The way that the museum world recruits and hones new talent is about to be given a comprehensive shake-up. Creative & Cultural Skills (CCS), the sector skills council for all branches of the arts, including cultural heritage, is planning a UK-wide Creative Apprenticeship programme and has established a taskforce for the project made up of key industry representatives.
'The taskforce will look at what sort of entry-level training is required across the sector but there is also a need to broaden the scope,' says Victoria Pirie, the industry skills director at CCS. 'It's predominantly graduate at entry level in the cultural sector and there's a need to look at more diverse pathways into museums, galleries and the other cultural bodies.'
The taskforce is examining possible frameworks for an apprenticeship scheme that it hopes to pilot from September with employers including some national museums plus archaeology and built heritage organisations. In addition, the Work Foundation, a research and management consultancy, is producing a report on the types of apprenticeship on offer in other fields of employment.
One possible model will be a set of core modules on, for example, business development and workplace skills, to which specialist modules for each creative discipline could be added, says Pirie. 'But the other thing we are looking at is for an apprenticeship to include separate modules in, say, an advertising agency and in a museum. Why should we pigeonhole people at this point?'
The taskforce's key priorities of matching entry-level training more closely to the needs of employers and diversifying the workforce are issues that are likely to resonate strongly with museums of all sizes. But they are only strands in a complex and multi-faceted set of problems besetting workforce development.
In terms of the entry-level skills shortage, Roy Clare, the director of the National Maritime Museum and a member of the CCS board, points out that the museum profession is in fact a blend of many professions and making connections with other areas of expertise, such as tourism and visitor services, is almost as important as curatorial skill.
'People should be commercially aware, visitor aware and, increasingly, digitally aware,' Clare says. 'And I don't think we ever do enough on communication and leadership. The Museums Association's own AMA has the capacity to grow in that area and universities and other masters degree providers have a role to play in raising the game. Talking to the providers is going to be an important part of what we do in the sector skills council.'
Where there is a mismatch between what universities offer and what museums require, it is not necessarily the academics' fault, says Maurice Davies, the deputy director of the Museums Association. The main culpability lies with museums.
'There's a huge growth in postgraduate studies courses combined with the withdrawal of museums offering traineeships,' Davies says. 'So, through no design, responsibility for recruitment into the profession has moved from museums to the courses and obviously the courses are much worse placed to know who is needed in museums. There's far too much training and qualifications going on and far too few "good" people coming out the other end.'
Interestingly, despite employers' disquiet, universities claim decent success rates at getting their postgraduates into jobs. At Newcastle, 85 per cent of MA museum studies students in 2004 were in work or taking higher degrees in the field shortly after completing the course.
And at Leicester in 2004 79 per cent of postgraduates on the long-established museum studies programme had found jobs in museums or a related field six months after graduation.
Most of the 14 museum management students who took their MA at Greenwich between 2002 and 2005 now have jobs, ranging from audience development and membership roles to lectureships and, in one case, a national directorship in Australia, says MA programme director Alix Slater.
Those who have not found work in the sector tend not to have done voluntary work 'and therefore weren't as employable,' she says, suggesting unpaid experience remains the job-market clincher.
But it is not clear how many of these graduates were from overseas and subsequently returned to jobs in their country of origin.
The lack of appropriately trained graduates is compounded by the paucity of opportunities for non-graduates who might nevertheless have valuable skills to offer. There are systemic problems that need to be addressed if this is to change, one of which is a failure to promote museums as a career to school-leavers, says Clare.
'There is an issue about perceptions of museums as a career. Anecdotally, I know that there are barriers from the point of view of careers advisers [who think that] museum jobs offer low pay and that it is a dull job. It means that we are not selling the profession well enough.'
Exacerbating the poor image is the fragmented nature of post-16 training in the cultural sector, while non-graduates with generic but increasingly valuable skills in digitisation or web development are not actively encouraged to consider museums as a worthwhile job.
Veronika Harris, the head of training at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), says that what is missing from the debate is a coherent structure linking schools, employers and the further education sector so that young people interested in museum careers have clear pathways into it.
'There needs to be a programme to give young people core basic skills for arts and culture which will give them some flexibility around the sector, so if they work in digital imaging, for example, they could ply that in museums, dance, art or theatre.'
One of the initiatives the CCS taskforce will study is Apprenticeships, the Learning and Skills Council-funded training programme for young people that operates in other sectors. The taskforce will assess how it might be tweaked to suit cultural organisations.
Apprenticeships elsewhere have focused on the under-25s but it is possible that for the cultural sector the scheme could be adapted to apply more widely, for people looking to change career or more mature entrants.
Some museums have already devised their own ways to help train and develop non-graduates. 'If you don't have a degree, your routes through a career in museums are pretty limited and those that do exist are not widely known,' Harris says. 'At the V&A, we have created nationally-accredited vocational qualifications in curatorial, technical and admin skills and there has been good take-up by people already working in the museum and by new employees.'
The Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust has embarked on an Apprenticeships for All scheme in collaboration with the New Deal for Communities. The trust has taken on two unemployed people from a deprived area of the city to work on the £17.3m development of the City Museum and Mappin Art Gallery, now being refashioned as the Weston Park Museum.
The employees, both in their early 20s, had no previous experience of museum work. They are working in front-of-house roles initially and the intention is to find full-time posts for both when the refurbished galleries are opened.
The trust has used other diversification schemes offered by the regional hub and Positive Action traineeships but the impact of such initiatives on broadening the socio-economic mix is limited, says Mark Hilton, the trust's director of finance and resources.
'You are really still talking to the same constituency as before - it is the middle-classes. With Apprenticeships for All, we are trying to get into the community at a younger age and trying to get people thinking about museums at a much earlier stage. The people we have taken on are only two or three years out of school and they hadn't stepped inside a museum before.'
Collaboration with the New Deal makes pragmatic sense but recruiting from the local workforce also embodies the ethos of the new, community-oriented museum, Hilton says. 'We prefer to get into things that are already happening on the ground, rather than join another talking shop. People at the New Deal are absolutely delighted that an organisation like ours is willing to work with them.'
Employers who spoke to Museums Journal for this article generally welcomed the idea of a new, more coherent approach to training as proposed by the sector skills council but with varying degrees of reservation.
Some felt that encouraging more non-graduates into jobs at the bottom of the pay scale would do little to alter the essentially middle-class nature of the profession.
Others were wary of the imposition of 'top-down' national schemes when so much activity in the public and not-for-profit sectors is now geared to responding to local needs and building local partnerships.
And of course a major concern is funding - not merely trainees' wages, but also the extra cost in terms of staff time to recruit and manage them and to pitch the proposition to other staff.
CCS will be exploring funding along with the other issues, but for museums the taskforce members will need to draw on all their creative nous if they are to uproot the obstacles that are currently holding back the development of the workforce.
Julie Nightingale is a freelance journalist
What's wrong with the recruitment system?
Maurice Davies, the deputy director of the Museums Association, is researching barriers to participation in museum careers for a project with the University of East Anglia, and his initial findings suggest that the system of recruitment is seriously dysfunctional.
First, it is failing to attract enough of the 'right' candidates in terms of skills and of diversity of subject specialism, as well as background.
'There's nothing wrong with having lots of female, middle-class humanities students but there needs to be some variety as well,' says Davies. 'It's a strong business principle now that successful organisations need a diverse staff.'
Less widely acknowledged is Davies's finding that the struggle to gain even a foothold in the museum world can be personally damaging. In interviews he has carried out with people in the early stages of their career, many emphasised the impact on their lives of the difficulty of securing a permanent job, even after costly postgraduate training and unpaid work experience.
Some have quit to join other professions - or plan to do so - for financial reasons, though money is by no means the only issue.
'Some of them are really sad stories of people whose 20s have been ruined by trying to get a museum job,' Davies says. 'It's not just finance and time. It's also the cost in terms of people's sense of themselves at what is quite a vulnerable age. It's exploitative in the worst sense. And running through a lot of the responses is some personal confusion about why they are in this position.'
Worryingly for the profession, there's also the possibility that the difficulty of securing a job in a museum is in itself reducing the quality of candidates coming through. The necessity of working for little or no pay in the beginning and enduring the uncertainty of serial temporary work could be a deterrent to the best graduates.
As such, those who do make it through may be more the plodders than the dynamos who will inject fresh life into the sector and ultimately improve it.
One of Davies's other contentions may prove even less palatable: people who pursue postgraduate courses could be wasting their time and money.
'There's a whole variety of other ways people get into the profession, sometimes just being in the right place at the right time. Typically, only half of those registered for the Associateship of the Museums Association (AMA) have a postgraduate qualification. A lot of people come through arts organisations, some from teaching. There's a definite amateurishness about how people are recruited.'
Davies, who will be presenting his findings to employers, says getting them on side will be vital if improvements to the system are to be made. 'If the employers don't buy into the need to change the way recruitment is done in museums, it will be very hard to change anything,' he says.
'The taskforce will look at what sort of entry-level training is required across the sector but there is also a need to broaden the scope,' says Victoria Pirie, the industry skills director at CCS. 'It's predominantly graduate at entry level in the cultural sector and there's a need to look at more diverse pathways into museums, galleries and the other cultural bodies.'
The taskforce is examining possible frameworks for an apprenticeship scheme that it hopes to pilot from September with employers including some national museums plus archaeology and built heritage organisations. In addition, the Work Foundation, a research and management consultancy, is producing a report on the types of apprenticeship on offer in other fields of employment.
One possible model will be a set of core modules on, for example, business development and workplace skills, to which specialist modules for each creative discipline could be added, says Pirie. 'But the other thing we are looking at is for an apprenticeship to include separate modules in, say, an advertising agency and in a museum. Why should we pigeonhole people at this point?'
The taskforce's key priorities of matching entry-level training more closely to the needs of employers and diversifying the workforce are issues that are likely to resonate strongly with museums of all sizes. But they are only strands in a complex and multi-faceted set of problems besetting workforce development.
In terms of the entry-level skills shortage, Roy Clare, the director of the National Maritime Museum and a member of the CCS board, points out that the museum profession is in fact a blend of many professions and making connections with other areas of expertise, such as tourism and visitor services, is almost as important as curatorial skill.
'People should be commercially aware, visitor aware and, increasingly, digitally aware,' Clare says. 'And I don't think we ever do enough on communication and leadership. The Museums Association's own AMA has the capacity to grow in that area and universities and other masters degree providers have a role to play in raising the game. Talking to the providers is going to be an important part of what we do in the sector skills council.'
Where there is a mismatch between what universities offer and what museums require, it is not necessarily the academics' fault, says Maurice Davies, the deputy director of the Museums Association. The main culpability lies with museums.
'There's a huge growth in postgraduate studies courses combined with the withdrawal of museums offering traineeships,' Davies says. 'So, through no design, responsibility for recruitment into the profession has moved from museums to the courses and obviously the courses are much worse placed to know who is needed in museums. There's far too much training and qualifications going on and far too few "good" people coming out the other end.'
Interestingly, despite employers' disquiet, universities claim decent success rates at getting their postgraduates into jobs. At Newcastle, 85 per cent of MA museum studies students in 2004 were in work or taking higher degrees in the field shortly after completing the course.
And at Leicester in 2004 79 per cent of postgraduates on the long-established museum studies programme had found jobs in museums or a related field six months after graduation.
Most of the 14 museum management students who took their MA at Greenwich between 2002 and 2005 now have jobs, ranging from audience development and membership roles to lectureships and, in one case, a national directorship in Australia, says MA programme director Alix Slater.
Those who have not found work in the sector tend not to have done voluntary work 'and therefore weren't as employable,' she says, suggesting unpaid experience remains the job-market clincher.
But it is not clear how many of these graduates were from overseas and subsequently returned to jobs in their country of origin.
The lack of appropriately trained graduates is compounded by the paucity of opportunities for non-graduates who might nevertheless have valuable skills to offer. There are systemic problems that need to be addressed if this is to change, one of which is a failure to promote museums as a career to school-leavers, says Clare.
'There is an issue about perceptions of museums as a career. Anecdotally, I know that there are barriers from the point of view of careers advisers [who think that] museum jobs offer low pay and that it is a dull job. It means that we are not selling the profession well enough.'
Exacerbating the poor image is the fragmented nature of post-16 training in the cultural sector, while non-graduates with generic but increasingly valuable skills in digitisation or web development are not actively encouraged to consider museums as a worthwhile job.
Veronika Harris, the head of training at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), says that what is missing from the debate is a coherent structure linking schools, employers and the further education sector so that young people interested in museum careers have clear pathways into it.
'There needs to be a programme to give young people core basic skills for arts and culture which will give them some flexibility around the sector, so if they work in digital imaging, for example, they could ply that in museums, dance, art or theatre.'
One of the initiatives the CCS taskforce will study is Apprenticeships, the Learning and Skills Council-funded training programme for young people that operates in other sectors. The taskforce will assess how it might be tweaked to suit cultural organisations.
Apprenticeships elsewhere have focused on the under-25s but it is possible that for the cultural sector the scheme could be adapted to apply more widely, for people looking to change career or more mature entrants.
Some museums have already devised their own ways to help train and develop non-graduates. 'If you don't have a degree, your routes through a career in museums are pretty limited and those that do exist are not widely known,' Harris says. 'At the V&A, we have created nationally-accredited vocational qualifications in curatorial, technical and admin skills and there has been good take-up by people already working in the museum and by new employees.'
The Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust has embarked on an Apprenticeships for All scheme in collaboration with the New Deal for Communities. The trust has taken on two unemployed people from a deprived area of the city to work on the £17.3m development of the City Museum and Mappin Art Gallery, now being refashioned as the Weston Park Museum.
The employees, both in their early 20s, had no previous experience of museum work. They are working in front-of-house roles initially and the intention is to find full-time posts for both when the refurbished galleries are opened.
The trust has used other diversification schemes offered by the regional hub and Positive Action traineeships but the impact of such initiatives on broadening the socio-economic mix is limited, says Mark Hilton, the trust's director of finance and resources.
'You are really still talking to the same constituency as before - it is the middle-classes. With Apprenticeships for All, we are trying to get into the community at a younger age and trying to get people thinking about museums at a much earlier stage. The people we have taken on are only two or three years out of school and they hadn't stepped inside a museum before.'
Collaboration with the New Deal makes pragmatic sense but recruiting from the local workforce also embodies the ethos of the new, community-oriented museum, Hilton says. 'We prefer to get into things that are already happening on the ground, rather than join another talking shop. People at the New Deal are absolutely delighted that an organisation like ours is willing to work with them.'
Employers who spoke to Museums Journal for this article generally welcomed the idea of a new, more coherent approach to training as proposed by the sector skills council but with varying degrees of reservation.
Some felt that encouraging more non-graduates into jobs at the bottom of the pay scale would do little to alter the essentially middle-class nature of the profession.
Others were wary of the imposition of 'top-down' national schemes when so much activity in the public and not-for-profit sectors is now geared to responding to local needs and building local partnerships.
And of course a major concern is funding - not merely trainees' wages, but also the extra cost in terms of staff time to recruit and manage them and to pitch the proposition to other staff.
CCS will be exploring funding along with the other issues, but for museums the taskforce members will need to draw on all their creative nous if they are to uproot the obstacles that are currently holding back the development of the workforce.
Julie Nightingale is a freelance journalist
What's wrong with the recruitment system?
Maurice Davies, the deputy director of the Museums Association, is researching barriers to participation in museum careers for a project with the University of East Anglia, and his initial findings suggest that the system of recruitment is seriously dysfunctional.
First, it is failing to attract enough of the 'right' candidates in terms of skills and of diversity of subject specialism, as well as background.
'There's nothing wrong with having lots of female, middle-class humanities students but there needs to be some variety as well,' says Davies. 'It's a strong business principle now that successful organisations need a diverse staff.'
Less widely acknowledged is Davies's finding that the struggle to gain even a foothold in the museum world can be personally damaging. In interviews he has carried out with people in the early stages of their career, many emphasised the impact on their lives of the difficulty of securing a permanent job, even after costly postgraduate training and unpaid work experience.
Some have quit to join other professions - or plan to do so - for financial reasons, though money is by no means the only issue.
'Some of them are really sad stories of people whose 20s have been ruined by trying to get a museum job,' Davies says. 'It's not just finance and time. It's also the cost in terms of people's sense of themselves at what is quite a vulnerable age. It's exploitative in the worst sense. And running through a lot of the responses is some personal confusion about why they are in this position.'
Worryingly for the profession, there's also the possibility that the difficulty of securing a job in a museum is in itself reducing the quality of candidates coming through. The necessity of working for little or no pay in the beginning and enduring the uncertainty of serial temporary work could be a deterrent to the best graduates.
As such, those who do make it through may be more the plodders than the dynamos who will inject fresh life into the sector and ultimately improve it.
One of Davies's other contentions may prove even less palatable: people who pursue postgraduate courses could be wasting their time and money.
'There's a whole variety of other ways people get into the profession, sometimes just being in the right place at the right time. Typically, only half of those registered for the Associateship of the Museums Association (AMA) have a postgraduate qualification. A lot of people come through arts organisations, some from teaching. There's a definite amateurishness about how people are recruited.'
Davies, who will be presenting his findings to employers, says getting them on side will be vital if improvements to the system are to be made. 'If the employers don't buy into the need to change the way recruitment is done in museums, it will be very hard to change anything,' he says.