Measuring up: What employers look for in historical consultants (Part 1)

07 December 2012 – Morgen Young

On November 8, 2012, the Northwest History Network, a non-profit organization in Portland, Oregon, hosted a professional development program entitled Who Hires Consulting Historians, a follow-up to A Future in Historical Consulting: Is It for You?, a panel discussion held over the summer. Four professionals discussed what it takes to get hired by universities, local governments and their agencies, as well as the National Park Service. The participants included Maija Anderson, Head of Oregon Health & Science University’s Historical Collections & Archives; Denyse McGriff, Senior Project Manager at Portland Development Commission; Christina Robertson-Gardiner, Planner at City of Oregon City; and Greg Shine, Historian at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. The panelists related when they seek consulting historians for projects, how historians can find job and contract opportunities at their respective agencies, what skills and qualifications are necessary, how consulting fees are weighted against experience and knowledge when selecting a historian, and what factors determine is a project is successful.

The following is an excerpt from the program.  You can hear the entire podcast on the Northwest History Network site.

~ Morgen Young, Alder LLC

Moderator: What skills and qualifications do you expect a consulting historian to bring to a project?

Denyse McGriff: What local governments usually have is MWESB, which stands for Minority Women Emerging Small Business and most people who are starting a business or have a very small business can definitely qualify to be an emerging small business and that gives you points on an RFP. If you can come in with all of those, you’re hitting the jackpot under MWESB.

But that’s just one factor. I was just recently on an RFP panel and we were looking for consultants who had experience with development, who had worked with property owners, and who had the capacity for flexibility, as we don’t always know the needs of stakeholders when they come to us. They didn’t require a Master’s degree. Rather, they wanted you to show your specific knowledge related to what they were asking, what other qualifications you might have, any related work.

Obviously fees are important, but it’s not as big of criteria as you might think. But, they do look at the fees, particularly a range of fees. Another thing you might think of, there’s a big push for RFPs that are sustainable. So they’re not asking people to turn in things with plastic binding, plastic covers; you send it in electronically. That’s one of the criteria, sustainability; then there’s your experience; MWESB; your firm, they want to know what your capacity is. All those things get weighted on a hundred-point scale and you maybe have six or seven people on a review committee and everyone scores the proposals. Then you have a discussion and select the consultants.

Maija Anderson: I wanted to expand on some soft skills that I think are definitely going to be needed in a university setting. I find sometimes certain academic qualifications are expected, but showing that you’ll actually get the work done is a lot more important. Between somebody who has a PhD but they’ve been doing nothing but working on their dissertation for the past six years and somebody who only has an MA but they’ve done lots of successful projects, we’re going to go with the second candidate.

You really need great communication skills to function at a university. Even if you’ve been at a university a long time as a student, as a staff member it’s just an entirely different universe of trying to communicate with people. There are huge bureaucracies. Everybody has a different agenda and it gets complex. You need to be able to work effectively in that culture because you’re probably going to end up involved in some sort of committee or team that is involved in that project.

And those people are going to have conflicting ideas about history, even if they don’t have history training. They’re going to think that their view needs to be represented. You’re going to need to balance that with the official message of the university wants to send about their history and what you think the record says. And you have to do that diplomatically. It’s one the reasons my staff tends not to take on these projects. It can be political and we find that having an outside person, an unbiased expert, come in and be the consultant works a lot better.

Get ready to work with communications professionals, who are going to have standards about your writing and it may not be your preferred style and they’re going to have the final say most likely. And I would say you’re going to need to check any of your personal biases about the institution’s history at the door. You’re being hired to support a specific message and if there’s a specific message someone wants you to support and you can say that the record doesn’t support that, say it. But, if you have an axe to grind about the institution or one particular view you’re going to support, I don’t think you should apply to work at that institution.

I’m really enthusiastic about working with people who already have really great primary research skills and have done that and I know when they come into our archives, they know what they’re doing. They don’t have to be experts on our history, but it’s great if they can get started not trying to understand the history of OHSU from scratch and don’t expect the librarians and archivists to tell them what it is. We’re just looking for people who are independent, but capable of working in teams at the same time.

Next week in Part 2:  Digital media skills and other ways to add value to your bid.