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The above post is a point of view... not one that I can agree with in its form. The IfA is certainly not a joke, given its influence and potential. nobody else is stepping to the mark, so although potentially flawed, the results are useful to examine... and thats becasue they did actually take the effort to collect data. WE may quibble with the results, but not the effort that dedicated people put into giving us the results in teh first place. (also a personal view) - lets not dissolve into anti-IfA rhetoric. its not helpful
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Worryingly I agree with BAJR (even if I also agree with a lot of Unit posted) - some figures are better than no figures, although rather more critical break-down of them would certainly help to interpret what, if anything, they actually mean...the good news is that enquiries from potential clients definitely seem to be continuing to increase (at least in the north of England), even if that doesn't seem to be translating into a glut of fieldwork just yet :face-approve:
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[SIZE=4]The ifa set up was a precursor to commercial archaeology. It was set up by the civil service for want of a better description. It imagined that there was a need for an association for independent individual field archaeologists. It produced codes and standards for people working in field archaeology. Commercial field archaeology evolved, the pseudo legalities evolved, but the introduction of the latest pps5 clearly shows up that the current standards were written for ppg16 and probably by the same people who wrote ppg. But now ?scheme of works? have for years refused to refer to watching briefs. In that time we have also had a lot of devolution and the creation of authorising authorities. The civil service have now produced something called pps5. I think it applies around here. Amazingly what difference has it made (and there in lies the trick). Its wooly fluffy and as stupid as ppg. They will change it again. Any association for field archaeologists should not be referring to national pseudo-legalities. It should have standards for a profession that are not tied to politics. Let us watch as the ifa go through its codes and standards and replaces ppg16 with pps5. It?s the type of thing the civil service wastes millions on a year doing as a result of its latest great new ideas.
We are in a down turn, ethics, standard practises, mergers may stretch this profession to new limits but the ifa is swamped by non commercials which it has no problem imaging are not effected by this down turn-must sound like bread and butter to the ifa. I would also say that it positively ignores field archaeologists. Unions are better at talking to diggers than the ifa (just).
You have to ask what aspect of being a member is so important to non commercials. The highest standards in undertaking an evaluation contract? Why are they hanging around. In what way are they a benefit to field archaeologists? This so called survey also shows that the ifa differentiates between its mifas. Yes its better to have a survey but it how far is it from being a total sham. Oh lets add 2829 to the numbers, makes it look like us is them. Thing is will the ifa produce this survey without the 2829 in it, would they break it down into mifas, non members. If they did they might show that in fact there have been no redundancies in the mifas which might make it an attractive position for a field archaeologist to take-excapt .....
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Well, maybe there is a glass ceiling "at work" between "the gods" and us, but I can't see it...ouch...just hit it again... But agree it is amiss there's no year by year breakdown of job gains/losses in one sector if you're going to merge it with the rest of the data, and isn't it vitally necessary to have categorical equivalence in the data when "doing the stats" on the professional upturn/downturn as a whole (but here it's the commercial hat being examined so strictly not a relevant but all the same tangentially signifcant quibble - just take away 2827, absolutely, though that might not please everybody!!)? So are those yearly (or shorter time-set) details available, I haven't seen where they are - through lack of serious looking, any pointers please.
If the following is already out there too, apologies....Perhaps overall business confidence could be measured by the change, per set period (month perhaps), in the number of RAOSs (and other categories if seen fit) reporting a rise in cost/manhour or other unit measurement for various types of work involved in, versus a drop in that. Might do away with working out the far trickier nature of rise and drop in actual numbers employed, which needs to be plotted and distributed weekly really to detect meaningful trends I'd have thought, and say what that actually implies longer-term commercially for archaeology.
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Limiting it to RAOs might well insert a whole new level of skewing into the data, a disproportionately larger number of smaller and very small outfits are not RAOs (and are quite likely to have been missed from any of the original data anyway), so you'd be reflecting much more the employment performance of the larger (and, dare I say it, southern) units. Any statistician/market researcher types out there?
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No I guess? Absolutely, agree it will be skewed, nature of it, and certainly not priority number one for a business, even for mega RAOs wherever they are based. And another problem being how you interpret all those "trends" in relation to the reality of living: what price index, those goalposts are (conveniently?) moving again. But reckon it's got to be a slightly better measure of business confidence than simplistic job loss/gain with no further comment. Appreciate a bit more "so this is where we go from here" and "how we interpret this" thoughts from IFA about the job losses. And if it shows up that the big beasts feel confident, then that's not so bad, there's clearly a surfeit in the offing, if they don't, then...well. Can not this information, even at the sketchiest level (and clearly stripped of confidential information), be provided from all whether registered or not, with some investigation by market research people perhaps brought in by the IFA for this purpose? Or could they do that inhouse if confidentiality is the problem? Or is it to hand already?
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Unfortunately all surveys I'm aware of in the past on archaeological companies, employment etc have always been somewhat flawed by the relatively low rate of return of the forms! There are whole swathes of the industry out there that have probably never appeared on any survey. Certainly where I work they tend to get filed in the 'better things to be spending time on' tray, i.e. the administrator's bin.
On the same lines, IFA would probably get more members if they made the membership application paperwork a lot less lengthy, I can think of any number of people over the years who've taken one look, gone "S** this" and filed them in the bin
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1st August 2010, 01:52 PM
Quote:On the same lines, IFA would probably get more members if they made the membership application paperwork a lot less lengthy, I can think of any number of people over the years who've taken one look, gone "S** this" and filed them in the bin
But then IfA membership would be too easy and wouldn't mean anything....:face-stir:
On the other hand, if you can't be *rsed to fill out the forms, which are actually pretty easy, have you ever seen what town planners, civil engineers, marketing types, HR people, have to do for their charters?
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1st August 2010, 01:53 PM
there, disagreed. I feel better now.
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2nd August 2010, 12:22 PM
How hard they are to fill in is heavily affected by how long you've been around - gets a bit tedious accounting for several hundred sites dug on, scores of units worked for (many/most of which no longer exist so trying to prove it tricky to say the least) etc etc. Same reason I tend to avoid application forms, easier just to phone someone you know at the unit and say 'got a job?'..... :face-stir:
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