Historic Environment Scotland (Deadline 15/11/2024)
Supported by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities, this post-graduate internship opportunity offers the opportunity to work with representative bodies across the heritage sector in developing a methodology for identifying skills at risk across the heritage sector in Scotland. This placement is offered by Historic Environment Scotland in collaboration with Icon.
This placement is open to students in Scotland only.
The Project: Saving our skills: useful methodology for a heritage skills at risk list
The refreshed Skills Investment Plan for the historic environment (SIP) was published in April 2024 following extensive consultation with sector organisations, training providers and key stakeholders. It is a collaborative framework for collective action and identifies priorities and where resource needs to be invested. During the consultation, it was identified that we needed a process to assess the ‘health’ of specialist heritage skills to help us to identify, monitor and act on those at risk.
There are areas of conservation practice where the number of professionals with the required knowledge and skills to care for many collections is vanishingly small, meaning that any, even small, decline in the size of the workforce is likely to have a significant impact on our ability to protect and preserve such collections. Unless urgent action is taken to understand the full scale of the risk across all areas of conservation practice and other specialisms within the heritage sector, we are likely to lose skills and knowledge that have taken decades to acquire without realising it.
In addition to HES and Icon partners involved in this project include English Heritage, Historic England, Communities NI, the Chartered Institute of Archaeologists and the Construction Industry Training Board.
We would like to offer an internship to do some exploratory work on what a methodology might look like to aid the partnership’s thinking. There are some useful models to explore most notably the Heritage Labour Market Intelligence toolkit and the Heritage Crafts Red List but there may be others we can learn from.
The ability to be able to identify skills at risk, assess the level of risk and the potential impact is vital to all the historic environment sector partners to aid skills planning, for advocacy and support the development of collective interventions.
It is envisaged that this work will consist of collecting and analysing secondary and primary data.
Primary data collection through conversations with key stakeholders including the Heritage Crafts Association that run the red list of heritage skills at risk to understand their approach and the limitations, and key stakeholders to understand what they are needing from a heritage skills at risk list. Secondary data collection through desk-based research to review other methodologies, approaches and best practice examples which identify and analyse skills at risk, and support skills succession planning
The intern will be closely supported by their mentors and the partnership.
Further details and how to apply
A full overview of this internship opportunity and details of how to apply can be found on the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities website.
The deadline for applications is 15 November 2024.