CIfA announced in May that it would spearhead the development of a salary benchmarking project to collect salary data for a range of archaeological job roles and compare them with equivalent roles in other professions. This will provide information to the archaeology sector which can be used by employers and employees to compare roles and salaries within their organisations and beyond.
The work is being undertaken in partnership with Prospect trade union and guided by a project advisory group including representatives from Prospect, CIfA’s Advisory Council, the Early Careers Special Interest Group and BAJR, drawing upon additional expertise, with the report due to be released by 8 October.
The project advisory group driving the benchmarking survey has been working hard over the summer and has agreed on the sample of job adverts to use, mapped against CIfA grades and BAJR levels of responsibility. These have been chosen to cover a broad selection of roles in archaeology. The comparator professions have been chosen to reflect industries that archaeologists regularly work alongside, including:
They will also be compared to skilled craft roles in the construction industry, and salary data from CIfA’s 2023 survey of members will add further detail. The project advisory group will release the first report by 8 October.
The project advisory group has also discussed the need for a more comprehensive survey of archaeologists as it was recognised that the scope of the original planned report was not broad enough, and there was a need to gather additional data to improve the quality and accuracy of the report. The survey and more detailed report will need further planning and resourcing, and to consider where it overlaps with existing surveys and research. It was felt that a wider partnership approach combining resources and expertise would result in a better survey that reflects the diverse perspectives within the field of archaeology.
We will keep you updated with developments as they occur.
We thought you may be interested to know the team at the heart of the benchmarking review:
