Diversifying the museum workforce: the Diversify scheme and its impact on participants' careers

Abstract

The Diversify positive-action training scheme ran in the United Kingdom from 1998 to 2011. It aimed to increase the accessibility of museum careers to Black, Asian and minority-ethnic individuals. From an initial focus on race, it developed to also offer training to people with disabilities and people from low-income backgrounds. It also included management-level traineeships. This article reports on a longitudinal study, commissioned by the Museums Association as part of its work to mark the end of the Diversify scheme, of the experiences and career progression of people who participated in the scheme as trainees, with a focus on those from minority-ethnic backgrounds. The responses offer insights into people's experiences of training, securing initial employment and career progression. Well over 80% of participants secured initial employment in museums and some 60% of participants responding to a survey are working in museum management or on track to work in museum management. However, perhaps a quarter to a third of participants who gained work in museums will have left the sector within a decade. There remains much to do to improve the diversity of the overall museum workforce.

Keywords:

• museum workforce
• museum training
• cultural diversity
• race
• ethnicity
• disability
• professional development
• museum management training
• organizational change
• workforce diversity

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous peer reviewers of earlier versions of this paper who made many suggestions for improvement. We also want to thank The Museums Association, Renaissance in the Regions, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the University of Leicester and Professor Richard Sandell, Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery, and Lee Fulton for their assistance and support. We acknowledge the many museums, galleries and universities who supported and hosted traineeships, particularly those who contributed funding. Most of all, we thank the trainees who participated in the scheme and are now contributing to the UK museum sector.

Notes

1. ‘Positive-action’ training aims to ensure that people from under-represented minority-ethnic groups can be trained so that they can then compete for employment on equal terms with other applicants. Diversify was a strategic initiative delivered under section 37(1) of the Race Relations Act 1976.

2. Full members were funded by Diversify; affiliates were funded by a museum, with access to Diversify's professional development opportunities.

3. The traineeship was named in memory of Bill Kirby who had been a campaigner for disabled people's access to museums. Some of the funds for the traineeship came from the Museums and Galleries Disability Association.

4. Hopkins Van Mil Creative Connections with Medar Pysden (2007, 39), found that 66% of bursary students and 71% of trainees found a job within six months. (The latter figure is artificially low as ‘those [trainee] respondents who said they had not yet found a job (18%) are in the main those who are still taking part in the scheme’.) Thirty-three per cent of bursary holders and 11% of trainees took over six months to find a job. Among questionnaire respondents, 14% took over six months to secure a job (Table 4).

5. Heywood (2010a) found that of the first 30 people to participate in the Diversify scheme from 1999 to 2005, 18 were still working in the museum sector in 2010 and a further three in the wider arts or heritage sector – that is 60–70%. Around 75% of questionnaire respondents were still working in museums (Table 5).