Dear all,

I am writing to express my concern at the limited prospects of employment for newly qualified archivists.

Whilst the number of vacancies has decreased in recent years, rather paradoxically, the number of places on the archive courses in the UK has increased substantially. This has created a situation in which there are far more qualified archivists looking for employment than there are archivist jobs. The purpose of these courses, presumably, is a vocational one, i.e. to specifically train people with the skills necessary to undertake employment positions as archivists. However, as these employment positions are becoming extremely rare, the courses no longer serve this function.

The universities offering these courses should take into account the scarcity of jobs and reduce their intake of students accordingly. I don’t want to sound too ‘careerist’ but I’m sure that I am not alone in saying that I would not have enrolled on the course if there was no chance of employment following graduation. The result is that there are a large amount of disillusioned qualified archivists who have all worked very hard for their degrees on the pretext of archive employment but cannot gain a foothold in the job market.

At the very least, the Archives & Records Association should update their ‘What are the job prospects after qualification’ webpage to reflect the difficulty of obtaining employment because this webpage hasn’t been updated in three years! (I know at least two people who have recently changed careers to become archivists on the basis of the outdated information on this page).

I would be interested to hear what other people on the list think about this.

Thanks,

John Smith

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