The emergence of hybrid professionals: New skills, roles and career options for the information professional.

The online networked environment continues to challenge the information profession. Easy access to masses of information via search engines has given business people, students, and many others false confidence in their ability to find what they need. The knowledge economy has driven large parts of the workforce into information-intensive roles and moved other professions closer to our territory. Information professionals have had to develop more specialised roles to make a distinctive business contribution. The new specialisms include emerging hybrid roles, which combine information expertise with extensive in-depth knowledge drawn from other professional disciplines. The new ‘hybrid professionals’ typically sit on the boundaries of established professions, occupying the expanded territory representing the overlaps among different domains. These boundary-spanning roles require a wider skillset and broader knowledge base than before: organisational understanding and management abilities must be supported by competence in two distinct, often diverse, specialist fields. Hybrid professionals are now firmly established in the information world. Notable examples include the specialist fields of legal know-how, health informatics, information literacy and digital libraries. A key feature of these hybrid domains is the different sub-species that have emerged reflecting the backgrounds of postholders who can enter the shared territory from either side of the professional divide. Indicators of their maturity include the representation of these specialisms at progressive levels of the organisational hierarchy; the creation of dedicated professional networks and formal bodies to support their work; and the development of specialist postgraduate education and training programmes for both new entrants and seasoned practitioners