The Heritage Lottery Fund’s Skills for the Future programme offers work-based training in a wide range of skills that are needed to look after buildings, landscapes, habitats, species, and museum and archive collections, as well as equipping people to lead education and outreach programmes, manage volunteers and use new technology.
The aims of Skills for the Future are to:
- fund high quality work based training opportunities to equip people with the skills to pursue a career in heritage;
- enhance the capacity of the heritage sector to deliver sustainable training and share good practice; and
- demonstrate the value of heritage skills to modern life.
With funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund between 2011 and 2014, Tate have created 27 traineeships that provide high-quality entry routes into careers in the museums and art galleries sector. Our traineeships are aimed at training new people in the skills which will be important for museums in the future. The aim is also to create a more diverse workforce, by attracting people who might not otherwise have considered a career working back-of-house in a museum or art gallery.
The programme welcomed its first group of ten trainees to Tate in October 2011, where they worked across the collection care department; in the art handling, conservation science, paintings conservation, sculpture conservation, time-based media, photography and registrar teams.
The second group of trainees has expanded to seventeen; these trainees started on1 July 2013and are again working across the collection care department, with the addition of paper and preventive conservation. Eleven of the group will gain Level 3 Diplomas in Cultural Heritage, whilst the remaining six are benefiting from personalised programmes of internal training and short external training.