Sorry if this doesn’t belong here but what better place to ask?
I’m a graduate of Ba history and Ma history of medicine and absolutely loved doing my course. I am now in a weird limbo whereby I am working in an ok job but I yearn to somehow get into a research of public engagement position (ideally in a museum). I have years of part time work experience and voluntary roles but every job I apply for within these fields, I seem to get rejected.
Have I done the wrong degree, or should I just expect it to be hard industry to enter in the uk?
Cheers!
I have a heritage degree and took me literally one year to find/get the perfect job.
I was living off my savings, staying at ny grandmas to save money and working a minor job giving tours at a museum.
I got depressed half way through and am still dealing with that.
Even though my job is ridicoulusly awesome, I'm not sure if it was worth losing an entire year and getting depressed...
Anyway, you probably can get you're dream job, but consider how much of an effort it's going to take and what kind of support system you have
Oh, it's a hard field to get into. Very over-saturated. More people have degrees in history and museum studies and such than there are positions for them. I finally got a position after several years of traveling around the country (USA) to temporary museum and heritage jobs. My current (permanent) job had over 100 applicants. I've seen interpretive positions in my organization have over 400 applicants! I've heard it's a very similar story in the UK.
So it's not really a reflection on you, it's difficult for most fully qualified museum professionals to land jobs.
Feel free to join us on /r/MuseumPros, we have a job hunting tool in the wiki which might be helpful to you. Apart from that, the only advice I can give is to keep trying, and keep your heritage work current as possible (keep volunteering and working part time there).
What do you mean by archaeological work? I work for archaeological consultancies in Ireland (basically I dig holes with a mattock and trowel, record features, and do some initial finds and sample processing). That work is far more common than university or museum/work, though it is almost entirely tied to construction so jobs can be intermittent.