Planning a career in the culture sector

Since 2016 I’ve applied, interviewed, and been offered, seven different jobs. I’ve applied and been interviewed for four more. That sounds like a lot, but it’s been necessary — partly because a lot of the roles I’ve occupied have been short-term ones (there are a lot more short-term museum digital jobs than permanent ones) and because my partner is in academia (where permanent jobs are even more elusive) and in 2019 got his first permanent job 257 miles from where we had been living since 2014.

Well, at least it wasn’t Beirut (which was one of the alternatives…)

And it seems we’re not alone; as a millennial couple working in the arts/academia, getting a permanent job for both parties in the same city is hard. Particularly right now; it will come to no surprise to anyone who’s been making applications since COVID that the job market is BRUTAL, with redundancies and unemployment historically high at the same time as vacancies at an all time low (and with major organisations making cuts and/or undergoing long-term recruitment friezes).

So it feels like a good time to spread some karma, and share the knowledge I’ve picked up along the way of my own experience trying to carve out a career that makes sense and pays the bills in the culture sector. I’ve come to learn that there’s a bit of a knack to each stage of the job application process. Former colleague Mark Carnall from Oxford University Museum of Natural History has written a brilliant blog post (I wish I’d seen it earlier in my career!) essentially outlining how job applications at most museums (and universities) are scored and how the selection process at that stage is made. So I’m not going to repeat the advice he’s already laid out pretty clearly there, in this piece I’m going to instead focus on four things:

1. Finding a job you want
2. Doing a good remote interview
3. Working out if you in fact want this job more than what you’ve got
4. Thinking about working ‘with’ museums (i.e. in agencies and consultancies) rather than purely jobs in museums

Finding the job you want

To find a job you want you’re going to need some fixed parameters. What do you care most about:

• location
• sector (probably ‘cultural’ if you’re reading this)
• discipline
• pay grade
• permanent/fixed term

For me I’m normally looking at all five, but location and discipline are key for me. In the museum sector the best job vacancy sites I’ve found are Guardian jobs and the Leicester Museum Job Board. Guardian jobs has an excellent job alert filter so you can search for ‘Museums and Arts’ jobs in a certain location and with a keyword that denotes your area of expertise (in my case ‘digital’) and get an email as soon as anything comes up. This works better for the larger museums that have budget to advertise with the Guardian.

When my partner (finally) got a permanent academic job in Newcastle, I knew no one professionally north of about Leeds and had no idea who the cultural employers were. I used Mark Fisher’s Britain’s Best Museums and Galleries in the UK to get an overview… and quickly discovered that the North East got about 10% of the coverage of London. (Equally Museums Association’s map of venues that MA members get free entry into would have been quite helpful at this point too). But at least it gave me some names to start looking at vacancy pages for. I also discovered that some national organisations, like Historic England, National Trust, National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council have regional offices (including in the North East), so added them to my list. Even so, the North East does have much less cultural funding than the rest of the country. So it became clear that ‘Museums within a commute of Newcastle’ was going to afford me more options.

£10 million to all of the North East from the Culture Recovery Funding vs just shy of £1 million to Secret Cinema…

In looking at jobs at that time, my main focuses were location, sector and discipline. I had separate searches for Edinburgh and Newcastle, but museums and ‘digital’ were a constant. The larger organisations (like National Museums Scotland and National Galleries Scotland) have their own job alerts (where I set up a search for ‘digital’). In my discipline, the Museums Computer Group mailing list also has a lot of relevant jobs posted in the tech/culture overlap, and there are probably equivalent special interest newsletters in different museum disciplines. I found LinkedIn pretty good for UK government, tech, commerce and agency jobs, but it didn’t seem to aggregate museum jobs properly.

In terms of networking and finding out more about jobs in different sectors, once I’d added a few people in the right area, Twitter was quite good at recommending me similar people — and if they followed me back, Direct Messaging proved quite a good way of getting an insight into different organisations in a new area of the country. LinkedIn can also be quite good for this, if you scroll through someone’s profile the ‘people also viewed’ listing at the bottom of their profile tends to show other people in similar roles at the same company- which can be helpful for getting a sense of the organisational structure and what roles exist where (and how long people have sat in them for). If you’re already on LinkedIn, it will also tell you if one of your existing contacts knows the person whose profile you’re looking at (and you can always ask them to set up an introduction). NB by default LinkedIn will tell someone if you’ve viewed their profile. I don’t actually mind this and am pleasantly surprised if like-minded folk have a look at mine in return, but it’s worth knowing that that is how the platform works (and how to change your settings if you want to avoid that happening).

My LinkedIn ‘People also viewed’ sidebar at 25/10/20

Once I’d got my data sources together, each week I’d dedicate a fixed time to go through my spreadsheet of different organisations’ vacancies pages within striking distance of Newcastle (in this case looking at Durham, Newcastle, Edinburgh and York) and just see what was coming up.

After a few months of doing that it became clear I was pretty unlikely to find a similar job to my current one in Newcastle: the museums are just much smaller and were unlikely to hire a mid-level digital content person. So that forced me to reassess my priorities and look instead for roles that would allow me and my partner to see each other at weekends but where I could keep a similar level of seniority in a large and interesting museum institution. By looking week-on-week I could see which organisations were recruiting for the sort of roles I could go for and that could help me make decisions on my priorities in the context of what was likely to be available (and recognise a really good/unusual job when it came up).

Doing a good remote interview

Interviews are weird at the best of time. Interviewing in your living room over Zoom/Teams is, for most people, even weirder. In summer 2020, while I was at National Museums Scotland (NMS), we recruited for a new Digital Media Content Producer. The last time NMS recruited in the Digital Media Team (pre COVID) there were 340 applications. This time we got 640. The vacancy to applicant ratio does not favour applicants right now. Here are a couple of things I learnt from being on the other side of the recruitment process:

• Test your tech in advance, there’s nothing to put you (and the interview panel) off-kilter like not having enough bandwidth
• You can read off a script with an online presentation (if that’s part of your interview process) in the way you can’t in person. But most of the time it shows, and your speech comes across more stilted than if you’re able to bounce off your notes at the same time as engaging with your audience. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has nailed this, although believing deeply in what she’s saying is probably the bigger take away here…)

AOC’s notes from her speech that was neither scripted nor learnt by heart, but rather bouncing off key prepared points

• (This one I find really hard to do) It’s a bit odd having a conversation with someone whose eyes are looking to the side of yours. I figured most people were used to that in a conference call situation, that’s how 90% of our online meetings work. But in interviews, I think it is a bit different. Zoom allows you to play back online presentations, and it does look odd if your eyes are looking at the corner of the screen (even if, counter intuitively, you’re actually looking at someone else on your screen). The only way round this is — as far as I can tell — to look into the webcam, which takes some training, occasionally looking back at people’s faces on your screen to take in their non verbal reactions.

And a couple that apply to offline interviews too:

• Ask how many questions you’ve got at the start of the interview. We’d see candidates that gave a very good, fluent presentation and tried to answer questions at the same pace, but you need time to think for the questions you haven’t prepared. This led some candidates to giving a lot of information, very fast and not taking enough time to pause, think, reflect and add additional examples. By asking at the start how long you’ve got and how many questions there are, you can do some quick mental maths and work out approximately how long you should be speaking for for each.
• Reread your job application before the interview. As Mark lays out in his blog post, the interview will likely be scored by a similar rubric to your application, and you’ll already have given tonnes of examples about how you’re a good applicant in that. You may think you’re being repetitive by citing the same ones at interview, but — from my experience being on the panel — the interviewers have seen so many applications that exactly what you said in yours will not be at the forefront of their brains. And even if it was, you need to use the examples from it in order to be scored highly for those questions. By mugging up on the application shortly before the interview, you’ll have revised your arguments for why you fit the bill.
• Don’t be scared to phone and contact people ahead of time to chat through the role. You might not be able to speak to them directly, or you might get HR instead, but any additional information can only be useful.
• Prepare typical questions. The most likely questions to come up are (in my experience) a) why do you want the job and/or b) why do you think you’d be a good fit for the job (NB if you get asked why you want it, and have prepared also why you’d be good at it, add some of why you’d be good into your answer too, this is likely what recruiters are more interested in!). I also always prepare ‘describe a difficult situation in your career and how you resolved it’ as I’ve always found that one a tricky one to think of on my feet (and it often makes sense to have a different example depending on the organisation/role you’re interviewing for).
• Think of some questions for them — getting a new job will almost inevitably change your life, you should have some questions about what it’s going to be like!
• Make sure you state at the end that your really really want the role. Don’t leave them in any doubt.

Working out if you actually want it

Applying for a job and being in the position of accepting it can feel quite different (although when there’s so little going and so much competition it can feel like you don’t have the luxury of choice). I know when I was offered my first job in the museum sector — at the Ashmolean — I very nearly didn’t take it, as I was only three months into a job at a tech start-up. But it one of the best career moves I’ve ever made. I think the human brain is pretty bad at weighing up different arguments for and against a decision and coming up with a balanced view of that will — long term — be best. It’s easy to be swayed by things that feel lower effort in the short term, will cause less difficult conversations and are more certain, but those aren’t good principles (in my experience) to base a job move on.

My decision-making here has been greatly aided by creating a weighted matrix of pros and cons. I’ll sum the pros and cons of both the existing job and the proposed new job to help guide me thinking on my priorities and what I actually care about in my work. Doing these weightings will also force me to reassess how important certain things are (how much do I value permanency compared to salary — this has changed a lot recently, with permanency feeling a lot more important in a volatile job market than it was to me previously). It also helps me simulate how I feel about actually taking job A vs B, with those decision making vertices in mind. In terms of accurately appraising your current job, it’s easy to overweight short term frustrations, but there will be unknown frustrations in your future work!

In terms of your overall weighting and a final appraisal of what makes sense in terms of your long term goals; I was impressed by Tamsin Russell’s advice on that, and would make that thinking (in terms of what you want to achieve in the long view of your time in work) an important part of the decision. In making my own career decisions I’ve had to sit down and do some thinking about *why* I get out of bed every morning, what ‘calling’ do I want to make my work respond to? For me it’s using digital tech to help public facing, cultural organisations achieve their aims and reach audiences.

Working with, rather than strictly ‘for’ the cultural sector

Being on an interview panel for a single job with 640 applicants was pretty eye opening. By the time we got to interview everyone was really, really good. It felt like it shouldn’t be this hard for qualified, hard working candidates to get a job. My own position was only fixed term, so I was very aware I couldn’t sit on the decision of my next career move forever. But equally, the statistical odds of the job I’d just been on the panel for were 1:640 (0.15%), that — combined with how few relevant museum vacancies I saw coming up in 2020 — made me think a bit more broadly than job options that purely involved working directly for a museum.

I had a sightly rocky career transition earlier this year, I was headhunted and then offered a job as Senior Digital Project Manager an agency called the Roundhouse, it didn’t set my world on fire, but it was permanent, I reckoned I’d learn a lot, and in this job market I felt I couldn’t logically justify turning it down. Three days before I was due to start, they called me to say they no longer had the funds to pay me and so had terminated my contract before it had started, which made me unexpectedly unemployed — exactly what I’d been trying to avoid by leaving my fixed term post at NMS early. It was incredibly sobering how little protection you have in a situation like that.

Fortunately I landed on my feet with a job as Content Strategist at One Further (Chris Unitt’s digital consultancy for the culture sector). The whole process of occupying (however briefly) three jobs within the space of twelve months has clarified a few things for me:

1. Remote working works well for me, it means I can work for big cultural clients but from Newcastle, where the cost of living is so much more affordable than anywhere else I’ve ever lived (and also/mainly it’s where my partner lives).
2. The cultural sector *is* important to me, that felt a welcome return when I ended up working with One Further rather than for an agency with far fewer culture sector clients.
3. I’ve been hugely fortunate to work in some fantastic museums, but I definitely don’t think it’s the only way to get cultural sector experience, or tick that box of wanting to work with like minded people. I’ve spoken about this at the Fair Museum Jobs Careers Summit — the private sector is in some ways better at training, progression and digital skills (and you’re unlikely to be up against 640 other candidates for the same role), so I think there’s no harm at all in oscillating between private and public sector.

Whatever your ‘calling’, good luck!