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Museum occupations: skills on exhibit

June 16, 2010

A museum hires workers in a variety of occupations to help share its treasures with the public. Museum work can be grouped into three broad categories: collections management and care, exhibit design, and education.

Median annual wages of selected museum occupations, private industry, May 2009
[Chart data]

Workers who manage and care for a museum's collections are experts on handling items to minimize damage, and they understand how temperature, light, humidity and other factors can harm these objects. These workers ensure that their museum's collections are preserved and shared with the public in a meaningful way. Some of these workers include archivists, collections managers and registrars, conservators, curators, and preparators.

A team of workers is usually involved in creating a museum exhibit. Exhibits today frequently incorporate interactive media and other technologies, such as touch-screen kiosks or audio tours, to help visitors have a more dynamic experience. Among the workers who create these interactive media are computer software engineers, scriptwriters, and audiovisual staff. Other workers perform tasks such as determining the desired contents of an exhibit or writing text about an exhibit's displays.

Education-related museum jobs have become increasingly prominent in recent decades, as museums place greater emphasis on informal or experiential learning. Today, most museums employ at least one person who is responsible for its educational programs and objectives; some museums dedicate an entire department to education.

See "Museum work: Put your skills on exhibit" to learn more. Earnings data are from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. The article shows wage data for 2008, the latest available when the article was written.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, Museum occupations: skills on exhibit at https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2010/ted_20100616.htm (visited March 28, 2024).

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