You know you need a new job. You might even REALLY want a new job. But opening another job board, rewriting another cover letter, or getting another rejection email? Absolutely not.

If you're frustrated with job hunting, we get it.

Whether you're deep into a museum job search, trying to leave the museum field, or pursuing something completely different, finding the motivation for job search tasks can feel like a full-time job itself.

In this episode, we're sharing the strategies we actually use (and recommend to our clients) to make job searching less overwhelming. Because when your job search motivation has disappeared, the answer isn't necessarily to push harder. Sometimes you need better systems, smaller steps, and permission to do things your own way.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why you're feeling stuck and how to find your motivation for job search activities when you're already exhausted
• Why applying to 10 jobs isn't necessarily better than applying to one that's a genuinely good fit, especially during a competitive museum job search
• Our favorite job search motivation tools, including templates, timers, trackers, organized folders, and a separate job search email
• How to measure progress beyond submitted applications, lean on your network, and take breaks without feeling guilty

If you're frustrated with job hunting because you're doing everything you think you're supposed to do and still not seeing results, this episode is for you.

Sometimes the best way to rebuild your job search motivation is to stop fighting yourself and start making the process easier.

Resources mentioned:

Re-Curate Your Career

The Daily Page by Thyme Is Honey

Episode 4: And Now We Wait... Tips for Surviving the Job Search Waiting Game

Episode 10: Stretch, Match, or Mismatch? Applying Strategically in a Tough Market

Episode 21. Why Your Resume Isn’t Working (And What to Do About It)

Episode 23. Why Your Cover Letter Isn't Working (And What to Do About It)

Keep the conversation going:

What's the part of your job search that makes you want to close your laptop and walk away? Follow Curate Your Career on Instagram and tell us.

Have a career question? Submit it to our mailbag!

Thinking about leaving museums? Work with Elin:

1:1 Career Coaching

Resume Course

Deaccessioned Community

Email Elin at ElinFilbeyCoaching@gmail.com

Looking to enter or grow in museums? Work with Alli:

1:1 Museum Career Coaching

Museum Career Resource Library

Email Alli at yourmuseumcareer@gmail.com

Do you need a personal brand to build a successful museum career? And does that mean posting on LinkedIn every day, becoming a thought leader, or turning yourself into an influencer?

Thankfully, no.

In this episode, we're joined by Haydn Corrodus, a social media and digital marketing consultant who's worked with more than 300 arts and culture organizations, museums, and libraries. We're unpacking what is a personal brand, why professional visibility matters, and how to build a reputation that opens doors without feeling like you're constantly selling yourself.

Because whether you're intentionally building a personal brand or not, people already associate things with you professionally. The question is whether those associations reflect your skills, passions, and career goals.

In this episode, we cover:

• What a personal brand actually is, and why it's about more than aesthetics, followers, or becoming an influencer
• How professional visibility helps you stay top of mind for jobs, collaborations, and career opportunities
• Why emerging museum professionals don't need years of experience to share valuable perspectives
• Ways to build meaningful relationships and professional networks without feeling transactional
• How museum professionals can share their expertise consistently without chasing algorithms or posting every day

The takeaway? You don't need to reinvent yourself to become more visible. Start by sharing what you care about, the work you're doing, and the perspective you bring to the field.

Resources mentioned:

Visible on Purpose

American Alliance of Museums

Connect with Haydn Corrodus:

Website

LinkedIn

Instagram

Keep the conversation going:

Do you feel like you have a personal brand, or does the idea still make you cringe a little? Follow Curate Your Career on Instagram and tell us what you think.

Have a museum career question? Submit it for a future mailbag episode!

Explore life beyond museums with Elin:

1:1 Coaching

Resume Course

Deaccessioned Facebook Community

Build your museum career with Alli:

1:1 Coaching

Museum Career Resource Library

When your museum job starts feeling uncertain, do you wait it out or start planning your exit?

And if you know you want something different, how do you keep your museum job search moving when your current job is draining your energy?

In this mailbag episode, we’re answering three listener questions about career uncertainty, strategic pivots, and figuring out what comes next.

We talk about building an exit plan before you need one, exploring museum career opportunities and adjacent roles, and staying competitive for future museum jobs when your career takes you outside the traditional museum path. We also dig into museum job titles and what to do when your title doesn’t reflect the work you’re actually doing.

In this episode, we cover:

• How to build an exit strategy when your museum job feels uncertain
• Where to find adjacent museum career opportunities that make sense for your skills
• How to keep your experience relevant for future museum jobs when working in a gallery or adjacent field
• Why museum job titles matter and how to make a case for a title change
• How to protect your energy while keeping your museum job search moving in a difficult work environment

Resources mentioned:

Resume Course – Elin’s resource for identifying transferable museum skills and potential career pathways

HigherEdJobs.com - A place to search for roles in the D.C. area and beyond for those seeking alternative career options

EdSkip – A remote job board focused on education-related roles

Upwork and Fiverr – Platforms for exploring freelance and contract work

A Fool’s Errand by Lonnie G. Bunch III

Keep the conversation going:

Follow @curateyourcareerpodcast on Instagram and tell us: What’s the biggest career decision you’re navigating right now?

Have a museum career question you’d like us to talk through? Submit it for a future mailbag episode!

Explore life beyond museums with Elin:

1:1 Coaching

Resume Course

Deaccessioned: A Network for Former and Aspiring Ex-Museum Pros

LinkedIn

Email Elin at ElinFilbeyCoaching@gmail.com

Build your museum career with Alli:

1:1 Coaching

Resource Library

LinkedIn

Instagram

Email Alli at yourmuseumcareer@gmail.com

Applying for a job at a museum where you already work sounds like it should be easier.

You know the organization. You know the people. They already know your work.

But that familiarity can make internal applications and interviews deceptively tricky.

It’s easy to fall into the “they already know I do that” trap, skip over important context, or assume the hiring team automatically understands why you’re ready for the next role.

In this episode, we talk about how to make the case for yourself as an internal candidate and how to help people stop seeing you only in your current role and start seeing you in the next one.

We talk about:

• Why “they already know me” can work against you
• How to build your internal growth story: who you were when you arrived, how you’ve grown, and why this next step makes sense
• How to identify your “secret sauce”. The skills, systems, processes, and responsibilities people already trust you with
• How to use institutional knowledge, relationships, and strategic priorities to your advantage
• Whether you should tell your supervisor or coworkers that you’re applying
• How to interview with people who already know you
• Why you still need to fully answer questions like “Tell me about yourself”
• What to do if you don’t get the role

One big takeaway: your coworkers may know your title and your face, but they may not know the full scope of your work, your process, your results, or your career goals.

Your job is to connect those dots for them.

And please: save the job description. Every application gets its own folder. Future You will thank you.

• What parts of the new role am I already doing?
• Where have my responsibilities expanded?
• What do people come to me for?
• What have I improved, created, or taken ownership of?
• What measurable impact can I point to?
• Why does this role make sense as my next step?

Have a museum-career question you want us to tackle in a future episode? Submit it here.

Curate Your Career
Instagram: curateyourcareerpodcast

Alli Schell | Your Museum Career Coach
For museum professionals building and growing careers within museums.
https://yourmuseumcareer.com/

Elin Filbey | Deaccessioned Career Coaching
For museum professionals exploring careers beyond museums.
https://deaccessionedcoaching.com/

If this episode made you think of someone who is already doing the next-level work without the title, send it to them.

Welcome to our first Gab Bag episode. It's a collection of career questions, situations, and slightly chaotic conversations that come up in our coaching work, our texts to each other, and around the museum field. This time, we’re digging into three very different questions that all come back to the same thing: being more strategic about your career instead of assuming the system knows what’s best for you.

• What to do when your new museum job isn’t the job you thought you accepted. We dissect one real job description and talk about misleading titles, “occasional” weekend work that turns out to be every weekend, and why you may need to get very specific with your supervisor about how your hours are actually supposed to be spent.
• Questions to ask before accepting your next job. What does a typical week look like? How much time is actually spent on each responsibility? How often does “occasionally” really mean? You’re interviewing the organization, too.
• How to spend a professional development budget strategically. Instead of automatically choosing the biggest or shiniest conference, start with where you want your career to go next, identify a skill gap, and ask what kind of training would actually help you close it.
• Why your professional development doesn’t necessarily have to be museum-specific. Project management software, leadership training, marketing, digital tools, database skills, and other transferable competencies can make you stronger in your current museum role and give you more options later.
• Whether LinkedIn Premium is worth it. Our answer: start by asking, worth it for what? Premium may have a useful feature for a specific moment in your job search, but paying for it does not automatically make you a more serious (or more successful) job seeker.

We also discuss avocado toast, DC dating culture, chocolate croissants, and our respective inability to eat lunch on time.

“Shia LaBeouf” Live: Rob Cantor
Yes, this is the video Elin promised to put in the show notes. It features the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, and we will provide no additional context.

Staying in museums?
Alli Schell of Your Museum Career Coach helps museum professionals navigate job searching, career growth, application materials, interviews, and professional development.
Explore Your Museum Career Coach

Exploring careers beyond museums?
Elin Filbey of Deaccessioned Career Coaching helps museum, arts, and culture professionals translate their skills and build careers outside the field.
Explore Deaccessioned Career Coaching

Submit a question for a future episode here.

Follow @CurateYourCareerPodcast on Instagram.

What if the skills you’re learning in museums could take you somewhere you haven’t even thought of yet?

Nancy Harmon went to museum studies school thinking she wanted to develop exhibitions. She interned at the Field Museum, worked on visitor research around museum apps, and later found herself experimenting with mobile technology during an internship at the Neanderthal Museum.

Then she went to a hackathon.

She couldn’t code. She didn’t have a software background. She was working retail while finishing graduate school.

She had an idea.

That idea eventually became Encurate, a museum technology company that works with museums and cultural destinations to create mobile visitor experiences.

In this episode, Nancy joins Elin and Alli to talk about:

• Her museum origin story (including a sixth-grade Ancient Egypt exhibition)
• What she learned from realizing her dream museum internship wasn’t quite what she expected
• How visitor research introduced her to museum technology
• Walking into a hackathon as the only museum person in a room full of tech and marketing people
• Building a tech company without being a software engineer
• The museum skills that turned out to be incredibly valuable in business and technology
• Why the ability to “figure it out with little to no resources” is a legitimate professional skill
• How museum work develops research, problem-solving, attention to detail, visitor experience, and communication skills
• Why leaving a traditional museum role doesn’t mean losing your museum identity
• Nancy’s work with museum studies students
• How early-career professionals can parallel plan by building museum experience and transferable skills at the same time

Nancy’s advice to emerging museum professionals is simple: stay curious, meet people outside your immediate field, learn the vocabulary other industries use, and go to the thing.

Museum people may use different language, but many of the underlying skills are the same.

And maybe most importantly: pursuing museums doesn’t require making museums your only possible future.

You have options. You already have skills. You may just need to learn where else they can take you.

Museum people and library people might have more in common than we realized. In this episode, Elin Filbey and Alli Schell are joined by Alison King, librarian-turned-career coach and founder of King Career Services, to talk about the surprisingly similar career challenges facing library and museum professionals and what we can learn from each other.

After landing her childhood “dream job” as a children’s librarian, Alison eventually realized she had reached a career ceiling much earlier than expected. She shares how that realization, combined with difficult schedules, limited advancement opportunities, and growing resentment toward her work, eventually led her to make the leap from libraries into copy editing—and later, career coaching.

Together, Alison, Elin, and Alli dig into:

• why reaching your “dream job” doesn't necessarily mean you've found your forever career
• the similarities between museum and library work, from low pay and limited advancement to being asked to do a lot with very few resources
• what “vocational awe” looks like in libraries and why museum professionals may recognize it immediately
• the skills librarians often underestimate, including research, understanding user needs, communication, programming, and cross-functional work
• why translating your experience starts with understanding where you want to go, not simply rewriting everything you've ever done
• how to “connect the dots” between your experience and what a new employer actually needs
• why there isn't one magical list of jobs librarians, or museum professionals, can transition into
• what museum professionals should consider before assuming libraries are the escape hatch from the museum field
• why identifying the point where your job search is breaking down can help you figure out what actually needs fixing
  

Plus, Alison joins us for a rapid-fire round covering resume mistakes, LinkedIn, networking, interview prep, feeling stuck in the job search, and the career-management hill she'll die on:

You have to own your career. Your employer isn't going to do it for you.

King Career Services & Leaping Librarians – Job Search Pro
https://kingcareerservices.com/

Alison helps librarians take the next leap in their careers—whether that's advancing or moving within libraries or making the leap into something entirely new.

Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves – In the Library with the Lead Pipe
https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Alison recommends Fobazi Ettarh's essay on “vocational awe,” which explores what happens when libraries are treated as inherently good or sacred institutions—and how that framing can contribute to burnout, being under compensation, and unhealthy expectations for the people who work within them.

We’re back with another mailbag episode, answering listener questions about some very real museum career situations.

In this episode, we talk through what to do when a posted salary range turns into an offer at the very bottom, how early-career museum workers can think about financial stability, and how students can approach internship outreach more strategically.

We also end with a recap from the Midwest Museums Association conference, including why smaller conferences can feel more manageable, how regional conferences can be great networking spaces, and why museum vendors can be an overlooked source of museum-adjacent job opportunities.

If you’ve ever wondered whether a salary range is real, how to make museum work more financially sustainable, or how to reach out for internships without sending your resume into the void, this episode is for you.