Museum Technicians and Conservators

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. At 13 the score sits at the top of the mixed band because bench treatment — inpainting losses, reducing a discolored varnish under the microscope, humidification-and-flattening of a warped print — has no digital substitute, but the same job title also covers accessioning, condition-report drafting, and object photography with metadata entry, and those are the hours that shrink first.

Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. 16 reflects that the work happens with scalpels, swabs, suction tables and solvent fume extraction on objects that are unique, dimensionally irregular, and destroyed by a wrong touch — plus crate-building, gallery installation on ladders, and courier trips where you unpack in someone else's loading dock under whatever conditions exist there.

No licence, no signature requirement. 3 is correct: AIC membership and the Professional Associate designation are peer credentials, not licences, and nothing in law stops a museum from assigning a treatment to an unqualified staffer — your protection is the institution's insurance policy and your director's judgment, not a statute.

Some relationship component. 8 accounts for the fact that lenders, private clients, and curators do choose specific conservators by reputation for a Rothko or a Han dynasty bronze, but most collections work is internal, credited in a treatment report rather than to the public, and the visitor who sees your reintegrated losses never learns your name.

Meaningful discretion. 12 fits because you decide how much original material to remove, whether a treatment is reversible, and when to refuse an intervention entirely — real discretion with irreversible consequences — but those calls are documented, reviewed by senior conservators and curators, and constrained by AIC's Code of Ethics rather than owned alone.