Pay and the museum sector

This week, the Museums Association's Salary Guidelines report found that museum works are paid on average 7% less than their equivalents in other fields. While this was no surprise to anyone working in the industry, it does beg the question - now what? We all know museums do not pay well, and certainly not equivalent to the multiple skills and years of experience it demands of its staff, particularly in entry level jobs. But is there any way to change that?

The new curatorship campaign at the National Trust

In April 2017, the National Trust announced that it would be doubling their curatorial staff in two years (at all levels) and advertising posts in the region of £33,000 pa. It was a bold and much talked about strategy to move the benchmark for wages in curatorial work. It was thus far the most proactive change in the heritage sector in a long time and so far (as far as we know) no other major cultural organisations have followed suit. What would it take, and importantly who would it take, to make a more permanent shift in the industry. The Tate? The NPG? The Science Museum?

We think there's three issues here that would need to be addressed if any changes could be made. The first is a lack of government support for the work of museums and art galleries.

1) Years and years of to the bone cuts have forced museums to rely on their staff for more while making due on less. I'm sure there any many people at lots of organisations who would love to pay their staff more, but simply can't. It's very hard to justify benchmarking jobs properly when you are worried about even being able to support the position at all. The government would need to make a significant and sustained investment in museums and in particular in staffing and other administrative costs, for anything to change. #fuckausterity #fuckbrexit

2) Pay. your. interns. Museums function on volunteers and yes, its great to an extent. But where someone is doing proper, skilled work or learning museum vocational skills, they should be paid. Many of the entry level salary packages in museum honestly look more like apprenticeship or internship pay than anything else. Creating more entry level paid roles and boosting the salaries of those working in the more skilled positions would enhance the industry as a whole. But, of course, see above.


3) Fight sexism in museums. Museums are a predominantly female dominated industry, aside from the privileged few at the top of the ladder (and their salaries are doing just fine). It's the entry level and other lower grade posts which suffer from the biggest salaries gap - and we bet you'd find, they are mostly women. Women's work is valued less via a phenomenon called 'employer bias', which is based in deeply rooted stereotypes. This is especially true in the museum industry where people are told again and again they should be grateful to have any job at all.

It's awful and frustrating and we don't really have a realistic solution. All we can say is - when you go for a museum job, negotiate your salary. Don't accept the first thing offered, make sure you are paid as much as that institution can reasonable afford for your role. Secondly, if you do have hiring power, do everything you can to help your HR departments and Trustees benchmark the roles appropriately. Save every job advert you see- especially reasonable ones like at the National Trust. Keep volunteer work volunteer work, don't make people work for free for work that should be a job (even if its more convenient). Thirdly, join your union and use your voice and body to show that you disagree with the current situation, Prospect and PCS are well represented among museums and galleries but don't be put off if your institution doesn't have a rep you can still join - there is a membership fee but its tiered against earnings. 

Stick together and make some noise! Let your  Let your organisations know that if they need to slash budgets it shouldn't come from staffing. Museums are nothing without the people in them.

Ministry Moan: Job Titles

Thursday lunchtime, you’re  eating at your desk (again) and painstakingly refreshing the University of  Leicester Museum Jobs page with the faint optimism that there will be something, well anything that your degree and years of volunteering will allow you to apply for. Finally,  there's a glimmer of hope- a collections job, it's not volunteering and actually pays just above minimum wage. The only thing is to apply for the role you have to carefully decipher the job title, and you soon realize that you can't speak industry babble. Really, the role is definitely not for an early career professional, it's more like a directorship, paying less than £20,000 a year. Who wants to be a Collections Significance Officer anyway!?

Here at The Ministry we feel your pain and like you Thursday lunchtimes are often spent under a wave of optimism or crushing depression as we are reminded that the museum job market is far from straight forward. Pushing past the funding buzzwords and warding off any gut feelings we all put on our game face on  and delve into the puzzle that could determine our future. If you can decipher the job title and person spec you're surely in for a chance. Right?

Perhaps we're too familiar with the job titles that out families and friends expect to hear, like curator of this or curator of that. But there does seem to have been a shift towards the fancier title that either over simplifies or over complicates the application process. ‘Forward Planning Assistant’ ‘Collections Access Coordinator and Logistics and Storage Administrator’ or ‘Selection Advisor.’ Do these titles say too much or too little about what we do in the Museum industry? 

Oh Neil...

Maybe it's down to the predecessor's interpretation of the role, yet at the time of publishing this article there’s even an advertisement for ‘Executive Assistant to Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum.' Really would 'Executive Assistant to the Director' not do? Do you really have to name drop him, we all know who the Director of the British Museum is, having his name on your staff pass won't pull enough connections to get you a Nando's black card. Chill the ego MacGregor. 

Front of house is often just as barmy. I know of one institution where public facing staff are referred to as Gallery Assistant's, Crew Member's, Event Assistant's and Visitor Experience staff all within the same HR department.  Can we really not standardized the term for the most public of jobs in the Museum industry? We’re not at Alton Towers folks, Visitor Experience staff won't be leading you onto a ride, nor will Visitor Services be at your every beck and call. Let's give these guys some respect and perhaps stick with one or two job titles for the thousands front of house staff across the City. 

The weird and wonderful, long and barmy job titles won't be  standardizing or shortening  anytime soon but we can at least create a space where Museum job seekers can discuss what's happening to their CV's. Use the hashtag #museumjobs and we’ll certainly put ourselves out there to offer advice on titles and job specs. Ask your Ministry. 

The Ministry Explains It All: Getting into museums

Recently it was the annual #Askacurator day, when twitter was flooded with questions from the public aimed at museums elusive behind the scenes staff. Questions ranged from how do museums utilize social media to what’s your favourite object in the collection, but the one question which came up again and again was, ‘How do you get a job in a museum?’

So young, so naive...

It’s a question that comes up a lot, and one which has been at the centre of a lot of debate of late. Do you need a museums studies degree to work in a museum? Is there really another way to get into the sector besides being able to do years of unpaid internships? Do you need to have an art history background? Are there any early career jobs even available in museums?

It seems every year the museum job market is flooded with a new generation of bright young things, fresh from degrees in art history, archaeology, history and museum studies who all seem to be asking the same question: what do I need to do to be a museum curator?

The almost universal response is: do a lot of voluntary work, followed almost immediately by some facts about how badly paid the sector is, how few and far between jobs are, how limited your career trajectory will be. But none of this will stem the tide of the number of people keen to work in museums. Why? Because working in museums may be underpaid and frustrating but it is absolutely brilliant.

So now we’ve given you the realistic down to earth warning about working in museums. Are you still there? Still think you have what it takes to make it in museums? In that case, the Ministry have created for you two brand new pages that bring together all our advice and insider know how.

The 'Top tips for getting into museums' page provides the Ministry's top 10 pieces of advice for how you can get yourself a museum job. We aren't saying its easy, or that we know best, but we thought it would be best to share and share alike our own experiences of working in the industry.

And if that wasn't enough, we've also pulled together a list of Ministry Resources for Museum People to bring together information from across the web that you'll need to know to get into museums or to just move up the ladder. You can look forward to links to museum job pages, details of subject specialist networks, more info on museum databases and much more.

We hope you enjoy the pages and please let us know if you have any tips you think we've missed out! 

Why your registrar should be your best friend

It is the burden of a registrar to be constantly asked, ‘So what exactly is it that you do?’ Sometimes even by other museum people. To this age-old question, a registrar can be counted upon to sigh heavily and launch into an explanation, all the while dying a little inside.

I am writing today to rectify this wrong. Museum people and all you other museum lovers- listen up! I will explain to you what a registrar does so that you will never make this tragic mistake again. Let there be no doubt for all in the museum world, but particularly on the exhibitions circuit, your registrar is your best friend, and you never EVER want to annoy them. Although you inevitably will.

Nope registrars never do this. In fact they make sure
that fool on the left is getting fired for not wearing gloves. 

It is the core of a registrar’s job to be annoyed by curators. Wait, scratch that, we will get to that a bit later. Let’s go back to basics and simply say that a registrar’s job is to do the registry work for the museum. Not more enlightened? Registry work is all things to do with the legal and logistical aspects of acquiring or disposing objects, whether for the collections or for loans. That means every object you see in an exhibition which says ‘on loan from…’ is only there because the registrars from the lending and borrowing institutions did days, possibly weeks, worth of work to make it happen.

That seems like a silly job, you might say. Why not just put the thing in the back of your car and drive it over to the other museum? Because it is also the registrar’s job to ensure that museums are acting according to industry standards at all times- and that means making sure every part of a loan ‘nail to nail’ is done with the utmost professionalism. That’s important because if you slip below museums standards of logistics, packing, conservation, or display the Lending institution can revoke the loan at any time, or even worse, you can lose your insurance cover.

Registrars are also in charge of all kinds of legal aspects about acquiring and disposing objects. Can you buy an object off the black-market that is made of endangered animal furs and was also looted by the Nazis? Of course not, and registrars are here to make sure crazy curators don’t.

Aside from any technical definition of what registry work includes, a registrar is essentially the middleman between all the different museum departments to make sure everything runs smoothly. A registrar will often coordinate between curatorial and conservation to make sure that objects for exhibition are condition checked, conserved and packed as necessary. They also work with donors to organise acquisitions and returns of objects. A good registrar will make sure everyone is talking to everyone else during a project and that everything gets done to time.

We can only assume the registrars are the ones in the background,
looking on critically. 

This also means that people tend to get annoyed with or even dislike registrars. Curators will often be driven crazy by registrars constantly pushing paper at them, telling them what they can and can’t do, or nagging them about deadlines. On the flip side, curators drive us crazy sometimes changing their exhibition plans, object lists, move in dates and god knows what else. And don’t even get me started on designers who just really want to display an object under a waterfall, or want people to experience a priceless 18^th century object through the sense of taste. These things sound like fun and probably look cool, but basically go against everything a museum stands for in terms of protecting heritage.

To be fair, the work of a registrar varies across institutions. In some museums registry work is done by the curator, in others it might be combined with documentation, and in some places it falls to exhibitions teams. What I can tell you is, whatever wrapping they come in, on any exhibition project there will be a registrar type person, and you need to make them your best friend. They have the contacts with museum logistics companies, they know who’s who in conservation and they can give you all kinds of paperwork related advice.

So here’s to you registrars, unsung heroes of the museum world. You make exhibitions happen, you make sure the various bickering departments work together, you keep museums accredited and you use your mad-organization skills to keep objects safe at all times.  Now go to work and hug your registrar, they probably need one after how stressed you’ve made them.