Workforce Development

What is the purpose of the UK’s museums, libraries and archives sector? For the MLA Partnership, it’s a sector that is:

"building a successful and creative nation by connecting people to knowledge and inspiration."

This can only happen through the people who work in and for the sector.

In the South East, there are more than 15,000 of these people in paid employment – that’s about 18 per cent of the national total. Add to that everyone who volunteers and you have a total of more than 20,000 people all working to bring about the MLA Vision in this region.

When MLA published its workforce development strategy, Learning for Change, it asked its regional agencies to sign up to a set of activities. Regional agencies like MLA South East would support Learning for Change through:

• Advocating sector diversity
• Brokering sector skills
• Indicating sector support
• Developing sector partners

In the South East, we are now building on those activities, and we are going forward from Learning for Change. Our workforce development strategy is Change Forward.

This is how Change Forward can help the sector:

• Advocacy
• • Problem: Lack of a culture of learning and change, lack of change being delivered
  • Need: Make strong leadership, staff development and a learning culture possible
  • Key response: Creating a post with Arts Council South East and the LSC to advocate the power of the sector’s workforce
• Diversity
• • Problem: The make up of the people in the sector often does not reflect the communities they serve
  • Need: Diversify the sector workforce in every sense
  • Key response: Piloting actively inclusive volunteering schemes to enable people to return to work
• Research
• • Problem: The sector doesn’t have the essential information required to make the case for investment
  • Need: Powerful and reliable evidence on the sector’s key strategic issues
  • Key response: Work with the Sector Skills Councils to map the sector’s qualification and vocational ladders
• Skills
• • Problem: People in the sector are looking for new skills, new attitudes and new ways of doing things
  • Need: Make sure people in the sector can get the skills, the attitudes and the knowledge they need
  • Key response: Developing the creativity of the workforce through the "Rewarding the Creative Process" grant scheme