On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Adrienne Roberts wrote:

++++ [CLIP ++++

> Out of panic and desperation, I thought I would turn to you all for some
advice.  I am currently looking for an entry level position, preferably in
the curatorial/collections field.  During the past 6 months I have been
able to find more than 60 web pages that list museum related jobs in North
America, so I've not been slack.

=========================

Adrienne:

I feel very deeply for you.  In the early 1960s when the museum scene was
in deep recession over much of the world it took me four years to get my
first museum job, during which time I trained and then worked as a
secondary school teacher.

At that time the problem was that museums weren't recruiting, because of a
combination of lack of growth and a stable (middle-aged) professional
workforce of people appointed (or re-appointed) as UK museums
re-established themselves after World War II.

The present situation is different.  There is currently a massive
"over-production" by pre-employment museum studies (and similar) courses
in relation to even the most optimistic labour market projections in
several major countries.  In less than 30 years the numbers of
postgraduate museum studies courses around the world has risen from less
that 30 to somewhere well over 500, while the average number of students
on most of these has also often doubled or trebled.

To take Britain as an example, there are probably less than 100 graduate
entry-level jobs a year, and a rapidly growing proportion of these are for
people with very specialised academic or professional qualifications (eg.
specialist PhDs, education, specialised conservation, accountancy,
building services management or human resources management), rather than
generalist curators or other traditional museum studies specialisations.
(It is estimated that curators in the traditional sense have fallen from
over 30% of the total museum workforce three decades ago to around 12%
today. However, against a labour market need of well under 100 a year, the UK
Museums Association currently has around 800 student members on (or
recently graduated from) such courses trying to get entry level jobs.

France was here 15 or so years ago. Most museum jobs were in the
government service, and entry was by means of a national competition (the
annual "Concours").  To prepare for this took at least two postgraduate
years including up to a year of voluntary work in a major museum, and
studies in the Ecole du Louvre.  There was, however, a fixed pass mark,
and everyone achieving this was then placed on an official list of
candidates who were allowed to apply for jobs when these became vacant and
were advertised amongst those on the Liste d'Aptitude.

However, despite a high standard and many failures each year, the numbers
for one particular government grade - as curators or deputy curators of
the major regional museums and galleries - mounted exponentially through
the late '70s and early '80s, so that against a total employment (not
annual vacancies) of around 150 there were quickly around 800 on the Liste.
In other words there were over three working life-times worth of
candidates waiting for these 150 or so jobs to become vacant.

The French government's solution was as brutal as it was controversial.
Primary legislation was passed cancelling completely all these hard-won
qualifications.  Instead a completely new system was set up based on a
competition for entry to a national staff college for advanced training in
museum, archive and heritage work.  Entry to this was by a national
competition again, but now instead of having an absolute pass mark, the
numbers who pass in each professional specialisation each year is strictly
limited by government decree to the estimated number of professional
vacancies that are expected to occur 2 years later, at the end of the
training programme.  On this basis in some recent years the total number
of museum curator passes in the Concours has been fixed as low as four
per year - out of well over 600 entries a year to the competition.

Though this seems extremely harsh, I often wonder whether this is not in
the longer term far more honest that simply packing people into
pre-employment courses in number than can never lead to employment.

The other possibility, Adrienne, is to re-train for one of the "shortage"
areas in museum employment, such as museum management or information
communication technologies (including museum network and Web management
and wider Internet skills). Both are rapidly growing areas within which
there are definite skill shortages worldwide.


Patrick Boylan
Prof. of Heritage Poilicy and Management
City University, London

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