Planning a digital career in the culture sector
From 2016 to 2020 I held seven different full-time jobs. I interviewed for four more. That sounds like a lot, but it was necessary – partly because a lot of the roles I occupied in that period were short-term ones (there are a lot more short-term arts 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.
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’m going to focus on six things:
Finding the job you want
How to use LinkedIn
Doing a good application
Doing a good remote interview
Working out if you in fact want this job more than what you’ve got
Thinking about working ‘with’ museums (i.e. in agencies and consultancies) rather than purely jobs in museums
1. 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 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.
Larger organisations (like Tate, National Museums Scotland and National Galleries Scotland) have their own job alerts you can set up from within their website. The Museum Computer Group discussion list posts lots of jobs in muse/tech but there’s no ability to search or filter by location from a listing. I found LinkedIn pretty good for UK government, tech, commerce and agency jobs, but it didn’t seem to aggregate museum jobs properly.
Looking for a cultural job in a specific/new location
When my partner 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 of what collections-based institutions exist… and quickly discovered that the North East got about 10% of the coverage of London. This gave me some names to start bookmarking 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 I 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 many options at a similar salary to what I had been getting down South.
Finding out more about the role before applying
Once you’ve found a job you’re interested in, don’t be scared to 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. LinkedIn, which I’ll talk about next, can be helpful for finding out more about the team you’d be working with for a given job, and help you stand out, if you were to put an application in.
2. How to use LinkedIn…
LinkedIn is, I think, a little maligned. Yes there are some quite dorky posters on there. But there are on every platform. Of all the social media platforms, I think LinkedIn has stayed the most consistent over the years, and has a point to it. I feel like time invested in LinkedIn is likely to deliver returns to you personally, if you know what you’re doing, in a way that I can’t say I’ve found to the same extent on other platforms (particularly since Mr Musk took over ‘X’).
…To find out more about the people that work in digital in a specific team
If you search for the organisation you’re interested in on LinkedIn, you can then navigate to the ‘people’ tab, from there you can search for keywords like ‘digital’ and view the team you would be working with.
Note, by default LinkedIn will tell someone if you’ve viewed their profile. I don’t 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).
…For profile building
One type of post that has been doing the rounds recently is getting an AI to ‘roast’ your LinkedIn profile.
But, bot-analysis aside, LinkedIn is a great visual way to present your CV and things you’ve worked on. It has some neat features like the ability to assign ‘skills’ you’ve acquired to particular jobs.
All this helps if you want to appear in LinkedIn’s search tools as qualified for a particular job, and gives anyone looking a quick summary of what your strengths are.
…For networking
LinkedIn allows you to write a short message to people you don’t know. This I’ve found invaluable. It’s less of a ‘cold call’ than an email out of the blue (which might get blocked if you're emailing from a Gmail anyway), as the recipient can look at your profile for some context on who you are and what you do. If I want to know more about a specific topic, I can use LinkedIn to find someone in the sector who looks like they do, and reach out to them to ask for advice. It’s one example I’ve found of a decent internet tool for connecting people based on their skills and knowledge. And the more you do it the more ‘connections in common’ you’ll have, all of which helps with social validation.
People like being seen as sources of inspiration - so there’s absolutely no harm reaching out to more senior people in the sector asking for advice and being up front about wanting to work on their team. Worst case, you won’t hear back, but best case you get some great advice and forge a connection that helps you in your next career move.
…For getting public endorsements
One feature of LinkedIn that I don’t see widely used in the sector is the public endorsement / recommendation feature. On your profile, you’ll have a ‘recommendations’ block. Some kind souls might give you a recommendation unasked. But this is very rare. You can ‘request a recommendation’ from colleagues and peers who are also on LinkedIn (you can even do reciprocal recommendations; you scratch my back etc). But probably best to ask them offline/outside of LinkedIn first!
I’ve found this very useful for being able to cite things like soft skills on job applications – I can link to a publicly available testimonial from someone who has said I am smart/ capable/ good at handling complex interdependencies (or whatever it is the job description is asking me to evidence).
…For publishing your expertise
LinkedIn has its own publication tools (LinkedIn Pulse) that works quite similarly to other article publishing platforms like Medium. I’ve found it more useful to publish content via Substack (the platform you’re reading this on), but then promote those articles via LinkedIn. That also gives you a reason to contact experts or people you’d like to be connected to to ask if they’d like to write a guest post for your newsletter.
3. Doing a good application
I’ve come to learn that there’s a bit of a knack to writing job applications for big museums and cultural institutions:
Understand each point in a Job Description will be scored against your application; typically (0) not met, (1) partially met, (2) fully met.
This means you have to give equal weight to seemingly vapid or innocuous criteria like ‘ability to use Microsoft Office’ and/or ‘ability to work in a team’. LinkedIn recommendations can be a great way to cite how you can evidence things like soft skills / team working / ability to handle multiple tasks at once…
Essentially, you want to be able to make it almost impossible for them not to invite you to interview because you’ve evidenced 2-5 bullet points which show how you fully meet each individual criteria point.
Don’t get your application in late. Even if the job deadline is midnight on a Sunday and no human is going to read it till 9 on Monday, automated systems won’t include you in the download pack that gets sent to the recruiting panel. Also, if you are one of those humans doing the recruitment and you’ve already got 175 applications, you’re unlikely to be looking for a reason to make that list 176…
4. Doing a good interview
Pacing yourself for the number of questions
Ask how many questions you’ve got at the start of the interview. In most cases, each response to a question you give will be scored individually and summed at the end. If you don’t leave yourself enough time for the later questions, you risk losing points.
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.
Prepping in advance
Reread your job application before the interview. 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 examples 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.
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
Note, if you get asked why you want it, it’s good to also articulate why you’d be good at it, 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).
When you’re giving examples to questions, be specific about what **you** did and what the outcome was. I often hear candidates say ‘we did this… we did that’. The organisation is not considering hiring your team, just you – so you need to be crystal clear about what you specifically did, what your individual role was in this. The panel are also likely to want to hear about your thinking; so set the situational context, explain how this answers their question, explain your thinking at overcoming whatever challenge you faced and what you specifically did to address it, and what the impact was.
In digital content roles we have the benefit of lots of data, so interviewers are keen to hear about the demonstrable impact of initiatives you led; did your SEO strategy lead to a 200% increase in views? Did your social media generate more engagement than the organisation had ever seen on those platforms before? It’s useful to have specific numbers and evidence points to hand to quantify the impact of your work and experience.
Think of some questions for them – getting a new job will change your life, you should have some questions about what it’s going to be like!
Make sure you state at the end that you really really want the role. Don’t leave them in any doubt.
Zoom interviews
Interviews are weird at the best of time. Interviewing in your living room over Zoom/Teams is, for most people, even weirder.
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.
If you have a presentation to deliver online, it will sound more dynamic if you can ad lib some of it and not simply read off a script. I found a post from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about how she prepared for one of her most famous speeches, and it was through having a number of key jumping off points she could talk to, but she wasn’t wed to a word by word transcript.
It’s a bit odd having a conversation with someone whose eyes are looking to the side of yours. Most people are used to that in a conference call situation, that’s how 90% of our online meetings work. But in interviews, it is a bit different. Try to look directly into the webcam, occasionally looking back at people’s faces on your screen to take in their non-verbal reactions.
5. Working out if you actually want it
Applying for a job, and being in the position of accepting it, can feel quite different. 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 and felt I had unfinished business. 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 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 my 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 (for example how much do I value permanency compared to salary). I also begin to get a ‘gut feel’ when I start summing the pros and cons about which one I want to come out on top. 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; think about what you want to achieve in the long view of your time in work. 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.
6. Working with, rather than strictly ‘for’ the cultural sector
When I was working for a museum I was on an interview panel for a job with 640 applicants. 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. The statistical odds of getting that job 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 at the start of 2021. I was headhunted and then offered a job as Senior Digital Project Manager at 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 the post-COVID 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. 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. The whole process of occupying (however briefly) three jobs within the space of twelve months clarified a few things for me:
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).
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.
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). There are benefits to both, and you can oscillate profitably between the two throughout your career.
Whatever your ‘calling’, good luck!
Thanks Ed Bankes and Chris Unitt for reading and improving this post.
We’re hiring!
At One Further we have a Content Analyst (SEO and UX focused) mat-leave vacancy
Salary: £35-40k, depending on experience
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Working hours: full-time, Monday to Friday
Benefits include: flexible working (hours and location), good holiday allowance, training budget, personal development planning, pension scheme, and lovely clients
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