I too have tried to stay out of this discussion, though I have been writing a longer piece for publication which addresses some of the issues.  Since it the great decline seems to have occurred on my watch as Chair of the SoA, I thought the least I could do would be explore ways in which the problem might be addressed.

 

David is right.  Henry’s numbers need some context and extension.  We don’t know, for example, whether the 2004 figure for posts advertised was itself an aberration and how it compared to the 5 prior years.  2005 saw the introduction of the FoIA which had an impact on the number of jobs higher up the food chain, perhaps creating more opportunities at the bottom.  The sharp increase in the number of graduates in the past 3 years reflects the impact of the first products of the new distance learning courses.  Many of the graduates of those courses were already in jobs and so would not have had the impact on tier 1 posts that might have been expected.  Lack of mobility at higher levels might also have been a factor with fewer jobs in the private sector acting to reduce the level of churn.  Perhaps the failure has been to reduce the amount of effort put into developing the market for records professionals while focusing on ensuring the funding and exploitation of what already existed.  We became too concerned with the ‘stuff’ and not sufficiently concerned about the people who manage the ‘stuff’.  Perhaps people have too narrow a view of what constitutes professional work.

 

The fall in advertised posts was quite sudden and unexpected and had a dramatic impact on the SoA’s budgeted income and its relationship with the publisher of ARC and ARC Recruitment.  If we’d been able to predict the fall, we might have been in a better position to offset that drop in revenue too.

 

None of this helps those recent graduates who are struggling to find work in the downturn.  They are not, unfortunately, alone as their contemporaries in other professions find themselves is a similar position.  Castigating the archive schools and ARA(SoA) for getting  it ‘wrong’ may make people feel better (unlikely) but it would be much better to put our collective heads together to find a constructive way of using this reservoir of skills.

 

Suggestions on a postcard, please.

 

Peter Emmerson

Chair, Society of Archivists, 2007-2009