We’ve all seen the following clauses in a job description:
— A combination of education and experience which includes College-level education or training that provided knowledge equivalent to that described above, plus appropriate technical experience or additional education.
— The work experience must have included archeology field experience, which may include that gained in an archeological field school.
— OR, 6 months of graduate education related to the occupation (i.e. related course work); OR, a combination of experience and education to meet total experience.
— Experience refers to paid and unpaid experience, including volunteer work done through National Service programs (e.g., Peace Corps, AmeriCorps) and other organizations (e.g., professional; philanthropic; religious; spiritual; community; student, social). Volunteer work helps build critical competencies, knowledge, and skills and can provide valuable training and experience that translates directly to paid employment. You will receive credit for all qualifying experience, including volunteer experience.
These clauses are just as ubiquitous as they’ve always been. They replaced the old school statement I used to see, “must have 4 years related work experience; however, a graduate degree can be substituted for work experience.” This type of stuff is usually found on government archaeology job posts, but sometimes is found on post for CRM openings.
I’ve always wondered why employers make it seem like college experience and #freearchaeology is equivalent to paid field employment. It always makes me ask: Do companies and agencies really consider college and volunteering the same as CRM field experience? Is a field school the same as a summer doing CRM? What is the value of CRM experience when applying for work?
This post follows on the heels on my recent posts about how colleges are not teaching the skills employers need and how becoming an expert in any activity requires about 5 years (10,000 hours) of concentrated effort. It is a continuation of my persistent quest to find the value of a graduate degree in archaeology, or any college degree for that matter.
Archaeology experience=what?
Personally, I don’t think college experience is the same as paid employment from a government agency or CRM company. Maybe an internship can substitute a few weeks of shovel probing in the forest, but I don’t think colleges are teaching the skills necessary to become a successful CRMer, at least not yet.
However, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for the U.S. Federal Government has a pretty clear description of what constitutes archaeological experience. Archaeology job classification standards can be found under the OPM standards for white collar work for group 0100 – Social Science, Psychology, and Welfare Group. The fact that OPM considers archaeology white collar work pretty much says it all since white collar positions with the government almost universally require college education.
In the guide for the Archaeology Series, GS-0193, OPM provides nearly 20 pages of text defining who is and is not classified an archaeologist by the Federal government. You can download the guide at the link above (standards for white collar work) and it is intended for the general category “archaeologist” at the GS-5—GS-9 level and above. I focus on the classification outlined in this handbook because that is how most full-performance (i.e. full-time) government archaeologists are classified and is similar to the field director/mid-level supervisory position in private companies.
After reading the 0193 handbook, it’s clear that volunteer work is probably not enough to land a full-performance position. The OPM guide clearly states,
“…positions generally at the lower levels (GS-5 and GS-7) involving performance of archeological duties in a trainee or developmental capacity when the following factors are present: An actual objective of the work is to prepare the employees for full-professional archeological work of a higher level; there is a line of promotion to full-professional positions in the organization; assigned duties are of such a nature and variety as to constitute important elements of preparation for full-professional archeology work;… the employees possess the qualifications which are consonant with professional scientific or technical training equivalent to that represented by graduation from an accredited college or university; and the supervision exercised over the positions is directed in part to the career development of the employees.”(pg.3)
How often are those factors not present in a job? Which employer doesn’t want her/his employees to advance, improve, and excel?
This implies, at least to me, that you need to put in time at the lower GS levels before you can realistically be considered for a GS-9+ position. An internship is probably not going to cut it when compared to an arch tech that has worked for the agency before. A CRMer with some experience may be considered, but I know folks with agency experience are usually the top candidates.
So much for #freearchaeology counting toward career advancement.
They don’t specifically say you need a degree, but…
The classification in the handbook pretty much describes the minimum qualifications, but, these days, they rarely say outright that you need to have a graduate degree. The Archaeology Series, 0193 handbook explains hiring managers have the freedom to choose the best candidates in line with the qualification standard. Basically, they say volunteering and field school count but the hiring manager will go with the best fit, which includes educational attainment:
“Beyond the minimum qualifications, however, agencies, in filling positions with particular specialized requirements, are able to establish selective factors for use in evaluating applicants who meet at least the minimum qualifications. Furthermore, in the examining process, quality-ranking factors are applied to rank the applicants in the pool of qualified persons on a scale that gives extra weight to relevant qualifications above the minimum defined in the standard. By these means, agencies are able to choose candidates from among those who meet or exceed the minimum requirements to best fit the particular requirements of the position being filled.” (pgs. 15—17)
There is a reason why the handbook doesn’t require a degree. The back section of the handbook discusses the comments OPM received on its classification for archaeologists, which provides information on how the classification was fleshed out within the government.
The guide was written in 1983 and, evidentially, there was blowback over the education requirement for the position of archaeologist. The guide states; “A few respondents expressed concern about the applicability of the basic requirement to all grades since they believe that certain employees in the occupation do not possess such academic achievements” (pg. 17). At the time when the Archaeology Series handbook was written, over 30 years ago, many of the archaeos doing work at the time didn’t have a college degree. The OPM wanted to maintain that a college degree was central to the position because it was interested in how the position would be defined for future employees, many of whom would have a degree. So, they kept a 4-year degree in anthropology as the basic requirement but added the famous “combination of education and experience” clause. The compromise is also the source of the “education is a substitute for real experience” caveat found throughout archaeology:
“The basic [education] requirement is applicable to all positions in this occupation, including those with any time equivalent combination of college level education and/or experience that satisfies the basic requirement as defined. Similarly, a master’s or equivalent degree is acceptable as fully satisfying the basic requirement. As cited in the draft and final standard, such a degree would warrant consideration for entry into the occupation above the GS-5 level.” (pg. 17)
The guide also explains why college experience is a substitute for archaeological experience:
“The minimum time requirement between General Schedule grades is one year’s experience. Thus, it takes at least two years for an archeologist (or engineer, or accountant, etc.) to progress from entry at GS-5 to GS-7 to GS-9. In substituting education for experience the same time requirement is maintained. That is, where a baccalaureate degree qualifies at GS-5, a year of graduate education qualifies for GS-7, and two years’ graduate education qualifies for GS-9. To simplify civil service examinations, a master’s degree was established-many years ago-as equivalent to two years’ experience. Currently, however, many master’s degrees can be earned in one year or less. This now produces a situation whereby two equally qualified college graduates with baccalaureate degrees would inappropriately be at different grade levels if one had spent one year working for the Federal Government (i.e., GS-7) and the other had spent one year in obtaining a master’s degree (GS-9). It is this inequality that the final standard eliminates.” (pg. 18)
Thirty years ago, it used to take a government employee two years of work experience to move up to the next GS level. OPM reasoned that, if a BA was the basic requirement for a GS-5/GS-7, then two years of graduate school was the equivalent of a GS-9 since, as we all know, graduate school is equal to working for the government for two years. Also, the fact that someone that spent two years in grad school could be outranked by a government archaeo with only a BA/BS was considered unfair by OPM. So, they used the grad school=work experience to make sure folks with grad degrees would outrank those with BAs or experience only.
Why is grad school privileged over real experience?
The OPM guide still never addresses the central question: How did the government’s office of human resources come to the conclusion that college education should be considered a substitute for real-world experience?
It is important to remember that the Archaeology Series handbook was written in 1983—a time when there were very few archaeologists in the United States, let alone archaeos with a graduate degree. CRM was still young. Most of the skilled technicians had a BA, but hadn’t gone on to the next level of education because they were too busy doing CRM work. Many PIs at that time only had a BA as well.
Since then, an increasing number of people were going to college and getting graduate degrees in anthropology. In his presentation at #SHA2015, Doug Rocks-MacQueen informed us that about half of all anthropology degrees have been issued since 1990. This includes a huge proportion of the graduate degrees.
This influx of degrees has probably caused OPM to essentially disregard the tenet that an MA is equal to two years of workplace experience because, today, we’ve got hundreds of MAs and PhDs graduating each year. It’s a buyer’s market now. I wonder how much a grad degree counts when you’re no longer the only applicant that has one? It seems like degree inflation in archaeology had drastically weakened the strength of the degree=experience adage.
The Archaeology Series handbook does stress the fact that college is the basic training ground for archaeologists. For the past 40 years we’ve known that universities are not teaching the skills necessary for a career in CRM, in either public or private resource management, which has further weakened the idea that coursework is the equivalent to time in the workplace. This is probably the lynchpin in the demise of the degree=experience clause because, in order to get any position above entry-level, you’re going to need workplace experience AND education. There are simply too many applicants with both of those elements for any employer to hire an applicant simply based on education alone.
The OPM definition is important because it has been somewhat of a baseline for many of the CRM job announcements. Although it doesn’t seem like degrees are the only thing that will get you the job, it is interesting to know where the privileging of graduate degrees came from. The perceived status of a graduate degree is actually a good thing for our industry because we can add CRM training to university graduate programs and create quality graduates that can use the prestige of their degree to land jobs and do them well. The positive perception of graduate degrees by employers gives us something to work with, especially if we can start adding real-world skills to university programs.
Thirty-two years ago, the OPM decided that a Master’s was worth two years of work experience. Is that still the case today?
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