Career Growth

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Introduction

In the ECPN Webinar Beyond the Portfolio: Your Conservation Career, Conservator Suzanne Davis offered advice on applying for fellowships and jobs, developing your career after graduate school, and negotiating salary.

Finding Opportunities

The Wiki page on Internships and Fellowships has an overview of how to find employment and training opportunities. This includes a list of websites and email listservs where positions are posted.

Negotiating Compensation

It is important to understand the complete compensation package for an employment opportunity, as well as the potential for advancement (e.g. position title and salary increases may be regulated by the institution). Compensation includes monetary and non-monetary components, such as salary and bonuses; vacation, sick leave and holidays; health insurance; and other benefits, such as access to or discounts on specific services, contributions to retirement funds, parking and transit, financial support for professional development opportunities, etc. Some components of a compensation package may be negotiable, while others are standardized across an institution and non-negotiable.

The overview report of FAIC’s 2022 Compensation Research, 2014 Compensation Research, and 2009 Compensation Research are useful resources for emerging professionals who are searching for employment opportunities or entering salary negotiations.

Since 2015, the ECPN Officers have been compiling and generating ECPN Compensation Spreadsheets on fellowships to supplement the FAIC's research survey. The purpose of collecting this data is two-fold: to increase transparency about typical fellowship/internship earnings and to provide a useful resource for early-career professionals.

Other ECPN initiatives include the "Making the Ask: Developing Negotiation Tactics in the Field of Conservation" workshop, "Professional Advocacy through Museum Unionization" webinars coordinated in partnership with the Philadelphia Area Conservation Association (PACA), and "Your Conservation Career: Negotiating Your Next Salary" blogpost by Suzanne Davis.

Read the 2019 blog post "Empowering Change through Salary Advocacy and Negotiation," which was written by Anisha Gupta, Ariel O'Connor and Jen Munch and offers a breakdown of how to advocate for yourself after a successful interview. It includes information about types of compensation, how and when to negotiate (and who to practice on!), and options you have if you don't get the response you want.

Additional Resources

The ICON blogpost "Things I Wish I Knew in My First Year as a Conservator" by Leanne Tonkin includes a personal perspective and lessons learned in the first few years out of graduate school. For additional reflections on this topic, check out ECPN's article "Changing Horizons: Observations from Emerging Conservation Professionals," found in the Introduction section of the Getting Started in Your Career page.