Emerging Professionals
How can we make our industry more responsive for the next generation?
2019 Angels Project at the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska, held during the 2019 Museums Alaska Annual Conference.
When I first entered the museum field over a decade ago, I found myself adrift among all of the other recent college graduates. Our heads were filled with knowledge and skills acquired through classroom instruction, guest seminars and more often than not, unpaid internships. We lacked the real world, ground level experience needed to secure employment in our chosen fields. As a result, I, like many others, found very limited job prospects and for a time, even had to work in an adjacent field.
Since then, the museum and archival industries have improved their resources for emerging professionals. The museum industry now has networks like the National Emerging Museum Professionals Network, https://nationalempnetwork.org/ , and the Society of American Archivists has a Students and New Archives Professionals Section, SAA-SNAP. There are also a wide variety of professional membership organizations that offer continuing professional development instruction. Despite these more recent developments, there is still a huge disparity between what resources and opportunities are currently available and what should be available to support the growth of our next generation of cultural heritage stewards.
How can we fill the gap? It is clear that we still have a long way to go to meet the needs of our recent Museum Studies and MLIS graduates. It is up to those of us who are currently working in the field to provide more opportunities and guidance. Perhaps it is time for all of us to revisit those early days of our careers and remember what we truly needed at that time but couldn’t find. With the onslaught of COVID-19 and our industries pivoting to the digital realm, we find ourselves in a prime position to make things happen now rather than later.
So what does this look like? For many, affordable digital instruction that focuses on practical hands-on applications versus the theoretical approaches taught at university, could mean the difference between securing employment instead of just being considered and then looked over. Furthermore, professional organization membership and registration fees do not come cheap. We must begin to consider how affordability affects access and then make the necessary adjustments to meet the needs of emerging professionals. Additionally, there should be more opportunities for emerging professionals to be able to have a seat at the table whether that means being able to give a presentation at a professional conference, serving on a committee or board, or even being an instructor.
If we are to ever hope that this next generation can take our place than shouldn’t we begin to trust that they are capable of doing the job now or at least some facet of it?
