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19th April 2005, 10:09 AM
It's also very hard to buy a house on 18-19K in the SE, and oddly this is not a problem that is unique to archaeology for those of us familiar with the wider world. However, house buying was the last thing on my mind when I was a poor digger and the short termism doesn't help either.
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20th April 2005, 01:38 PM
As much as I enjoyed studying archaeology at university, especially the practical side, it was the wage side of things as well as the job insecurity that put me off. I'm currently sitting here earning 2k more in a job that requires considerably less skill and work input than I would do in archaeology. When I tell people how much archaeologists earn they can't believe it. Even worse is the fact that more and more graduates are being put off by the lack of job security and poor pay - out of about 35-40 people who graduated in my year about 4 maybe 5 chose archaeology as a career and 2 of those have since given up on it. Let's hope things improve!
If at first you don't succeed...give up and have a beer!
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22nd April 2005, 01:44 PM
I could quote similar statistics and I graduated 12 years ago. I don't think that most people who do archaeology as a degree intend to work in the profession after they graduate anyway. Many people do the degree purely because they want to obtain a Bachelor's in something that interests them whilst being able to leave Uni waving a qualification. People with archy degrees find themselves into all walks of life. Perhaps the limited reward found in field archaeology singles out the people who are more determined to succeed in the profession?
I'd also question the general assumption earlier that the amount of jobs being advertised means that there are plenty of people struggling to fill the vacancies. Surely this could just mean that there are more jobs being created in a growing and developing profession? I've seen a rich tapestry of employing and few jobs being re-advertised. Surely this means the positions are being filled by upwardly mobile archies? Oxford constantly advertise for managers, but they're constantly expanding...
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23rd April 2005, 12:18 PM
Are there any (current) unit managers or people responsible for recruiting staff that read these forums? I would be very interested to hear their views on the ease or difficulty of getting staff (diggers esp.), whether they can get suitably qualified and/or experienced people easily, and what if anything they would do (or have done) about training up their own people. A view from that side of the fence, as it were.
A couple of years ago I heard that the position was that while units were crying out for experienced staff there were few around, but there were legions of "inexperienced" applicants for vacancies (a situation paralleled in other walks of life, I might add). Is this still the situation or has it changed?
Apologies for using the old terms "unit" and "digger", but to everyone else a contractor means the building contractor! Archaeologist is such a long word......
