 Thank you for joining us today on AIC's Emerging Conservation Professionals Network webinar, and we're better known as ECPN. My name is Fran Ritchie and I am the Network's Professional Education and Training Co-Chair. Today we are very pleased to present ECPN's sixth webinar, Beyond the Portfolio, Your Conservation Career. ECPN is thrilled to have with us a fantastic mentor for emerging conservators, Suzanne Davis. Suzanne is the Associate Curator and Head of Conservation at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Before we continue, I just want to familiarize you a bit with GoToWebinar, the program we are using to facilitate this webinar. The view window where you see our title slide right now can be resized by clicking and dragging the lower right corner. The control panel is where you as an attendee can take some control on your own screen. You may find that with inactivity the control panel automatically minimizes. If you would like to keep it open the entire presentation, under view there is an auto-hide the control panel option that can be turned off by unselecting it. The audio section tells you if you are joined to the audio by phone or internet. All of you listening out there are muted today so the way that you will be communicating is through the question or chat box. We have already solicited many great questions for the Q&A today but if you have a question feel free to type it into the chat box. If there are questions that do not get answered we may be able to address them in a post webinar blog post. There is a raise hand option but we won't be using that today. I would also like to take a moment before we begin to share some information about ECPN and highlight previous webinars that we have presented. For those who don't know we are a network within AIC dedicated to supporting conservation professionals as they move through the first stages of their careers. We do this by organizing a variety of initiatives and programs including the mentoring program which pairs emerging conservators with mentors, contributions to the public relations toolkit hosted on the AIC wiki, regional and graduate program liaison program which helps us connect with emerging conservators across the United States, our webinar series and programming at the AIC annual meetings which has included informational meetings, portfolio sessions and seminars, happy hours and most recently a very successful lunchtime speed networking event. To learn more about ECPN we encourage you to join us for our bi-monthly conference calls which are usually held on the second Tuesday of the month at 12pm Eastern Standard Time. The number to join can be found under the information section of our Facebook page or you can email ECPN chair Megan Salazar Walsh or anyone who is an ECPN. Please also consider subscribing to our periodic e-blast which you can do by logging on to the AIC website, clicking on manage your profile and selecting ECPN. You can also follow us on our Facebook page and on the AIC blog conservators converse. Visit the link on your screen for more information about all of this. Through our webinar series ECPN strives to connect with all levels of our membership, pre-program individuals, graduate students and recent graduates by addressing a range of topics of interest to emerging conservators. Since 2012 we have hosted webinars on the topics of self-advocacy and funding, private practice, pre-program internships and outreach and advocacy. ECPN strives to provide ongoing programming that responds to the needs of emerging professionals at all different stages of their early careers. Examples of all of our webinars may be accessed on AIC's YouTube channel and a recording of today's program will also be posted there soon. So then turning to today's program at the 2013 AIC annual meeting in Indianapolis, ECPN held a portfolio symposium where Suzanne Davis gave an engaging presentation on career development. Because that presentation was so well received, we have asked Suzanne to reprise her talk and answer additional questions now with a wider audience. Today's information will focus beyond the portfolio, although if you are seeking portfolio advice, Suzanne wrote a blog post on your changing portfolio throughout your career that can be found on AIC's blog, Conservators Converse. As I mentioned, today's program will conclude with a question and answer session. The questions were selected from those submitted by the audience through emails provided in the registration form and through Facebook and you can submit questions through the chat box on your screen. Even if we run out of time, Suzanne may be able to address additional questions in the form of a blog post, so please do continue to submit. And speaking of time, I won't take up any more of it and I will turn the program over to Suzanne. Thanks. Thank you Fran and my thanks to ECPN for inviting me to speak. I'm honored and I'm delighted to be talking with you today. My goal is to give you some information and advice that I wish I'd had early in my career. Much of it I hope will be useful to you no matter your career phase, but my focus today is really on graduate students and recent graduates. The presentation today will cover three basic things, applying and interviewing for jobs, negotiating compensation and then strategies for career development. So to jump right in, there are two basic processes involved in getting a job offer. The first is the application process and the second is the selection process. You don't think about that probably usually, but that's the other side of it when your future employer selects you as one of their favorite applicants. Your application will have multiple components including curriculum VEDA, a statement or letter of interest, references, and we'll talk about these first three today. And then depending on the job you might also be asked to submit transcripts. And then the selection process also has several components, the most important of which is the interview or interviews. It might also include a portfolio review and or a presentation or job talk. And we'll talk most about the interview today and we'll just touch on the other two things briefly. It probably goes without saying that you want your application to be on time, you want it to be complete, and you want it to be professional. But you also want it to be concise, clear, and easy to read. And the latter is a lot more important than you might think because you have only seconds to make an impression in the reviewer's mind and because your application is usually one of many. So you want the reader to be able to see who you are and understand what your qualifications are quickly and you don't want to bog them down with a lot of extra text or unnecessary details. Your curriculum VEDA is one of the most important building blocks for your application. And I wanted to say a quick word about the difference between a CV and a resume. People sometimes use the words interchangeably, but in the business world a resume is a short summary of your education and your work experience. It's usually only one page wrong. Whereas a CV includes a lot more. It includes awards, grants and fellowships, publications, professional service. And I will focus on the CV today because I think it's usually more appropriate for conservation jobs. The Latin curriculum VEDA means the course of your life and the purpose of a CV is to construct on paper your academic and professional identity. So you want to keep that purpose in mind when you're writing your CV. I want to encourage you right now to start keeping a master's CV and you want to add things to it as they occur or at a minimum you want to update it once a year. Organize it in a way that makes sense to you. You probably won't ever actually submit the master version. It's really a place for you to keep a record of what you're doing. You can then use your master to create a customized CV when you're applying for jobs, fellowships or grants. You can move your experience around to highlight or minimize certain things. So my CV, for example, has a separate archaeological fieldwork section that I can include or I can take out as necessary. You can also trim your CV down if there's a maximum length requirement, which is often true if you're applying for professional grants, for example. So to just look at the CV in a little bit more detail, some things that you really don't need to include are on the left here. You really don't need an objective statement on your CV. I know that people sometimes put these on resumes, but on a CV, an objective statement really is not part of your identity as a conservator. And I can tell you that when you're reading a lot of applications for jobs, these statements begin to ring really false when you read them in succession. My advice to you is to just leave that off. You really don't need it. You also don't need descriptions of your coursework. Your academic credential can stand on its own. There is one exception to that, however. And that's if you have a degree you think the reviewer might not understand. We'll talk a little bit more about that when we are talking about the letter of interest, the statement of interest. You also don't need to describe in detail everything you did in previous jobs or internships. It's okay if you want to put in one or two sentences listing your general duties, but a narrative description like a whole paragraph is really too much when you risk bogging the reader down in too much text. You don't need to describe individual treatments. Again, that's just too much prose on a CV and it's really not appropriate there. You also don't need to list software or other skills unless they are really specifically relevant like the job ad specifically asks for them. You also don't want on your CV anything that detracts from the message that you want to send or conflicts with your identity as a conservator or scholar. So if you worked at the Humane Society all through high school or you were a camp counselor in college, these things are nice, but they really have nothing to do with conservation. So ask yourself if things like this really need to be on the CV that you're submitting for a conservation job. You do, of course, want to include your education and then you want to include all your previous professional conservation experience, including jobs, internships, and fellowships. These first two items should really appear in this order on your CV and then after that the order is up to you. I want to, so sorry, I'm listening to my plays and my notes. So you want to always include professional publications and presentations and I want to just briefly address what counts of the publication. The range of significance for publications goes from scholarly monographs or like single author books at one end with book chapters and peer review journal articles sort of near the top end too and then things like newsletter articles, essays or catalog entries, conference, post prints would sort of be in the middle and then anything that you're writing online is going to be at the opposite end. My personal advice to you is to not count blog posts or wiki entries as publications. It doesn't mean that they shouldn't be on your CV, but I would encourage you to capture this instead as public education or professional service depending on what's most appropriate. It's also okay, I just want to tell you, if you don't have publications for your CV. A lot of conservators aren't required to publish as part of their jobs and if you do contribute in that way it's great, but if you haven't done it yet that's okay. You don't have to worry about that early in your career. You don't need to try to manufacture things to fit in a publication section on your CV. You do want to include professional development and training and awards and fellowships and I want to call your attention to the little tips box at the bottom of the slide here. My CV has been most improved by doing these things. It's been important for me to have friends review my CV and edit it from time to time and then of course I do the same thing for my friends. And you can really get a lot of great ideas from looking at how other people organize and characterize their experience. Your statement of interest is the other really important part of your application package and you want to do a couple of things here. You want to always submit a formal letter. This looks a lot better for you and you want to do this even if it's not required. So if you're applying by email or through an online system, it's better for you if you can submit that letter as a separate file. So you don't want to paste the text into the little box in the online form or into the body of the email. It's going to look better for you if you attach or upload a separate file because it'll be formatted the way you want it to be. In the letter you want to be formal and respectful. You want to make sure that you proofread it and then you want to have somebody that you trust proofread it for you too. And then be aware of the main purpose of the statement or letter. They're really the same thing. People call them by either name, statement or letter of interest, but it's the same document. The purpose is to demonstrate that this job that you're applying for, a fellowship, is the one that you really want and that you're qualified for it. So a few things that you don't want to have in your letter, you don't need to summarize your entire professional work history. So you don't need to list everywhere you've ever worked or all of your degrees because remember, your CV is included in your application package and the reviewers are going to read it. You don't need to describe your coursework. But remember, there's one exception to the coursework slash academic credential thing. If you think that the reviewer will need help understanding your academic credential for some reason like my colleague Claudia has an MS in material science from an Australian university. So it's worthwhile for her to put a line in just explaining that that degree is actually a conservation focused degree. If you have a degree from one of the US graduate programs in conservation and you're applying to a job in the US, people understand that credential. But if you have a degree that's a little bit different, you might want to stick in one sentence about it to explain. In your statement, you don't ever want to give personal reasons for wanting the job. So you don't want to say that you want to move to live into your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your parents or that you've always wanted to live in a certain city. You also don't want to say that you're unemployed and you just want a job. And the reasons for this is that things, statements like that, make the reader question your commitment to the job itself. And they want to get the job to somebody that wants it, not somebody that just wants to live near their boyfriend or girlfriend. You don't want to include negative comments about your current situation no matter how much you hate your current situation. And we'll talk a little bit more about that when we're talking about the interview. You do want to include the reasons that you want this job. This is the most important thing you can do in the letter. You want to be specific. Do your homework, read the job ad carefully, look up the institution online, look at who is there, look at the kind of work the institution does, and really think about why you would want to work there and then articulate that in your letter or your statement. The letter is also where you want to draw out your relevant experience in more detail than on your CV. This is the place to draw out and describe specific activities that would relate to the thing that you're applying for. So if you're applying for a job that mentions responsibility for outdoor sculpture, let's say, and you previously had a fellowship where you did things with an outdoor sculpture park, that's where you would want it. The letter is where you would want to describe these kinds of activities. In the letter, it's also a good idea to summarize what you think you can bring or offer to the institutional organization, and then it's also a good idea to summarize what you think you can learn from them or how you think you can grow professionally, and that's especially important when you're applying for internships or fellowships because at their core, these are educational opportunities. And then a nice way to close is to thank the reviewer or the reader for considering your application. Your references are the third important piece of your application, and you can actually influence how strong they are. The two most important things you can do are to choose your references carefully so that the individuals can speak strongly to your qualifications for the particular opportunity, and then you want to give them everything they need to give you a great recommendation. So here are some tips for optimizing your references. I won't spend a lot of time on this slide, but on the left, you see a list of what you should provide to your references, and what most people neglect actually is the information that's on the right. So you want to communicate to each reference why you chose this person. You want to give him or her a current picture of your career with an up-to-date CV. You want to explain your specific reasons for wanting this job or fellowship because then they can communicate that when they're providing the reference for you. And then if there's anything special you want them to focus on or communicate about you or your experience, just tell them, and then they can make sure they convey that when they're writing or giving the reference for you. By the time you get to an interview, you are no longer demonstrating your qualifications, believe it or not. The review committee at this point already knows that you're qualified, and the interview is not even about determining whether you're the most qualified candidate because they already know which candidate is the most qualified. There are really only three questions that are being answered in the interview. One of them is, does this person really want this job? Do they want to work here with us? And then they want to know why you want it specifically, and then they want to know if they can work with you. They want to know if they like you and if your personality will fit well with their institutional culture. So here are a few tips for different interview situations. Of course, if you're interviewing in person, you want to dress professionally, and that's important even if the institution's culture is laid back. Believe me, my institution's culture is very laid back. When I interviewed for my job here, my boss wore cut-off jean shorts, but I will tell you that we notice when people dress up for interviews because it sends a message that the job is important to the candidate. You want to be on time for any interview, and initial interviews are usually conducted by phone or by Skype, so I've included specific tips for that. You don't ever want to use speakerphone on your end. You don't ever want to do that. Voice quality is not as good, and the background noise is quite distracting. If you have children, you want to get a babysitter. If you're interviewing by Skype, you want to think about creating a professional vision and impression throughout the interview. The first thing to do is to make sure that Skype will work for you by testing it beforehand. You want to test the video link with somebody who's remote to make sure that it works. You want to look just as good for your Skype interview as you would look in person, so dress up, and then you don't want to have piles of crap or a messy kitchen visible in the background. That doesn't look professional, and you also don't want to have your bed in the background. That is weird and distracting, so you want to turn the camera so that it faces something else, like a blank wall even is better than your bed. You also don't want people walking around behind you during the interview if you can avoid that, so if you're at work, try to go someplace where you can be kind of on your own. If you're at home, ask your spouse or your roommate to leave, and then if you have kids, of course, again, don't forget the babysitter. During your interview, you don't want to talk too much. The interview should be a conversation, and the reason for this is that your potential employers think that their workplace is very special, and they want to tell you about it, and they want to see how you respond. Just like in your written statement, you don't want to offer personal reasons for wanting the job. You're sometimes asked about, like, okay, so here's an example. So where I work, I live in the Midwest, I live in Michigan, and this is a really common thing that people will say in interviews here. They'll say, do you really want to move to the Midwest? Like, the winters aren't really long here, it snows a lot, it's really cold, and let's say that in your case, your entire family lives in Michigan, and you really want to move back because you miss your mom. What you would want to say here is, actually, I grew up in the Midwest, and I would love to move back. Whatever you say, though, you want to keep it really brief because too many personal life reasons for wanting the job make your interviewers question your commitment to the job itself. And again, they want to hire someone who wants this job. They don't want to hire someone who wants to live near her mom, even though that is a lovely sentiment. You also don't want to say anything bad about your current or past employers. You don't ever want to do that. This does not elicit any sympathy for you. What it makes the committee think is that you might be difficult or problematic. So what you want to do, if you actually hate your current job, is frame your desire to move to the new position in terms of the opportunity that offers, not what you want to escape. You do, in the interview, want to offer specific reasons for wanting this job. You want to be ready to talk about at least three specific examples of relevant experience, and you want to be prepared to discuss anything that appears on your CV or in your statement. You also always want to have questions. So if all of your prepared questions got answered, you want to make up some new ones on the spot. It looks good for you if you have questions that looks like you care, it looks like you're thoughtful, like you're truly considering the job and the workplace, which you should be. But your questions at this phase should always focus on the institution and or the job responsibilities. So the interview is not the place to ask about the salary or the benefits or the flex time. You could ask about the start date, actually. That's a reasonable question. But there are a couple of reasons that you don't want to focus on the compensation or the kind of special accommodations that you might want. And these reasons are that questions like that take the focus off the job and off how fabulous you're going to be in the job. And then also this group of people hasn't offered you the job yet. So once they've selected you, then you can review their offer and you can ask about things like this. You might be asked to present your portfolio or to give a talk. And there's a lot of stuff on this slide which you can read at your leisure. There are two main things that I want you to take away here. The first is that in either case, the portfolio review or the presentation, you want to choose projects that are appropriate for the kind of work that the institution does. And you want to know who your audience will be. So you want to ask about that ahead of time. And this is because you want to pitch your talking points a little bit differently based on whether you're talking only to a group of conservators or if you're also presenting to allied professionals or to the public. If you have non-conservators in the audience, you don't need to talk down to them, but you want to stay away from conservation jargon. So don't expect people to immediately understand the names of conservation products. You want to explain and contextualize your decisions and your work a lot more completely than you would need to do for a group of all conservators. So just be aware of that. The second main thing that I want you to notice is in the tips box at the bottom of the slide. The primary purpose of looking at your portfolio or having you present is to start a conversation with you about your work. What the interviewers are interested in is how you make decisions, how you communicate, and then how you handle the discussion. And when you're thinking about what to choose to present, it's quite nice if you can feature projects that show investigation, that show problem-solving, and that show teamwork, because almost any job or fellowship is going to involve those things. So those are good things to think about. Congratulations, you are being offered the job. So there are usually two basic pieces to consider with a job offer. One is the salary or if you've applied for a fellowship, it'll be a stipend. And then there are non-salary forms of compensation and I've listed some of those on screen. We're going to talk about both. We are first going to talk about the salary. So you don't have to accept a job offer immediately. You usually have some time to think about it. You might have more or less time depending on the situation with your future employer. But if it's a salary and not a fellowship stipend, you usually also have some room to negotiate. Now I wanna tell you, don't think that you shouldn't care or you shouldn't ask about this because you really should. I don't want you to be afraid to negotiate. So when you're entering a salary negotiation, you wanna try not to name a number first. It's to your advantage to get your potential employer to do this because you don't wanna accidentally start too low. So try to make them go first. If they forced you to go first and sometimes this happens actually even at the application phase where you're asked to give a range, a salary range on the application. If you have to do that, I don't want you to be afraid to aim a little bit high. And that brings us to the most important thing that you really should do, which is research. And people seem to feel really paralyzed about salary research. But I wanna tell you, if you can research a conservation treatment, you can research your salary. So I've listed some ways that you can do that here. One way is to look at recently posted jobs and their ranges. Also, public institutions usually have to report their salary data. So universities report what people make. Sometimes you can't get it for the current year, but you can usually get it for past years. And I've actually done that for friends just by Googling. So that information is out there for any public institution. Then you can also call or email friends you know who are in parallel positions and you can get them to tell you what they make. And usually if people know that you want this information for a salary negotiation, they will share it with you. You can also call people who've recently hired for similar positions and you can ask them what the salary range was for the hire. And so like in that case, they don't have to tell you exactly what their employee is making, they can at least, they can tell you what HR approved for the salary range. And then there's also the 2009 FAIC compensation survey. This is available on the AIC website. And if you can't find it, I have the PDF and I can send it to you. FAIC is conducting a new survey right now. I took it this morning actually. It looks really good. I'm not sure when those data will be available. But the 2009 survey is only five years old. So that data is not far out of date. I have heard people criticize that survey but I have to tell you, I think it's really great and I've used it successfully for a lot of stuff. And with any salary survey, you are going to have to do some work and some math because no other person is exactly like you and nobody else is considering the job that you're considering. So with the existing survey, the 2009 one, if you look at pages 68 and 69, it will actually tell you how to do that math for yourself. And then also be aware that the Bureau of Labor Statistics gives general ranges for salaries. It's a little bit less useful because conservators are lumped in with some other museum-related occupations but it's still a decent resource. And then I also want to make you aware of the fact that there's a big gender gap in pay and conservation. Men across all compensation ranges in conservation make about 30% more than women do and that's a substantial difference. So if you're female, you should ask about this when you're negotiating your salary. You can do it nicely by framing it in terms of the statistic as a whole rather than making it about your employer's offer. But if you have male friends who are in comparable positions, you can ask them what they make so that you have a point of comparison. And my guy friends have usually been willing to share that kind of info. With me, again, if they understand why I'm asking and if you have numbers from men that can help make your case. Also asking about this is a way to make employers aware of unconscious biases and hiring and compensation. But let's say that you're just too uncomfortable bringing up gender parity head on. I want you to at least be aware that women are making 30% less which means that they're being offered less money and it means that they're accepting less. So be aware that the offer made to you if you're female might be on the low end of what's available. And this isn't happening deliberately. Like this kind of bias is unconscious. So people don't realize that they're doing it. But I'm just telling you, be aware. It could be on the low end of what's available. So advocate for yourself. Consider asking for 30% more and then justifying why you're worth it by pointing out what you'll bring to the institution. If the salary is fixed, the way it will be for an endowed fellowship, you might still have a little flexibility in the other non stipend forms of compensation which we'll talk about next. And then finally, your starting salary is really important. It's important any time you move to a new institution. The kinds of places will be work, museums, nonprofits. They don't typically have a very strong salary program so there aren't big increases built in annually. So you wanna get that starting number high. And then I hope you looked at the tips box because I really want you to be a strong advocate for yourself, especially in your first job. When you're negotiating non salary compensation, again, don't feel hesitant asking about this. You want to know the details. It's normal to want to know. You wanna be able to consider the whole package for any job or fellowship. And there's a list here of some things to think about. Advocate for yourself. As I mentioned previously, sometimes if the salary or stipend really is not flexible, other components might be. So research and travel money might be available, for example, or there might be a possibility for special time off. Like if I move to another job, I might want to negotiate some time off for archeological fieldwork if I wanted to keep doing that. You always wanna do this kind of negotiation upfront before you accept the job. And it's important to always get things like this in writing. So you remember that I encouraged you not to ask about these things during the interview. Well, now is the time you're negotiating the offer. Now it's when you wanna ask and then get any special accommodation in writing. So we come now to the more general career development part of the talk today. We'll talk about two basic things, figuring out what you wanna do next on a macro and then more micro levels, and then about strategies for getting those things accomplished. So when you're thinking about your overall career trajectory, your next step is going to be very individual based on you and what you like to do and where you want to work. And then other factors like work-life balance. It's a good idea to spend some time developing your own ideas about what you value in a job and a vision for what you'd like your life to be like. And I know that it is easy to feel paralyzed about this kind of thing when there aren't a lot of jobs or when the economy is not great. But I have to tell you that fear is not going to help you. So I'm sorry, I have no work and one of the other phones keeps ringing. But just spend some time thinking about this because you wanna achieve what you want to achieve unless you develop a vision for yourself. And I also want you to know that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is forecasting 16% growth in this job sector over the next seven years. So it is worth it for you to spend a little time on this. If you don't have a crystal clear idea about what you wanna do, do a little bit of legwork, talk to senior colleagues and ask for their advice. They might see gaps in your experience or they might see very logical next steps for you that it's hard for you to see yourself. When you're thinking about what to apply for and you're wondering if fellowships or jobs are better early in your career, again, I think that's gonna be individual for you. But I would encourage you to apply for both if possible. Fellowships will give you unique opportunities that you're not likely to have later in your career. So if you love research or focused work, you definitely want to apply for fellowships. At the same time, I would really hate to see any young conservator not apply for advertised jobs or contract positions. And just be aware that your first job, honestly, is often not your absolute dream job, but a job is going to set you up better for future employment very likely because you'll be doing very practical collections based work that you can point to as you begin to build your career. Also be aware that you can, in some cases, create your own opportunity. So the Crest Fellowships, the Smithsonian Institution Fellowships and a lot of other fellowships can have a unique research focus that you can develop. And the Crest and the Smithsonian ones can be written for specific individuals. So you can actually name the fellow and the application. So if there's a place that you'd like to work or if there's somebody that you'd really like to work with, you can approach that institution or that person about crafting something together that might be mutually beneficial. And then I also want to put in a plug for professional associate status in AIC. You can apply for that after you've been out of school for three years. So when you're three years post-grad, you can apply for that. And with your professional associate status, it's a little bit different than just being an associate for a couple of reasons. One is that you're agreeing formally to uphold the Code of Ethics for AIC, which is important. You go through a level of peer review, which is also quite important. And once you have successfully achieved it, you have access to some additional support through the organization. Like you have access to the individual professional development scholarships, for example. When you're thinking about your work on the day-to-day level, what do you want to do to move your career along? Again, it's not that useful to be prescriptive because you are unique. But I encourage you to think about your day-to-day work in terms of experiences and think about what you haven't done yet that you might like to try. I listed some very general kinds of things on the left, and then I also encourage you to consider service work and publishing and presenting. By doing service work, you make wonderful connections that you wouldn't otherwise make. You get a broader overview of what's going on in the field, and you gain useful experience at the same time. Publishing and presenting is also a great experience, and it's a way to share your work. And I want to tell you, too, that over the course of your entire career, it's quite normal to have things that you submit for publication or presentation be rejected. So don't be discouraged if that happens to you. I know that it can be easy to be discouraged by that when you're first starting out. If you follow up your rejections, you can sometimes learn from them. And it sounds counterintuitive, but the sooner you accept rejection in terms of putting yourself out there professionally, the easier it will be for you over the course of your whole career to be bold and to go for it. And I also want you to be aware that just because something is rejected from one venue doesn't mean that it won't be perfect for presentation or publication somewhere else. So think about that and then keep at it. If you're not sure what might be good to try, you can talk to senior colleagues, but you can also talk to your peers. And I personally find peer mentoring really helpful for this kind of thing here. Nothing is going to happen for your career development unless you take the reins and you make it happen yourself. So I suggest setting short and long-term goals that will help move you along. Short term might be one year, long term might be three years, but you can choose whatever intervals you think will work best for you and whatever intervals you think are achievable. And then what you want to do is break your goals or your projects down into their most basic component parts so that they're divided up into manageable, easily achievable chunks. And then you want to set deadlines on those little itty-bitty parts. And it's helpful to enlist a friend who will check up on you in this regard. And I suggest buddying up and doing the same thing for your friend so you can each establish some goals that you want to achieve in the next year or three or whatever. And it's useful if this person is a conservator because they will know your professional world, but they don't have to be. I have an arch history buddy who we do this for each other and it works out pretty well. All of this will work better if you are realistic and you align your goals with things you're already doing or things that you already have an opportunity to do or if you can just start to do something new where you already are. It's good to reevaluate your goals at least once a year. You can do this with your buddy or with a friend or mentor. Or if you can, it is quite nice if you can do this with your supervisor. If you can set and evaluate goals with your supervisor, this person can be your ally and you'll have a lot more support for accomplishing things in your work and then you will also have somebody that's following up on whether or not you're getting these things done. I want you to remember that you have agency throughout your career and you have the power to shape your professional life even at the very beginning and I think actually, especially at the beginning. So embrace it, feel hopeful, articulate a vision, research it the way you want a treatment proposal, break it down and then go for it. I want to thank you for having me. I hope this was helpful. I feel like it went by really fast and I think that Fran will start to take questions now. Yes, thank you so much, Suzanne. We will jump right in. The first question I have, if a human resources form wants you to list the number of years of experience you have in your field, do you include pre-program work, conservation graduate school and the final internship year for school or can you only include what you've done post-graduation? Okay, my take on that personally would be that the final internship year would count. However, I polled my lab mates about this recently and so one of them just finished school and the other one is about three years out of school and they both felt pretty strongly at the convention in the field right now is that you can only count post-graduate experience. So you can't count your final internship year for school. I think that with the human resources form, you know, maybe you would want to include any work that you actually got paid to do. That could be one way to think about it. But you know, you can also, like when you're writing the letter or the statement of interest, you can be careful to characterize all of the internship or fellowship or final year work that you did so that people understand that that was at a professional level. I don't know if that was enough of an answer. Yeah, I think it might be a case by case basis as well but thank you, that's a great place to start. I know I've encountered that several times. You've answered, we've got a question, someone asking about where to find reliable information for coming up with a salary and you were able to answer that. But we also got a question on when is it appropriate to ask for a raise? Well, so a lot of places will have a salary program in place so there will be a little bit of an increase every year. At most places it's not a very big increase though it might be like 1%, if you're lucky it will be two. So if you want to have a larger job, like three to 5%, I think that after you've worked some place for, I mean it kind of depends on where you start off too. Like if you start off pretty low you might want to ask for this sooner. But other places like if you're having, if you're making a reasonable salary for your level when you're hired, then maybe after three to five years that would be a good time to ask for a raise or if you've just done something pretty intense for the organization like let's say you have just supervised a collections move or like a collections wide re-housing project or you've just helped with like renovation of a new building or something like that and you've really been doing a lot of work that would be a good time to ask for a raise. That sounds good. What about gaining additional experience? A lot of us have a lot of pre-program experience and then in grad school we get a lot of experience in different materials and different avenues but you can't touch on everything. So for example if you want to get a footing conserving stone and monuments but that wasn't covered in your grad program do you have any recommendations on how to get that experience? Well, if you can attend conferences on things like that there's a group of still conservators actually that meets regularly so you could attend a conference. AIC often has workshops before the annual meeting and I know in recent years some of those are focused on stone just for example. Networking is another good way to do that. I often pick up the phone like if I have to consult on something that I really haven't done a lot of I figure out who's doing work in that area and I talk to them about what I might need to do to learn more. If you're still in school you can do independent studies of course. You can focus your summer internships on getting the kind of experience you want and then I mean sometimes you just have to learn it on the job too and then you just have to be really proactive about educating yourself about reading, about talking to people, things like that. Thank you. The next question I'm gonna ask is kind of a multi-part question. They're all a little bit related. The first one, if internships are a good thing to bolster your CV after graduation is it a good idea for a professional conservator to someone who has graduated versus a student to seek out and do internships especially if they're unpaid? What are your thoughts on that? I think in general that's not a great thing to do after you graduate although there are some conservation graduate programs out there that don't have a built-in internship year. So if you're coming out of school and you don't like you didn't have that funded third year or fourth year you might not be, I guess what I'm trying to say is you're not gonna be as competitive in the job market or the fellowship market as somebody who did have that built-in year in their graduate program. So in that case, if you can afford it it's not a bad idea to do some internship time where you consider your compensation to be the practicum internship. That said, if you have a graduate degree I mean you have a decent credential so I think it's better for you to expect to be paid. And you know there are, the Crest Fellowships can function kind of like that third year so like if you didn't have that in your graduate program maybe consider one of the Crest Fellowships and like again you can approach an institution about crafting a Crest together and that could be a way to get that year funded. And then just related to that and I think I know the answer but I just wanna go ahead and ask it. For those of us emerging conservators who are starting up a private practice sometimes it's a little daunting and I know we've already talked about fear today but sometimes you are approached to do maybe some volunteer conservation work or a very short, for a very short conservation treatment or to do something that's very, very low paid and maybe our first inclination is to do it just to have something but maybe that's not a good idea or how do you feel about that? I think that if you're going to do something that could lead to getting you a decent contract then you might consider doing it unpaid so if you could do a quick assessment, something that wouldn't take a lot of billable hours time away from you so like if you could go to an institution and in say like 90 minutes do a really quick survey and write up something for them that would help them apply for grants with the understanding that you would be the conservator that they would then employ to do the work once they got the funding that might not be a bad thing to do but in general I think it's better to tell people what your rate is and then just stick to that and places do often have odd pockets of money I feel like people will often tell you that they really don't have money to afford stuff but like if they think about it they do I mean there are places that they can look so that's kind of what I have to say about that. Yeah and then just to finish up this topic I know I just graduated from school and sometimes I'm a little bit nervous about if I can't find that next job or that next fellowship what do you suggest I should do with my time without a job and then how would I explain that gap in my resume? Well to start kind of a little bit earlier with that question one thing that you can do when you're thinking about employment for yourself in the future is think about what you're good at what you like to do and what people might pay you to do you know write that down and fire that letter off to places in your area places that you might like to work so that they realize that you're available and then if you've you know and of course obviously network like anybody you know in the conservation world you should tell them like my internship here or my fellowship is coming to an end and I would like to be employed you know just make sure that everybody knows that you're available for contract work and for other things like that and really like work that if it happens that you really have nothing lined up that's a tough question because it'll depend on your personal circumstances but if you know if you're at a place where you could instead pursue a little bit more education that might be something to think about you know like if you've thought about like I've occasionally thought about getting an MBA I mean you probably would rather get a you know like a bone marrow transplant than go back to graduate school at this point but I feel like you think about like is there something that you would like to do or some sort of credential that you would like to add that now might be a time to pursue and what about getting maybe not a conservation job but if you were qualified for a curator job or something else within a museum do you think you should go for that or I think many of us are worried that if we get a different job in the museum that then we'll no longer be able to return to conservation yeah that's a tough one too it kind of depends on how much of your time that other job will take if it's something that you think you can do relatively easily and you can still kind of keep your hand in with conservation in some way like you could still take in some private work or you could start to pick up a little bit of conservation work for that institution like if it's a smaller place that doesn't have a conservator on staff even if you can continue to do some service work for AIC I think that's a totally reasonable thing to do I mean to be honest you might find that you like doing that you might really like doing these in education and you might bring something special to it because of your conservation training so I don't think that's a bad thing to do thank you switching gears a little bit what about personal websites as someone who has interviewed other people do you find them to be on the rise and a necessary thing should I spend my time and my financial resources working on a personal website I am like one of the least web-presidency people around I'm not on Facebook and I don't do any social media things I think that with a personal website you know if you're starting a business like if you're starting a private practice you do want to have a website for that if you are oh gosh you know your phase of your career and probably a lot of the people on this phone call it's probably not a bad idea to have some sort of electronic product whether it's a website or just like a selection of PowerPoint slides that you can fire off to a potential employer so that they can see examples of your work I think that's probably not a bad thing to invest some time in but do you need a personal website I don't think that you need a like that you really need a personal website no okay then we also got a question about the perks of public and private institutions so we were asking what should a person keep in mind for each sector regarding career prospects any thoughts on that well I guess I guess I don't really know if we're talking about private institutions in terms of like a private practice or if we're talking about private institutions like a like a museum I'm not sure either maybe we'll say maybe private practice and then what you should keep in mind regarding each sector for each sector regarding your career prospects so maybe the perks of each one well I am I think like with the private the private practice I feel like private practices often get in like regional labs they often get a pretty wide variety of work and that could be interesting it can be financially a little bit more challenging to work for a private practice or regional lab just because you always have to be drumming up business so there can be lean times you know as well as more flush times you might end up having to travel quite a bit if you work for a private practice or a regional lab I guess you should think about that like how like how much would you like that or how much might you not like that like if you have small children that might not be something that you want to do public institutions of course go through lean times too but in general I think there's probably more resources available through public institutions like public museums if you're thinking about like the difference between public and private museums so like the difference between a place like the Kelsey where I work which is a small university museum public, publicly funded, state funding and some place like the Frick you know it just has a lot of private funding I feel like or like the musical instrument museum in Arizona that also has a lot of private funding a lot of times those places are a little bit more idiosyncratic I think you can do things perhaps that are a little bit edgier because you're not relying on public money in quite the same way that you are at a public institution so that could be interesting although you know with any public or private museum right now I think you know you're thinking a lot about public good and how you're serving your public in your community so that's probably going to be the same yeah that sounds good and thanks for talking about the regional centers I kind of I forgot about those I also have several co-workers who are just beginning their families as well and some of them might be interested in negotiating the number of hours worked maybe perhaps turning it into more of a part-time job or rearranging their schedules so it's easier for babysitters and child being and what not so when is it appropriate in the job process to negotiate those numbers of hours worked and do you have any recommendations for how to approach that topic well if you're thinking about this when you're interviewing for a job um... usually the way that the job is posted is what they really want so like if they're advertising for someone to work full-time they want someone to work full-time so I would definitely not ask about this until you get the job offer and then you know be prepared for them to withdraw offer if you if you really don't want to work full-time you might be able to talk to them down to like thirty or thirty two hours a week that might be okay but usually if they have a salary line salary line for a full-time conservator they want and need a full-time conservator you know it's more normal to have more conservation work then you have um... full-time equivalent hours for your employees there's usually more work and you know not enough conservation hours if you are already working and you would like to uh... decrease the number of hours that is often frankly a pretty difficult thing for employers to do one reason is you know what I just said there's usually more work and not enough time to go around the other thing is like as an administrator I don't want to lose half the salary line so I don't want someone to drop to half-time because I might not ever get that money back from my department so you could think about it's often easier to drop to like thirty or thirty two hours and that's usually better for you too as an employee because you're able to retain your benefits that is usually better than going half-time so you might try asking about that you could also ask if you could work um... although it's not ideal you could ask if you could work um... with a more flexible schedule so where you work like for ten hour days and then you have uh... the friday or the monday off I have a friend that does that but I would just you know float it with your boss although I mean this is a discouraging thing to say in regard to this question that I don't know many people that have successfully been able to do this you know more normal that your boss is going to say like no way we need you full-time it's great to hear this anecdote thank you uh... I'm actually since we only have about two minutes left in our hour I'm going to wrap up the Q&A um... so thank you very much um... thank you Suzanne for not only your presentation but also for answering all these questions uh... I definitely learned a lot and I wish I wish that we'd have this webinar you know months ago before I applied to some recent jobs I really uh... got some tips today that I'll be using again that I'll be using in the future um... I'd like to remind some people uh... everyone about uh... Suzanne's comments on becoming a professional associate that status within AIC uh... we have a blog post that was written by Molly Gleason of ECPN in 2012 and I'm going to post that blog post on uh... on Facebook so you can see it but you can also go into conservators converse and search for it in the archive so people can learn a little bit more about becoming a professional associate and like we said before we obviously didn't really touch on portfolios today and Suzanne wrote a portfolio blog for us um... a little while ago and I'll post that again so people can tell can see that one uh... I'd also like to thank Ryan so much for running the go-to webinar software today through AIC and thank you all for watching and for your questions and we also uh... we're developing right now uh... different topics for upcoming webinars so if you have any suggestions we would love to hear them you can email us uh... or make a comment on Facebook or get in touch with us so thank you so much and I hope that everybody enjoyed the webinar today as much as I did so thank you Suzanne you are welcome thanks for having me thanks