The ASTC Leadership and Field Development (LFD) Committee is excited to present their 2023 report, Priorities, Challenges, and an Action Plan for Strengthening the Science Center and Museum Workforce. This report covers some of the key priorities for the future of the field, some of the critical challenges that will need to be addressed, and a collection of relevant resources.
The Leadership and Field Development Committee is an ad-hoc committee of the ASTC Board of Directors, which provides perspective and advice to ASTC’s Board and staff on the association’s work to support and connect its members, including on how ASTC might best facilitate learning and collaboration among members, spread ideas that work among ASTC members, and cultivate leadership skills across the workforce of ASTC member organizations. The report is responsive to ASTC’s 2022-2025 Strategic Framework which aims to strengthen our members and their capacity by:
- growing the diversity and skills of our members’ workforce;
- facilitating innovation, connection, learning, and collaboration among our members;
- collecting and sharing data and research.
The LFD Committee created this report through an iterative process that began at the ASTC Virtual 2021 Annual Conference, and included listening sessions, reviews of existing resources and strategies, and interviews with leaders representing diverse institutions. This background research resulted in a landscape of key priorities for the field, identification of critical challenges that must be addressed to achieve those priorities, a review of existing resources and important gaps, and an action plan for moving forward.
Key Priorities
The committee identified four key priorities and suggested field-wide efforts or strategies that will be needed to achieve them:
- Build adaptive capacities. We must examine the ways that organizations in our field responded to the pandemic, learn what institutional qualities facilitated successful adaptation, and use that knowledge to support other organizations in developing similar capacity.
- Centering equity and justice in our work. Social justice and racial equity are priorities for many museums, but field-wide strategies will be needed that consider the diversity of organizations and their place on the journey.
- Reinvent what it means to have a career in a museum. We must live up to the promise of offering meaningful, community-engaged careers while ensuring that staff have access to good working conditions, fair compensation, and professional opportunities.
- Prioritize fiscal health. Financial sustainability is essential and will require consideration of new business models that balance revenue with visitor accessibility.
Critical Challenges
These key priorities are essential but cannot be achieved without addressing three critical challenges also identified by the committee:
- Trust and transparency. Transparency is very important to museum staff, but there are still challenges with how to operationalize what increased transparency really looks like and what systemic changes are needed to strengthen it.
- Staff support and retention. Challenges with staff support and retention include the need to provide mentorship to those who have changed job roles since the start of the pandemic, and making concrete commitments to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB).
- Staff loss and recruitment. The dramatic impact of the pandemic caused many organizations to reduce the size of their staff, especially front line and entry level staff. Attracting and retaining new diverse staff has become even more difficult due to the intersecting forces of institutionalized racism and low compensation leading some applicants to seek employment elsewhere.
Resources and Knowledge Gaps
The committee looked for resources that could support museums in advancing these priorities and addressing these challenges, while also identifying gaps where additional resources are needed. They found many materials on DEIB, but they noticed a lack of resources that provide concrete steps and models of success for internal change in the museum field.
The LFD Committee also learned that there are few resources that address the human resource (HR) challenges specific to science centers and museums and noted that a range of HR resources would be required to address the diverse needs of various institutions. They also drew attention to a lack of specific resources to support museum leaders in transforming fiscal models.
The committee has compiled many useful resources on the topics that may be helpful to the field as a whole. Click below to view these resources, along with brief descriptions of each.
Recommended Next Steps
Finally, the committee laid out a plan to address resource gaps and support science centers and museums in overcoming critical challenges and advancing key priorities. They identified four focus areas and provided some near-term (1–2 years) and longer-term (2+ years) actions to address each of these areas.
One example focus area is to “Expand support for science centers and museums in implementing ongoing ways of learning together within and across organizations”. For this focus area, the near-term actions are to expand and improve ASTC’s Communities of Practice and online events to better connect staff across organizations, expand existing models for mentorship, and share examples of how museums have prioritized their staffs’ professional development. Longer-term actions would include establishing a professional development fund for the field and scaling up existing leadership development programs.
Selected Resources
Below is a selection of resources included in the report’s appendix that can help in devising strategies to hire and retain staff, support DEAI organizational learning. and offer staff professional development. View them all here.
- Museums & Race. This is a movement to challenge and re-imagine institutional policies and systems that perpetuate oppression in museums, including the Museums & Race Report Card for self-evaluation and a reading list.
- Human-Centered HR Repository. This repository from the Museum of Us is a place for museums to share their experiments with new human-centered HR practices, categorized by themes such as “Recruitment & Hiring” and “Organizational Structure & Strategic Planning”.
- Rubric for Assessing Candidate Contributions to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging. This is a sample rubric for search committees to use in assessing candidates’ knowledge, past activities, and future plans for contributing to DEIB in the workplace.
- Change Up Learning. Self-paced and live professional development opportunities for educators and youth development workers that provide evidence-based advice drawing on the work of psychologists and learning experts.
If you’re interested in these workforce-related issues, consider raising your hand for the Leadership and Field Development Committee!
We invite staff at all levels from ASTC members in good standing–both Science Center and Museum Members and Allied Members–to serve on ASTC committees and other volunteer opportunities. Learn more here.