ABSTRACT
The concept of management studies and the fact that senior staff within museums and galleries might have management training or qualifications, is a relatively new phenomenon in museums. For the best part of 150 years museums were managed with little or no attention being paid to management training for staff. The view has often been expressed that management training and the resulting techniques are inappropriate to museums and, as such, are irrelevant to the museum profession. The general opinion has been that museums are different from other organisations and this is a view which a large section of the museum profession still retains. This problem is compounded by the fact that employers are not acknowledging the importance of training throughout the profession and for management in particular. Until recently the entry level qualification which had been generally accepted (at least in local authority museums) was the Museums Association Diploma, but its management content was always, understandably, minimal. The Association has itself recently revised the criteria for the award of its Associateship but it, too, still concentrates on traditional ‘museum studies’ graduates which all too often involves no more than a cursory glance at the skills of actually managing a museum or gallery.
