Profiling the Profession 2012-13 is Now Out

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Its good to see that they are attempting to separate out the type of unit-charity trust etc. Its also good to see that they try recognise the concept of self employed. I agree with doug that trying to describe the industry in yearly salary terms does not suit an industry that works on contracts that are often far short of a year and where people like doug are not on a salary for the whole year. £16grand is all pie. I don't know if it is a paradigm thing from some constraint made by the commissioners of the survey requiring yearly salary view but I think that it is a great shame that they did not present a Post profile (in an appendix 1) of respondents who claimed to be self-employed when they obviously went to the trouble to ask people if they were self-employed and when a lot of the reported problems of the survey were reported in appendix 2 as

I think there is a problem where one‐person or other very small companies try to
meet standards developed for larger organisations. This has arisen with both IfAregistration and Achilles UVDB accreditation

I am a sole trader, providing a range of site, PX, training and illustration services. I have only been back trading since May this year

Responses are from the viewpoint of a single specialist officer

Could probably do with a few more questions about using self employed staff, which we predominately do. We can pay them better and generally they are betterarchaeologists

Obviously Im a self employed consultant so you will need to take that into account

This survey is not that appropiate for freelance/ sole trader finds specialists

My company has only been operating for a little over 12 months and I work parttime.I don't employ permanent staff and only employ staff when I need to,

Couple of points ‐ survey not well set out for one person organisations

As I work as a self‐employed sole trader, some of the questions are difficult toanswer, so have been left blank.

We have noticed the rise of 0 hours contracts as a response to huge fluctuations in work load and a proliferation of 'one man bands' able to carry out small scale works very cheaply.

After taking early retirement/redundancy from EH in 2010 I set up as selfemployed and have earned only a small amount since then on a consultancy basis.

Much of this survey is not really relevant to a sole‐trader

I am a freelance lithic specialist. Over the past 5 years I have also undertakentemporary teaching contracts in a university

Notes: I'm basically a one‐man band, with part‐time admin support. I wentfreelance after losing my job.

This survey seems to have been drawn up so as to exclude those of us offeringspecialist services(in my case pottery analysis and reporting)and the role of the sole trader/ free,ance operator

As a sole trader with no staff, some of this is difficult to fill in sensibly

As a single‐person organisation, some of the questions are difficult to answer in a helpful way

I am a self‐employed archaeologistand buildings analyst

As a consultant operating as a sole trader most of what you ask is not relevant to me.

This questionnaire is not really suited to small businesses like ourselves. We are two people ‐ we do not intend to grow beyond this and our small size is part of our business plan. So the turnover question in terms of £m is laughable.

Obviously I'm a very small organisation and have actually lost one staff member

Questions largely irrelevant to one person business ‐ I may spend a few hoursstudying some particular technical point (and thereby learning),

Some questions quite difficult to answer as a single archaeologist working in a localauthority planning department

Its bloody brilliant to see that us self-employed pretty much dominate the problems with the survey. Hay folks when is somebody going to see that its all about copyrights. (sorry sorry sorry) and when sometime soon it will be seen that we are the only archaeologists that there are.