Information education in the 21st century: to stay competitive in today's business environment, information professionals will need to broaden their knowledge through more comprehensive educational tools.

• Author: Dearstyne, Bruce W.
• Position: Career Path

The contributions of educational programs to any profession are important. Among other things, they help determine the nature and content of professional fields, offer aspiring practitioners courses that impart theory and best practices, carry out research that improves the knowledge base of the field, produce publications that enrich the field, and award degrees that signify mastery of content. Effective educational programs are even more important in a field such as records and information management (RIM), which is steadily changing, expanding, becoming more complex, and requiring a broadening array of knowledge/skills/abilities for entering professionals.

At the least, today's RIM professionals need

* subject-area expertise (e.g., the work of their organizations)

* leadership and management skills to develop and sustain flexible, effective programs (e.g., understanding the direction of their industry and their organization)

* aptitude for thriving on change, ambiguity, and inconclusiveness

* flexibility to grow, change, and refine or modify the career path over the years (e.g., the ability to move with ease from one industry to another and from one type of professional service to another)

* skills to conceptualize and develop insights, strategies, and approaches as needs change

* well-developed analytical skills (e.g., research, understanding of financial issues, cost benefit analysis)

* instinctive inclination toward management, partnership, and facilitation (e.g., teaming, coaching)

* ability to deal with new creator/user expectations for information (e.g., easy and nearly instantaneous access to needed information)

In the past, many people became records managers without formal training and learned on the job. That approach has been made obsolete as records management evolved and broadened into RIM and thus became steadily more complex and demanding. For that reason, there is a need for a concerted effort to upgrade educational requirements and expand offerings. However, establishing educational expectations is challenging; consider just a few complications:

* E-government and e-business rely on well-managed digital information, but their expectations and strategies are in flux. "If you look at the Internet technologies, for example, there are business methods that are being pioneered, Web-based techniques, and infrastructure, and they are tumbling out so fast that Approach M is barely beginning to be deployed when a better idea -- M + 1 -- comes along and says, Don't bother with that. Deploy me," explains Intel chairman Andrew Grove in The Mind of the CEO.

* The characteristics, and even the name, of the field are in flux: records management, records and information management, and strategic information management are all terms and concepts...