The Job Market (continued)
Initially most jobs will be short-term contacts, but archaeology is not unique in this respect. There is anecdotal evidence that many people are leaving after about 3-4 years, but whether this is disillusionment with the subject, or due to the poor rates of pay and conditions, or simply that some people never plan to make it a long term-career, is unknown. Those who stay on and find a permanent place will never get the remuneration of accountants, lawyers or doctors, but it can produce a reasonable salary for a job which many of us find fascinating, and which opens up possibilities for research and travel (a recent survey produced an average salary across the profession of over £17,000, with the highest over £50,000).
The first point to make is that a degree in archaeology does not qualify you to become a professional archaeologist. You will need further training, so an undergraduate degree should be seen only as the first step. What employers will be looking for will be a wide range of additional skills. Some of these will be purely archaeological - experience of digging and surveying, of finds processing, of drawing, using Sites and Monuments Records - what in the jargon are known as 'vocational skills'. But it will also include non-specific skills (or 'transferable skills') - IT, team work, presentation (verbal, graphic and written), Health and Safety.
All these are skills which, along with your academic knowledge, you will have to continue to develop throughout your career, and more and more this sort of training is becoming formalised. Like most other professional bodies, the professional body for archaeologists, the Institute of Field Archaeologists (IFA), is developing Continuing Professional Development (CPD), in which you systematically acquire more skills and document them. Good employers assist with this through the process of 'Staff Development', so that your increasing skills will benefit the organisation you are working for. You yourself will be looking after your own interests, in terms of career development, promotion, and perhaps moving sideways into new areas of interest. For this you will need a 'Personal Development Plan'; your employer will look at the organisation's plans for your development through 'Staff Appraisal' or 'Staff Review'. Your employer's interests and your own may coincide, but they may also conflict, so you may need to negotiate over what you will be doing yourself, and what you can reasonably expect your employer to provide or pay for. You may, for instance, after a few years in your post, decide that you need further university training, and finance yourself through a Taught Masters Degree at university; some organisations give help for their senior staff to take part-time doctorates.
One organisation which is developing training schemes for the profession is the Archaeology Training Forum (ATF), which includes representatives of the major groups of employers and education providers. The major gap lies between graduating and 'entering' the profession, and in the next few years this is an area which will be targeted, probably with studentships, secondments, sandwich courses and day-release schemes filling the gap. So keep an eye on what is happening in this area (the IFA's publication The Archaeologist is the best source of such information).
However, archaeologists do a wide range of different jobs, and there are in fact several different career ladders that you can follow. After the general academic and practical training, you may want to go into Field Archaeology, and find a post in one of the archaeological units; local government deals with a wide range of archaeological activities, such as Development Control (which primarily concerns planning applications and sites threatened by development), or Sites and Monuments Records (recording archaeological sites and information for a county or city); but there are also private consultants who provide information to developers and other private organisations; those who go into finds analysis (pottery, animal bones, etc.) may find themselves self-employed.
There are museums, universities, various schools and colleges who employ archaeologists; or specialist areas like insurance or trade unions where archaeological knowledge is needed. For each of these areas different career strategies are needed. A doctorate may be essential for an academic career or to become a finds analyst, but it may make you less employable in some fields. The extent of your knowledge may also be different from one field to another or at different levels of the hierarchy - a pottery specialist or a unit director does not need to know how to use the latest EDM or GPS.
In brief, the best advice is first of all to try to get a broad range of experience, and then decide in which area you might like to specialise. The recent surveys of archaeologists and what they do may give you some ideas about where the best potential lies, in terms of lack of skilled specialists, or the potential number of openings. Do not necessarily rush into doing another degree; you may be running yourself into debt learning skills for which the market is already overflowing. Above all, get to know your way around the archaeological world; there is more to it than universities and holes in the ground. Try to get to know people, by going to, and even giving papers at, the annual IFA conference, for instance. Keep up to date with information which the Council for British Archaeology gives out, or the IFA's The Archaeologist. The Digger is a publication which represents views at the grassroots.