Library & Cultural Services: Skills at Library: Information skills

Whether you are a first year undergraduate or working on your PhD, information skills can make or break your academic experience. The information skills and habits you use today will have an impact on your future degree and employability outcomes, so it's a good idea to regularly assess your capabilities and identify the areas you need to develop.

This overview of information skills covers:

What information literacy means and why these skills are important
How to assess your skills
How to make Skills at Library training work for you

Click to expand presentation: What is information literacy?

Already confident in your information literacy skills? Continue to the next section on 'Managing Information' or return to the Skills at Library homepage to select another lesson.

Here's some quick links to help you develop information skills:

Complete our Academic Skills Audit to assess your current information and academic skills and discover resources to support your development.
Reflect on your results. What are your strengths, and what do you need to work on?
Create a personal development plan and outline the steps you will take to improve your skills. We have a downloadable worksheet that can help you get started or you can try one of these free Notion templates. Remember to refer back to your plan to reflect on your progress.
If you are a postgraduate or researcher, take a look at our Research Support pages that cover publishing, open access, copyright, increasing research visibility, and more.

Information literacy includes basic skills like using Library resources, and more advanced academic skills. Continue learning with Skills at Library to develop advanced skills.

Want to learn more?

Attend a Skills at Library open workshop. These sessions will give you an opportunity to practice skills, learn alongside your peers, and get instructor feedback.
Explore the digital skills support available at Essex.
Register for our 'Information Skills' course on Moodle to access additional learning exercises and discussions.
Complete the 'Digital Skills for Learning' online Moodle course to learn about using different software, web browsers, and more!
Complete an Information Literacy course on LinkedIn Learning to earn a badge for your digital CV.
Click the 'Next' button below to continue learning about different types of information sources and where to access them.

Except where otherwise noted, this work by University of Essex Library and Cultural Services is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.