1.4 Organisations’ Skills Needs & Development

Latest Data: 2020

This page reviews organisational responses to questions about current skills needs and shortages, as well as training support and provision within the sector.

Highlights

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126 organisations provided information on skills and development, though not all answered every question. All answers are presented as the number of organisations responding and the number of staff employed by those responding organisations. Number of staff is a more representative inidicator of the overall needs of the sector.

Organisation experiences

Organisations employing roughly a quarter of all staff in the sector experienced skills losses in 2019-20 in all areas tracked except for ‘Artefact or ecofact conservation’ and ‘Data management’ (Table 1.4.1). Considerable numbers, both in terms of the numbers of organisations and the staff they employ, hired in skills in the areas of Fieldwork, Post-fieldwork analysis and Artefact or ecofact conservation (Table 1.4.2). Organisations that employ the majority of archaeologists trained staff in all areas listed except ‘Artefact or ecofact conservation’ (Table 1.4.3).

Table 1.4.1: Skills that were lost in 2019-20.

n = 126 and 2438 for Organisations and Archaeologists Employed respectively.

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Table 1.4.2: Skills that were bought-in in 2019-20.

n = 126 and 2438 for Organisations and Archaeologists Employed respectively.

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Table 1.4.3: Skills training provided in 2019-20.

n = 126 and 2438 for Organisations and Archaeologists Employed respectively.

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Respondents were asked where they felt there were sectoral skill shortages in 2019-20.

Table 1.4.4: Skills sector shortages in 2019-20.

n = 126 and 2438 for Organisations and Archaeologists Employed respectively.

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There was some overlap between respondents that both provided training and bought in skills. For many of the listed areas, internal training was the primary method, with the exceptions of Fieldwork and Post-excavation. In these areas it appears that many organisations either trained up staff but found that they still could not meet demand and needed to buy in those skills, or vice versa, they bought in skills and couldn’t fulfil the need and also had to train staff. Regardless of which way this happened, this crossover indicates significant issues that required multiple methods to address.

Table 1.4.5: Skills that were only hired in, only trained internally or both in 2019-20 by number and percentage of employees.

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Staff Training and Development

The overwhelming majority of archaeological employers fund training for their staff, provide paid training time, offer access to mentoring and review professional development goals at appraisal.

Table 1.4.6: Responses to “how does your organisation encourage individual staff to engage in their continuing professional development?”.

Organisational n values for “Financial support to cover costs of training”, “paid training time”, “access to mentoring” and “reviewing professional development goals at appraisal” are 140, 145, 132 and 139 respectively. n = 2859 for Employed Archaeologists. “Employed Archaeologists” refers to count and percentage of archaeologists working for organisations that responded to PtP 2020.

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The majority of archaeologists work for organisations that have both formal organisational training plans and dedicated training budgets. Nearly half of archaeologists work for employers that currently use Traineeships for staff training and development. Relatively few archaeological employers use or have formerly used Apprenticeships, but approximately a quarter of organisations intend to do so in the future. The Archaeology Skills Passport is used by a minority of employers. The NVQ (Level 3 NVQ Certificate in Archaeological Practice) appears to be falling out of favour, with more employers having formerly used it than do so currently or intend to do so in the future.

Table 1.4.7: Responses to “which of the following do you use, have used or intend to use for staff training and development?”.

Organisational n values for “Apprenticeships”, “NVQ”, “Traineeship”, “Skills Passport”, “Formal organisational training plan” and “dedicated organisational training budget” are 41, 21, 42, 32, 75 and 84 respectively. n = 2725 for Employed Archaeologists. “Employed Archaeologists” refers to count and percentage of archaeologists working for organisations that responded to PtP 2020.

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Comments

A few respondents provided comments on why they answered the way they did:

• ‘As part of a University the training is provided centrally and is not archaeology related’
• ‘Not all of these questions were relevant to a Local Authority (for instance no relevant Skills Passport for new curatorial or HER staff)….’
• ‘This survey has been filled in from the view of a County Council and as such some of the skills based questions were not relevant to the work undertaken by the Heritage Team.’
• ‘Training budgets are for the council as a whole and has to be bid for, there being no current budget being made available…’

Image Credits

Training session for Bath Abbey volunteers by Wessex Archaeology. From Flickr CC BY NC 2.0

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