The Canadian Museums Association is holding a Trainer's Workshop (
held every three years) in Toronto this Thursday through Saturday to
address a C.M.A. Human Resource Planning Committee report. This is a
report which has been developed over the last year assisted by our
Employment and Immigration- Manpower Department of the federal
government in an attempt to develop secotral strategies for the future
of museum work. We are the first non-profit work area that the federal
department is supporting in strategic planning for the 21st C!
 
Our report addresses issues such as : human resource planning for
museums, jobs competency analysis, recruitment and training, the impact of
technology and developing job areas, pay equity and cultural diversity
impacts on recruitment and many other areas.
 
Much of the data on which this report is based is by necessity
fleeting.  I would appreciate any  information, stories , intuitions
from the members of museum-l as to future developments in museum work.
All of this information is as valid as any information that is now
three or four years old from our cultural statistics sources. I would
love to be able to take any of your insights to this gathering of over
50 museum people involved with the future of museum work from Canada
and including some colleagues from Britain and the U.S.
 
 
In Canada, we have witnessed the downsizing of many large provincial
museums and galleries over the last two years as well as serious
restructuring. Colleagues with excellent service records have lost
jobs while others are suffering pay freezes and cutbacks.  People
looking for museum jobs, be they graduates from Museum Studies or others, see
+ few job opportunities.
 
How serious are the changes? Indeed, a few of us remember some dire
days when employment was thin in the early eighties or even longer ago
in the 1960's before the museum -boom (so-called).  To what degree are
we in the middle of a revolutionary restructuring of our cultural
institutions and employment patterns.  As a person who is constantly
advising people about museum work whether they be new to the field or
old hats, it is a tricky exercise to convey solid information about
the labour market and emerging trends.  We have a huge responsibility
to be positive in our advise to students and new people to the field,
and to encourage creative and imnspirational solutions for them to
come and join in museum work. We have as much responsibility to
prevent the deadrot which occurs when valuable museum people are
frustrated by their management structures, by the few challenges and
rewards they perceive in their institutions. Clearly, the future of
museums depends on our people.
 
Or have I missed something. Generation X does have as a different
future for their museum careers.  One strong suggestion in our work
for the CMA is the prediction that the museum field will become more
like the performing arts where museum careerists will move from job to
job as freelancers or in consultancies like a journeyman/woman
museologist (yes I will use this word and I advise you to investigate
its meaning before you call it silly). As various museum
responsibilities are outsourced and contracted out, one view is that
even large museums will have a smaller core of museum workers with
many activities sent out to outside companies of museum experts or
whatever experts.
 
You will quickly see that the implications for educating future
professionals takes on a different shape given this scenario.  Generalists
with a complex set of  skills and abilities will be the most
desirable. Experience, paper qualifications, two and three degrees,
wonderful connections and a swell personality-- the museum employer of
the future can ask for it all. Furthermore, numbers of museum workers
will be competing with each other for the same contracts, a fact which
I dare say will have an impacty on salaries.  And what will the
professional associations do?  I suggest that support for individual
museum workers will become more important in the development and
management of their careers.
 
 
So, after all this, again let me sincerely invite your thoughts on
jobs, past, present, future. What's the score? Or am I just sitting in
dreary, cold ( and I do mean cold!) Toronto worrying about nothing, biased
by the decline of some Ontario institutions?  Or is this in anyway a global as
well as a local problem?
 
 
Thanks for your thoughts,
 
 
 
Lynne Teather,
Professor of Museum Studies,       "be-mused, bothered, and bewildered"
University of Toronto,
Toronto, Ontario,
CANADA  M5S 1A1
Phone: 416-978-8822  Fax: 416-967-8821
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]