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Hear the inside view on cultural careers with the Cultural Peeps podcast.
Cultural Peeps: A Project by Iain Wheeldon
The Cultural Peeps Podcast series is part of an ongoing project which explores different career pathways across the cultural sectors.
The podcast aims to do three things:
- to help early career professionals understand the huge range of ever-changing job profiles that now exist across these complex and interconnected sectors
- to help early career professionals to interpret job titles in the context of different venues and organisations – often, jobs with the same title can be radically different depending on the organisation
- to help listeners understand that the people that make up any field of work are all human and are making human decisions, and that in turn plays a significant part in their unfolding career pathways and decision-making processes
Project background
So where did this project come from – why make a podcast?
Iain says:
'The decision to record this series and formalise these conversations as a podcast came in 2017, after a student asked me to provide what she described as a ‘definitive list’ of job titles that exist in the sector.
This started a lengthy and ongoing conversation about how the range of jobs that are available are hugely varied, constantly evolving and rarely really standardised. They often vary because of a range of factors, including the type and size of venue, it’s history, how it is funded, how it is governed and what its current direction of travel is.
Through my job as a Lecturer at the University, I hear fascinating tales directly from the individuals that work in these venues about why they chose to apply for their current job, why they left their previous role, why they intend to move jobs in the future and, in some cases, why they are planning to retrain altogether.
When my student asked me for that ‘definitive list’, I thought about the recent conversations I’d had with colleagues and wished I was able to rewind and replay them for her, so she could hear first-hand, why they chose to do the job they do and what it actually feels like on a day-to-day basis.
By formally collecting and archiving some of these conversations, I hope to create a touchstone for those looking for an insight into what people do all day, and why they do the jobs they do. Hopefully this series can help in their own decision-making.'