I'm going to do my bit. Are you?

I feel like I have read a 1001 blogs and tweets about the how the comprehensive spending review is going to affect us as a sector. It seems that in general this is how people feel:

• We can’t stop the cuts now. We can try and make them work
• We should have been letting our audience know what we do for them
• We need to change how we engage with our audiences and partners
• Some people will not want to work as a team so we may have to makes some changes as individuals.

So where does this blog come into it? Well it’s really important that we use this time to create a culture of change in our organisation through its workforce. It’s our opportunity to make a difference in the small amount of time we have. It’s also an opportunity to show your employers the skills that you have that are not listed on your job description and how it is vital to utilise them for survival. It could be the start of something great……………

So here are some tips to get you started. Feel free to add your own in the comments

The museum workforce needs lots of different people with different skills working in it. It’s highly unlikely that we are going to be recruiting them in the near future. Why don’t we become them? Find yourself a mentor in another sector and shadow them. If your organisation can’t afford to send you on a fundraising course, find a charity that exceeds at fundraising and absorb their knowledge and use it in your own organisation for the benefit of the service. Embrace this opportunity to add new skills to your own CV. Share your skills with others. Become the museum professional of the future.

If you have worked with partners such as the NHS, the Prison Service or other directorates in the local authority such as Children’s Services, convince them to repay all the hard work you have done by shouting your virtues in the direction of the people that should know about it. We talk our partnerships up to our funders and to the rest of the sector, now is the time for them to realise what we do for them in real terms. Give them the material to work with. That is how a true partnership works. Both ways.

We are all going to feel uncertain about the stability of our jobs over the next year. It might feel like its better to keep your head down and keep quiet and hope that the axe does not fall. Start talking to the people who are making the decisions. We work with the audience we serve, we know what they value the most; tell the people who need to know constructively what parts of the service are integral to maintaining that connection with our audience, and more importantly how we attract new audiences. Be brave but be clear and have the evidence ready to back you up. Remember it can be lonely at the top; our superiors want to hear that we have changed peoples lives, helped them get a job or made them visitors feel special by simply talking to them. If we don’t say it they don’t know it!

Start planning to show people how we think (not know) that we affect lives. See if they agree. Listen to them even if they don’t think we have done anything good for them, chances are if they don’t feel the benefit there isn’t one. It obvious the systems we are using now don’t work, don’t be afraid to scrap methods that don’t work just because it’s ‘the way we do it’. Evaluation is worthless if you don’t act on it. Make this planning the core of what you do as a service and that everyone in your organisation has a voice. It is everyone’s responsibility to make sure we meet the needs of our existing and future audiences.

I’m going to do my bit. Are you?

Day 1 of the MA Conference: An accreditation for staff?

Having rested from the Museums Association Conference, I feel ready to share my thoughts with you on it. I am going to take it day by day………..

Monday

I spent all of Monday feeling disappointed. It being my first time at conference I felt like the next three days were going to invigorate and motivate me. Well not on Monday anyway. I was really looking forward to the Dr Frankenstein’s guide to building the museum professional of the future but for me it just did not hit the spot. We spent time working in groups coming up with character traits and skills that the museum professional of the future would need to work in a sector that is changing. Then we heard from Tony Butler and Keith Merrin, directors of independent Museums that are doing great things around social entrepreneurship. Then came the questions, and this is where the session should have started.

We all know that the sector is changing. We know that museums now need to have successful corporate and community partnerships that meet the need of the expanding museum audience. We also know that we need people with expertise in these areas to work with us. At least I think everyone in that room knew this judging by the long list of skills and characteristics that was churned out.

What we really needed to know was how we recruit people with these skills? How we train our current staff to take on these new challenges? How do we get them through the benchmark entry requirements on local authority job specifications? Why should they want to come and work with us? What with the low pay, oversubscribed job opportunities and current cuts. I think the people in that room could have come up with some great answers, instead of covering old ground.

There needs to be some standards set that will support a museum in wanting to develop its workforce. The two most important things that make a museum successful is its collections and its staff. If we can provide standards for maintaining, developing and acquiring collections then we should certainly do the same for our staff.

Realistically we are only going to achieve a new dynamic in the museum workforce by getting the right people in the right room and get them making some actual decisions. That means the Museums Association, Universities, MLA and Local Authority decision makers. Take note of museums that have took on this challenge and are blooming because of it.

Lets not forget about Diversify

So, before I started looking into it I didn’t really know much about Diversify. I knew that it supported people from BME (black, minority, ethnic) backgrounds into Museum employment and I knew it provided those people with an MA in a Museum related subject. Did I think that Diversify was the solution to workforce diversity in the Museum Sector? No. After reading the recent MA report saying that BME staff are still underrepresented after a twelve year development programme I was decided. I started to look into Diversify. I had a few issues with Diversify.

Number one was that the majority of the original intake had already considered a career in museums before they saw the advert for Diversify and 14 out of the 30 had volunteering experience in a museum. I understand the barriers that some of these people may have faced when it came to getting a paid job, but I still think it would have been interesting to see where these people would have ended up without Diversify. Something tells me that if they had already considered a career in the sector and some of them had volunteering experience in the sector then some of them would have ended up working in a Museum. It got me thinking, in 1993 when 2.5% of staff working in museums was minority ethnic, how many minority ethnic people were out there wanting but failing to find work in a museum? Probably the same representational amount as White British people. Maybe the problem isn’t minority ethnic people finding a job after studying its supporting minority ethnic people to be inspired to think of the museums sector as a career choice at a younger age.

Number two is that The Diversity Evaluation Report states that a few respondents had previously thought about a career in museums but ‘had been put off by the need for voluntary experience when faced with large student debts after graduating. Diversify was a way round this problem’. To me this is not a diversity problem; it’s a sector wide problem.

Number three is that now Diversify has finished, the MA ‘hope that UK museums are now at a stage where workforce diversification can be integrated into museum policy as a matter of course’. Really? So after twelve years and with minority ethnic people still unrepresented, museums are ready to do this when only 113 ethnic minority people and a small amount of museums have been involved? The programme was led by a policy maker, not museums. Where is the transition? There is a Diversify toolkit which is a detailed guide on creating positive action traineeships in your own organisations but what is its use if this framework has not worked over the past 12 years?

I think supporting a positive action traineeship in your own organisation is worthwhile. There are many benefits for both you and the trainee, but I would suggest these traineeships could be offered to people leaving school or after 16-18 year old education. Capture their imagination before they leave school and give them the opportunity to do something that they had never considered.

http://www.museumsassociation.org/careers/diversify

http://www.museumsassociation.org/news/16092010-minority-ethnic-staff-still-under-represented-in-museums

Introducing Museum Workforce.........

Well I suppose I had better tell you what this blog is all about.

I’m on the 2010 Renaissance North West funded Museology Professional Development Programme, and my personal project is to explore the theme of Museum workforce development. I feel really passionately about this subject as I entered the Museums profession via an odd route myself, stopping off in the housing, care and education sectors along the way. But that’s a story for later.

I have no Museum qualifications and I didn’t want to work in a Museum when I grew up – shock horror!! And yet I work in one. The majority of people that I encounter working in the same sector have at least an MA in a Museum related subject as well as their degree. Now, I’m not saying having gained that level of education is a bad thing, but should everyone who works in a Museum have or need those credentials? Do they need to be that specific? Who sets the standard, is it the employers, Universities or ourselves?

Who exactly is the ideal Museum professional and can they ever exist within our current set up?

Do our organisational structures and current views on professionalism get in the way of hiring people from outside of the sector who can bring fresh ideas to the table?

How realistic is it for a person succeeding in another sector to enter into the Museum workforce and transfer that success?

Which hurdle would they fall at? Lack of qualifications, experience, or the fact that they did not know where to look for the job advertisement?

Who decides what training is appropriate or necessary?

Is work experience measurable?

I know there are so many questions and that they would be easy to brush under the carpet in favour of dealing with the repercussions of the tough financial times we are all facing. I’m going to try and answer some myself but along the way I’m going to be video interviewing people working in the sector, students and policy makers to collect their thoughts and ideas about Workforce development.

I believe that if Museums are to survive they need the support of a diverse audience. I don’t believe you can truly have this without a diverse workforce.