (ARA) held a launch event in London. Here an executive summary of the Workforce Mapping Project, with which I have been heavily involved over the past 15 months, was presented. The summary distributed at the launch notes key findings of the study.

These include:

The estimated size of the UK workforce in the Library, Archives, Records, Information Management, and Knowledge Management professions is 86,376.
Women dominate the workforce (78.1% of the workforce is female, and 21.9% male), yet earn less than men, and are not so well represented in senior management positions.
The workforce is highly qualified: 61.4% hold postgraduate academic qualifications.
The workforce is ageing: 55.3% of its members are over 45 years of age. (The equivalent figure for the UK workforce as a whole is 41.1%.)
There is low ethnic diversity in the workforce: 96.7% identify as ‘white’.

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