Digital career paths in the cultural sector are broken

Over the past few weeks I’ve been involved in interviews for three different roles we’re hiring for at Substrakt.

In those interviews I have met lots of people who currently work in-house in digital roles at cultural organisations in the UK and North America.

I’ve also been having conversations with many other digital folks in the sector as I put together the programme for next year’s Digital Works Conference.

Almost all of these conversations have at one point or another touched on the same issue.

Career pathways around a digital specialism in the cultural sector are broken, or to be blunt, they’re non-existent.

People who were strained to breaking point during the pandemic are now feeling undervalued, unappreciated and hopeless about a total lack of opportunity.

The issues seem to relate to one, or all, of the following areas:

Roles have become uncomfortably (and unrealistically) broad

The range of things that digital professionals are now expected to be expert in and oversee is vast.

People are reporting feeling overstretched and like they don’t have time to master any part of their brief.

We still regularly see job ads that combine the responsibilities of 5 or more specialist roles into one, underpaid, digital position.

Roles (and budgets) don’t allow for specialisation

Generalists are great, I love generalists, many digital folks enjoy the variety of their jobs (within reason, see above).

But when people decide they want or need to specialise in a particular area (product management, strategy, data analysis, content creation) there are very rarely opportunities for them to do so and ‘go deep’ on these specialisms within the sector itself.

Roles are isolated from the broader organisational structure, and have no progression opportunities

Digital roles are still relatively new in the sector. As such there is a lack of consistency in how digital teams are structured and where they sit in organisations.

This often means that digital people and teams end up disconnected from the wider organisational structures and there are a lack of clear, established pathways for people to progress along.

Leaders in the sector are (mostly) not digitally literate

As I’ve written elsewhere, digital professionals are still mostly operating within highly non-digital contexts.

This requires daily advocacy and dealing with process, culture, and attitudes that are sometimes actively in opposition to the things they are trying to do, and the ways they are trying to work.

This friction, combined with a lack of understanding and support from sector leaders is resulting in a widespread loss of motivation and burnout.

Leadership roles with a primary digital focus are few and far between

At an exec or leadership level, digital still mostly sits within a broader mix of responsibilities.

For example as part of the remit of a Director of Audiences, or Commercial Director, or Director of Communications role.

This lack of specialisation at the highest levels of an organisation is another reason that ambitious people feel they have to leave in-house roles in the sector. They aren’t interested in these broader multi-disciplinary roles.

Training and progression opportunities, and development plans do not exist

This is the issue I hear about most often. There is an almost total lack of opportunity.

People feel stuck, and they feel like their professional and personal development is not taken seriously or seen as valuable by their employers.

This is heartbreaking. Heartbreaking because I have been in this situation myself and it makes you feel utterly hopeless, but also heartbreaking because it is so solvable.

Training budgets do not exist

This is perhaps most understandable given the wider pressures on the sector.

But training budgets, of even a few 10s of pounds per person per year, just do not exist. This, combined with everything above, often seems to be the final straw for people.

A version of these issues have existed in the sector for a long time now.

I remember around 10 years ago watching people like Rachel Coldicutt and Rohan Gunitillake (both very smart, very capable digital leaders) leave the cultural sector because of frustrations around the lack of progression opportunities.

I revisited a post I wrote at that time (2013) where I referenced Sunny Widmann's Arts Journal piece on leadership in the arts sector (Getting Unstuck: Developing Skills to Climb the Leadership Ladder):

“Marc Vogl, who works with arts and culture organizations in his role as Principal of Vogl Consulting, aptly describes the problem as a clogged and leaky pipeline.

Basically, there are a small number of leadership positions at the top, often held for many years by the same people (that’s the clogged part) and therefore more junior employees are stuck at their current level, growing increasingly tired of waiting around for these positions to come available.

Eventually, financial realities of working at a nonprofit and the monotony of a static career path push workers to leave the cultural sector (that’s the leaky part).”

In my view, this still accurately describes why so many senior digital folks, like Rachel and Rohan, end up leaving the sector (also see more recent departures from the sector of people like Ankur Bahl from Sadler’s Wells, Jordan Ahmadzadeh from Shakespeare’s Globe, Dafyyd James from Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, and Rob Cawston from National Museums Scotland).

It’s worth noting that almost all of these people still work in in-house roles, in government, charity, or other third sector organisations. So it is not the nature of in-house work that caused them to leave, nor is it the case that they’ve gone to big salaries in the corporate world.

But increasingly a wider frustration around the lack of opportunity and progression is affecting people at every level of seniority.

This is leading to a brain drain of digital talent from the sector which in turn is leading to an atrophying of digital maturity, a lack of digital leaders, and a sector-wide inability to maximise digital opportunities and potential.

And that feels like a problem.

How do we fix this?

At Substrakt we are trying to be useful in this area by regularly hosting free webinars across a range of subjects. In addition, the entirety of our Digital Works programme is focused on trying to open up conversations around digital work in the sector and contribute to forming a wider community of practice for digital professionals.

There is similar work being done by the folks at MuseumNext, Culture24, the Arts Marketing Association and others.

But webinars, podcasts, conferences, and newsletters alone are not going solve this crisis.

And it is a crisis, a quiet one, but one that is resulting in smart, passionate, committed digital professionals leaving the sector in droves.

Money, and the lack of it, is undoubtedly part of the problem. But if we revisit the areas I outlined at the start of this article:

• Roles have become uncomfortably (and unrealistically) broad
• Roles (and budgets) don’t allow for specialisation
• Roles are isolated from the broader organisational structure, and have no progression opportunities
• Leaders in the sector are (mostly) not digitally literate
• Leadership roles with a primary digital focus are few and far between
• Training and progression opportunities, and development plans do not exist
• Training budgets do not exist

Only a few of these absolutely need money to be spent to resolve them, the rest relate to culture, leadership, and opportunity.

These are solvable without vast sums needing to be spent, but the sector needs to prioritise this work.