Cognitive Dissonance and Jobs in Cultural Resources
Timothy Scarlett
Associate Professor of Archaeology, Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University
Tomorrow is Michigan Technological University 's Fall Career Fair . more than 400 companies and 2,000 recruiters to campus each year. All campus majors enjoy this biannual event where more than 400 companies send 2,000 recruiters that connect students with co-ops, internships, and full-time jobs. The students get one-on-one training in essential skills, including practice interviews, resume-building sessions, and industry outreach.
I experienced some cognitive dissonance last week, when I visited the American Cultural Resources Association (ACRA) Annual Conference held in Indianapolis, Indiana. ACRA represents a national network of large companies and individual consultants in the United States, an organization of the cultural resource management (sometimes #CRM, sometimes #Heritage) industry. ACRA's company employees provide specialized research skills applied within a framework of federal, state, local, and/or tribal laws that govern historical and cultural resource preservation, development, and use. ACRA members also sometimes facilitate stakeholder participation in economic development and environmental decision making.
CRM firms around the United States are facing a crisis in their human resources pipeline. Jeffrey H. Altschul and Terry H. Klein recently analyzed the booming need for staff, but the lack of qualified people to do the work:
In the next 10 years, the US cultural resource management (CRM) industry will grow in terms of monies spent on CRM activities and the size of the CRM labor force. Between US fiscal years 2022 and 2031, annual spending on CRM will increase from about $1.46 to $1.85 billion, due in part to growth in the US economy but also to an added $1 billion of CRM activities conducted in response to the newly passed infrastructure bill. The increased spending will lead to the creation of about 11,000 new full-time positions in all CRM fields. Archaeologists will be required to fill more than 8,000 positions, and of these, about 70% will require advanced degrees. Based on current graduation rates, there will be a significant MA/PhD-level job deficit....
And those figures don't really account for the demand for architectural and applied historians, ethnographers and oral historians, and all other types of professionals that help with heritage resources and the living communities that care about them.
I struggled to reconcile this booming demand with the fact that, over the years, our undergraduate students find very little benefit to Michigan Tech's career fair.
Nobody comes to our career fair to hire archaeologists.
But that's just nuts.
Many of the big environmental and civil engineering firms that send recruiters to our career fair have divisions that provide cultural resources support for projects. Here I could point to 艾奕康 BAR Engineering Co. Ltd. TetraTech, Mead & Hunt The Mannik & Smith Group, Inc. and TRC Companies, Inc. And this doesn't count US Army Corps of Engineers and various state DoT and other agencies.
Michigan Tech's Career Fair is one of the largest in the nation and is an event in which we take pride. (Our pride is justified based upon job placement and employment numbers, where our university consistently ranks highly in Michigan and the United States). Like most professors, I regularly clear career fair on my syllabus so that students can maximize their opportunities at the two-day event.
Why don't those large engineering companies recruit for their cultural resources units the same way they recruit for civil and environmental engineers?
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I suspect the answer is that they've never had to do that before.
Their HR departments have never had to recruit cultural resources staff. The managers in archaeology or preservation could just post announcements to websites like the ACRA JobBoard , LinkedIn , USA Jobs , or into the many social media feeds of Shovelbums or other sites. (I must also mention Jennifer Palmer's recently retired ArchaeologyFieldwork.com board, which was a defining feature of archaeology employment for more than 20 years!)
They could just post a job and trip over the applicants' cover letters that filled their office.
But now, the pipeline no longer supplies the number of trained professionals required to meet the need. Companies need to recruit quality candidates.
Why this happened is a topic for another essay that explores wages and conditions, ethics and business practice, employment law, and the various structural exclusions that drive qualified people away from entry-level archaeology jobs. This is an essay for another time.
Many of the larger companies could start addressing their pipeline problem simply by meeting students where they are every day.
Small companies can't send recruiters to interview two or three prospects, but there is no reason that the recruiter for a large firm couldn't also collect archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and history students while they also collect various future engineers.
Ask your existing recruiters, already attending existing career events, to collect resumes and interview young professionals.
It is the least you can do. Maybe next year, I can tell the archaeology students to attend.
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1 年Valuable food for thought, Tim. It is so important for all of our students to get the most out of Career Fair! I was there with a marketing student this year — and can report that his resume was cheerfully taken, even when no recruiter from his career field was present from that company, with an assurance that they'd pass it on to the appropriate department/person. It helps that so many of our recruiters are Huskies and willing to go that extra mile to do fellow Huskies a solid. Ideally, we can get to a place where as many intros and interviews as possible for all majors can be conducted on-site during the event. But in the meantime, I encourage students to identify their target companies and potential hiring managers in advance and network at Career Fair. You never know where it might lead plus it's a great way to spread the word about the importance of CRM work.
Associate Professor of Archaeology, Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University
1 年Another area for thought is that the job fair system is also entirely corporatized and digitized. It would be useful for ACRA to work with human resources staff from companies and study how the classifications of jobs links to defined majors and degree programs in the system. It seems that the computer automatically connects people within degree programs with potential employers who select job types in the system. Someone majoring in geology, but studying archaeology, might not get matched to a company. The the recruiter might not know that they should tic the box for "social sciences" if that staffer has an engineering mindset. If you search "resource management" from our list of current companies on campus right now, only one company results. But as I listed above, at least 10 of those firms need resource management specialists of various types for large divisions in their companies. https://app.careerfairplus.com/mtu_mi/fair/4989/employer/344723
Associate Professor of Archaeology, Department of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University
1 年I discussed this issue with people at American Cultural Resources Association (ACRA). One idea that came from brainstorming is that perhaps ACRA could provide a more robust recruitment process for a confederation of smaller employers who could not afford to travel to career fairs, providing a rep who could gather resumes and interview and then pass those applicants to a collective pool. Where such unequal power differential exists, I would worry somewhat about black-balling and other such actions.
Creative and ethical leadership in cultural heritage
1 年Thanks Timothy Scarlett for this interesting reflection on the US situation. Many similarities on this side of the Atlantic too. Looking forward to reading Part Two!