In 2016 the Board of Trustees set up a Task and Finish Group to review Icon’s approach to providing salary guidelines for conservators and make a series of recommendations to the Board. One of the key recommendations accepted by the Board was that Icon should continue to publish numerical salary guidelines for entry-level conservators. The Board also agreed that jobs offering a salary below this level should still be advertised through Iconnect Jobs, but with a prominent banner indicating that they do not meet Icon’s guidelines. This policy provides the opportunity for Icon staff to engage with prospective advertisers to advocate for higher levels of pay. Happily, there is evidence to suggest that the banner has had a positive impact over the last few years, as many job adverts do comply with the guidelines.
The Task and Finish Group also recommended that further work should be undertaken to gather salary and workforce data so that a more informative tiered salary recommendation could be offered. The entry-level conservator figure of £24,648 (set in March 2014) was based on the Labour Market Intelligence survey carried out in 2013 and it was felt that this needed to be updated. However, as this type of research is expensive to commission, we have taken the innovative step of developing a new proposal to produce a simple toolkit that will allow Icon, and other cultural heritage organisations, to systematically gather information about jobs and salaries more cost effectively in the future.
The development of this new Sustainable Labour Market Intelligence toolkit, which has been generously supported by Historic England, is currently underway and will enable us to create a much more useful set of salary guidelines in the future. This work is complimented by the independent research on “The twenty-first century conservator: Training, skills and employment” that was presented at #Icon19 by Christina Rozeik, which will be published in due course.
In the meantime, we will be updating the recommended entry-level conservator figure from £24,648 to £27,108.[i] When the Board set the previous guidelines in 2014 the intention was always to increase the figures in line with Consumer Prices Index (CPI) though this wasn’t implemented.
The current review of Icon’s advice and guidance on salaries and recruitment is part of a larger package of work to publish a suite of career development resources on the Icon website. This will bring together existing initiatives, such as our Emerging Professionals Network; the accreditation pathway; our Leadership Launchpad training programme; and ongoing CPD sessions on workplace and business skills. We will also be looking at ways to signpost members towards useful resources that support freelance conservators, as we know that many Icon members are self-employed and would value additional support.
A further strand of work will be our new collaborations with the unions that support professionals working in the cultural heritage sector and also with Fair Museum Jobs. With the support of these organisations we plan to develop employee and recruitment guidance for conservators, which will be published on the Icon website. Finally, as an initial offering, we will be running a webinar with Prospect on how unions can support conservators in the workplace in the coming months – look out for further details in Iconnect.
[i] The revised figure was calculated using the Bank of England’s inflation calculator using the most recent CPI data (2018): https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
