✍️ The newsletter: Feedback for Conservators #18
On money (part 4): Strategy
This is a monthly free newsletter project that came from the Initiative Feedback for Conservators ✍️: a place to bring a little bit of professional advice to help on topics that I wish I knew more about at the start of my art conservation career. Topics discussed here are recurrent ones that I see over Zoom sessions! So I thought would be useful to discuss them here. It’s also not a perfect newsletter and doesn’t intend to, but rather a space to share. Read here past newsletters. And as always, some disclamers1
So! With the last posts (1, 2 and 3) we inaugurated a section that will all fit into the same theme: Money and conservators, because we do not talk about it! Before diving into it a quick reminder: this is not money advice, is what has been my experience.
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On money (part 4): strategy
I finished the post 2 of this series with this paragraph:
Finally, I would like to point out that part of negotiating is also understanding your work value, which is something that most colleagues struggle with voicing out or simply finding out in their profile. Even if you’re an emerging conservator you can have it. But also, it is something that you must, at least partially, be able to plan to archive, which is not something that most of us are comfortable with since it is related to strategy, a word that has such a bad connotation (and yet has none of it). Both topics I will talk soon about it, so stay tuned.
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We cover the first part with the post 3. So today I want to talk about being able to plan to archive it, a.k.a, strategy.
One of the main questions that I ask while doing mentorship is what is your goal right now or what is your dream job. Most people have a quite clear view, but few have a roadmap in mind on how to get close to it, because well, this means talking about strategy. And seems that it does not look good to say that you have one.
But it is not. It is simply having a plan in mind.
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I am not sure that any art conservation program treats or discusses the question of the planning of your career, or at least how to approach the path to it.
I will start by saying that like anything in life, most of it is/will not be fully figured out, and should not be either (a too rigid structure does not bring too many nice outcomes). But I believe that never hurts to plan while leaving room for magic to happen. And more important, I think it is mandatory, especially if you’re investing money in it, to at least ask you this question:
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What is the impact that this course/project/publication/training that you choose will have on your work goal? In other words, why are you/did you invest in doing this?
And I say invest because is important to understand that it should have a return for you (yes even if it’s an unpaid internship or a publication collaboration). The importance is to change the lends and remember to ask yourself what this brings to you. We can talk of three levels of impact when you do a job-investment action. Let’s see them with some examples.
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Short, middle and long terms work investments 📈
🚀 Short-term investment — you should see your impact within this year.
It allows you perhaps to gain more background on something/a skill that you need right away (e.g. a scaffolding course certificate), or maybe to simply get more experience (e.g. fill up your CV).
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😎 Middle-term investment — you should see your impact within the next 5 years.
E.g: maybe you want more experience in cleaning methodologies, so you have to start with a course. It will not bring you all the skills that you need to approach this right now (you will need perhaps several courses and quite some experience), but it is the first step to a series of them.
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⌛️ Long-term investment — you should see your impact with a horizon of at least 10 years.
E.g: you want to specialise in a niche area within your conservation specialisation or you want to be a reference on X treatment of X type of artwork in the long term because you can see a lack of experienced conservators in that matter. This will take years of experience, courses, attending lots of conferences and the trust of colleagues and institutions (yes trust!) to create this profile and move into that specific field. It is a snowball effect, so no rush here.
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If we have this clear, the result would be that if I ask you on your CV any of the training/experiences that you did, you should be able to tell me to which of these three categories belong to.
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✍️ info break: I added a section called Kind Words. Write if you have questions!
Some more reflections 🧐
Sometimes it can be two types at the same time.
E.g: you do a theoretical course on courier documentation when you start. It is an immediate short-term investment (some more training than just your formal training and filling up your CV),
but a middle one if you consider applying to an institution where they need an intern that will assist a senior colleague on this, so they can appreciate if you have some idea of it. If you then are accepted, the result is that you will have now some theory + a first experience that creates a little bit more background (practical). If you would like to gain more solid experience and knowledge, then you have to try to plan out to do more related courses (perhaps some on preventive conservation) and try to work on projects that bring you closer to it or to colleagues who have this experience.
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You should work on several investment actions at the same time. E.g: maybe during a year you focus more on short-term investment actions: working as much as you can on freelance projects to get experience while assisting at maybe one specialized course/conference in a field that you would like to work in the future (long term investment), so it allows you to start knowing the conservators of this area + understand the projects that they usually face.
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Again, be flexible: not all have to be planned. You can do a course that you simply liked, and over time find its usefulness in a future project. Or maybe you tried out something, and then realised that is not that useful. Try out is also part of the process.
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However, I recommend you to reflect on this on each step. Most of the time you will invest time and money, and in many cases, you can not do all the courses that you would love to for budget or time limits. At least asking yourself this question can bring more clarity.
As a final note, remember that you must play an active role in how you want to design and go about your career since we also know that there is a part that you (and everyone) can not control. And talking about this last part, in the next post, I will talk about the importance of diversification (money-wise and in your working life) as an art conservator.
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That’s a warp for today. More next month, see you then?
This is my personal opinion, which means also that I could be wrong! You do you✨.
Please do not share extracts of this newsletter without my consent.