I’ve been paying attention to all the consternation our business community is having about the “lack of employees” and how “nobody wants to work anymore.” I find this so fascinating because these same companies that eroded employee rights, had absolutely no loyalty to employees, and treated us all as if we were disposable is now wringing its hands at how it can keep the same old game afoot. Conversations about the post-pandemic economy are entertaining, fascinating, and prescient. They have also been playing out in cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology over the past couple years.
Last week I was watching a video segment on CNBC about “New Collar Jobs” and noticed how this could be a pathway for CRM companies to think about staffing in the near term. While I don’t think this is a permanent solution for our predicament, I do see a future where this plays a role in training tomorrow’s archaeologists.
This is the first post in a series about how New Collar Jobs applies to cultural resource management archaeology.
Talking about New Collar Jobs is not new. Conversations about creating professional certifications in CRM archaeology have been muddling about for a long time now. My colleague Chris Webster launched Archaeological Certifications Team Black back in 2019. The goal was to teach aspiring CRM archaeologists the wealth of useful knowledge universities do not teach through online training modules that were to be designed by CRM archaeologists. We were trying to help prepare folks for careers in CRM while also helping CRM companies teach the professional skills they were looking for. The project didn’t go too far as there was no uptake by CRM companies and few new archaeologists were willing to pay for additional trainings after completing entire college degrees. Even though it is a great idea, ArchCertBlack now exists primarily as an Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/archcertblack/).
The idea of supplementing college with technical certifications is not new in other industries either. One example is the Google Career Certificates program (https://grow.google/) which is a collaboration with Coursera to provide online courses that terminate in certificates that are endorsed by a range of employers, universities, and other partners. I’m unaware of how these certificates compare with traditional college degrees but it is clear that large employers are taking actions to supplement what they see as a shortcoming in traditional college education.
In the CNBC conversation, noticed that the commentators had a pretty pedestrian view of the future of “New Collar Jobs” in the American economy. The whole segment reflected the contrast between educational traditionalists (e.g. those who continue to espouse the value of a college degree) and essentializing pragmatists (e.g. those who clearly see the shortfalls in today’s higher education system and think targeted training and certificates can do away with a traditional college degree). The reality is we need both approaches to future-proof our society: need employees with college degrees who can also take advantage of the “New Collar” industry.
CRM archaeology is a microcosm of this debate. It is an industry uniquely positioned to see both the benefit and shortcomings of both approaches. CRM will be most successful in the next few decades if it can tack between these two viewpoints.
What are New Collar Jobs?
In short, New Collar Jobs are professional jobs that require technical skills but don’t necessarily require a college degree (check out the bibliography on Wikipedia for links on the current campaign to build out systems for this sort of work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New-collar_worker). The CNBC video above mentions that this isn’t a new concept. There have been several of these sorts of jobs; in fact, I would argue that skilled practitioners in the past like farmers who grow specialty crops like sugar cane, informally trained engineers like those who built much of our early railroad network, and others of that ilk have existed in western societies for centuries. The moniker “New Collar Jobs” is a 21st century label for something that has been with us for generations.
The difference of the modern conceptualization of New Collar Jobs is how it is pitched as a compliment, supplement, or competitor for a college degree. This is probably because college degrees have become ubiquitous whereas useful workplace skills amongst recent college graduates have not. For over a decade I have been blogging about how universities do not prepare students for careers in cultural resource management archaeology:
When archaeology field techs have to teach PhDs how to do archaeology
It’s not just archaeology. Most students don’t learn what they need in college.
Archaeology PhD students: Prepare for a non-academic career.
6 reasons why CRM companies shouldn’t hire field techs with graduate degrees
Which college courses helped my archaeology career
In short universities have no incentive to teach CRM, so they don’t. In academia, we get rewarded for being hyperspecialized. Anthropology departments at R1 schools hire professors to build departments like people collect Pokémon cards. Gotta catch ’em all. Schools with fewer resources want T-persons (e.g. folks who know a lot about one subject but also a little about a breadth of topics) so they can provide an experience similar to the bigger schools without as robust of a research component. I’ve never seen an anthropology department doing everything they can to hire professors who can prepare students for the CRM industry because departments still believe it is up to companies to teach students how to do archaeology. There are archaeological field schools. There are some CRM academic certificates, minors, and classes. But there is very little in college that will prepare any aspiring archaeologist for a career in the reality of American archaeology, which is CRM. And I never see a time when departments will orient themselves towards this reality because it doesn’t bring in revenue or prestige. CRM companies are going to have to settle for whatever they get until they start investing in anthropology programs. A “New Collar Jobs” system for CRM archaeology could be the answer. Building a series of recognized certifications and trainings could be a better way of creating the archaeologists government agencies and CRM companies need ASAP.
While I believe some system of “New Collar” jobs training could be helpful now, a college degree will always be required for archaeologists who want to stay employed as an archaeologist for several reasons:
First, this is how things have been in the United States since the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) was signed into law in 1966. College-educated archaeologists built and continue to maintain the CRM archaeology industry and college-educated archaeologists will continue to have preferences for CRMers who have the same educational experiences as they did.
Second, archaeology is a science that requires scientists (e.g. folks skilled in applying the scientific method with evidence of that proficiency). We can meet some of our client’s legal obligations through targeted trainings and certifications, but we can’t meet the needs of government agencies and the rest of the American public by simply reporting what we find in shovel probes. CRM is supposed to be the identification and evaluation of historic properties; CRM archaeologists do this for archaeological resources. You can teach someone off the street to identify artifacts and sediments, but it takes additional intellectual ability to evaluate the significance of a site and connect that to human pasts. For better or worse, college is the space and time in an archaeologist’s life when they first develop their capacity for archaeological thought. This is needed for higher level CRM work.
I am not saying every CRM archaeologist has the same intellectual ability, but I am saying that every CRM archaeologist with a college degree has set aside significant hours of their lives cultivating some degree of archaeology intellectualization. You are not going to get that through a “New Collar Jobs” certification system.
Third, archaeology in the United States has an absolutely shameful legacy of graverobbing and looting. A lot was done by professional archaeologists, but much more was done by avocationalists, antiquarians, volunteers, and looters. Today’s archaeologists need to do better.
For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, museum and university archeologists disrespectfully dug up Native American and African American graves so they could collect the skeletons of ancestors and the associated grave goods. Archaeologists also supported random citizens who wanted to dig up sites, taking their collections as donations, providing maps of locations where sites could be found, and providing technical expertise. American archaeologists used this information to further eugenics, which fueled Jim Crow society, and to promote the idea that Native Americans were extinct, therefore, they had no rights. All of this was used to build the unequal society in which we live today.
Today, untrained avocational archaeologists, bottle hunters, and other looters continue to plunder sites. Professionals stay away from these factions, for the most part, but this sort of thing is still happening across the country because portions of the American public do not observe the ethical treatment of the past. Vowing to protect and ethically treat archaeological sites is part of what it means to be a professional archaeologist. I’m not sure we’re going to get this same commitment from folks who just took a bunch of online archaeology certifications. In fact, we may get even more looting if we’re not careful.
I feel like it is the duty of today’s archaeologists to try and undo the damage caused to heritage sites. Getting a college degree will not fix what our dirty universities did in the past and continue to do, but the privilege that comes with that degree and the knowledge accumulated in the process, can be used to create the sort of scholar that is willing to try and atone for what our predecessors did.
Now is not the time to be ashamed of archaeology or to give up. Now is the time to use our degrees, skills, and knowledge to find sites, properly determine their significance, and mitigate adverse effects in a professional manner. An₵ient Aliens, Ameri₵an Diggers, NatGeo, and your local bottle collector’s club isn’t going to do that type of work.
Could this be a substitute for college?
I do not believe New Collar Job training is not a substitution for a college degree. Employers will continue to value the college degree as much as any certification for decades to come. This is why folks with New Collar credentials will also need a degree if they want to maintain pathways to gainful employment throughout life. Regardless of what industry you go into, it is extremely likely that you will be laid off, fired, or find yourself without a job at some point. What are you going to do then? Is your next employer going to value the certifications you got for your previous career? Our economy is oriented to value college degrees. We’ve built much of our economy around the idea that a college degree is the best evidence we have that you can follow instructions and persevere to complete a difficult task over a long period of time. The degree says as much about you as an individual as it does what you studied. Employers know this, which is why they will continue to value those with a degree over those without one.
However, I do think cultural resource management needs to invest in a professional certifications program that will either create archaeological technicians with New Collar Job credentials. Or the industry could supplement the lack of professional training in anthropology programs with certifications akin to those found in New Collar Jobs. In my next post I will outline some reasons why New Collar certifications will be useful for cultural resource management archaeologists and some models we can use to make these certifications a reality.
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