Fair Museum Jobs (FMJ) is delighted to announce a week-long, free online heritage careers event in partnership with Group for Education in Museums (GEM) with support from Art Fund.

This ground-breaking programme will sit at the intersection of a museum conference and a careers advice event, empowering the current and potential workforce to regain agency and confidence during a complex period of change, and supporting the sector to make ethical, sustainable improvements to recruitment and employment practices.

The events will take place across the week of Monday 23 November, completely online and completely free. Attendee booking for events will open in early November.

The sessions over the week will be in 4 strands:

  • What types of jobs exist in museums/heritage?

Panels about the varied areas of museum work.

  • Managing your career

Sessions to empower people at all stages – from pre-first job to management and leadership – to think about themselves, their careers and future options.

  • Real Talk

Events focused on real, practical tips and workshops to navigate working life and improve working practice.

  • Supporting the sector

A strand focussing on where anyone in the sector can find help and support both formally and informally.

GEM will be contributing to sessions across the strands to ensure that the importance of learning roles is highlighted across the board.

 

Call for contributors

We are now looking for expressions of interest to contribute to sessions. With the support of the Art Fund, we are pleased to be able to pay honorariums to participants for their contributions to ensure that no-one is disadvantaged by taking part and that their labour is valued. Preference for these will be for those not supported by their organisation to take part.

We are looking for:

  • Panellists from a variety of museum roles to discuss their jobs and career paths
  • People to share their experiences of:
    • Varied entry routes into the sector
    • Dealing with difficult workplace situations
    • Volunteering
    • Changing careers into or out of the sector
    • Being, or working with, Trustees
  • Good practice that can be shared in a practical way in areas of recruitment, workplace support, jobs, accessibility
  • Sector support organisations who want to share what they do with a wide audience

See more about the topics we would like to cover here: https://bit.ly/2RDElix 

You can find the online form for expressions of interest here: https://forms.gle/oJNaLmmhcUQ3acAj6

We will use the submitted information to build the programme. If you have any suggestions for what you would like to see, contact us via Twitter: https://twitter.com/fair_jobs or email [email protected]. 

To ensure that we are involving a wide, and representative, view of the sector, we will be collecting some diversity and representation data about gender, social class, race, geographical area, length of time in the sector, area of work, and others.

Please note that not every expression of interest will be successful but we will be sure to clearly explain why we haven’t been able to take you up on the interest.

 

Timeline:

  • Expressions of Interest Open: Friday 25 September
  • Expressions of Interest Close: Friday 16 October
  • Participants notified: By Friday 30 October
  • Programme Announced and Session Booking Opens: Monday 9 November
  • Fair Museum Jobs Careers Summit takes place: week commencing Monday 23 November

Please contact [email protected] with any queries.