Top 12 Curator Skills to Put on Your Resume
Curators juggle research, care, storytelling, and public connection. A sharp resume shows that range—how you manage collections, shape exhibitions, and move people to care. These 12 skills signal depth and readiness, the kind that helps institutions trust you with their objects and their audiences.
Curator Skills
- Collection Management
- Archival Research
- Exhibit Design
- Cataloging Standards
- Digital Preservation
- Educational Programming
- Fundraising Strategies
- Public Speaking
- Adobe Photoshop
- Microsoft Office
- Social Media Platforms
- Grant Writing
1. Collection Management
Collection management covers the full arc: acquisition, documentation, care, access, interpretation, and ethical stewardship. Keep each object safe, findable, and meaningful to the public and scholars alike.
Why It's Important
Done well, it protects integrity and context, supports research and exhibitions, and delivers on an institution’s mission. Visitors feel it, even if they never see the stacks.
How to Improve Collection Management Skills
Strengthen the backbone of your practice—policy, data, care, and access—so decisions stand up over time.
Modernize cataloging: Use a robust CMS and consistent metadata. Build authority files; document provenance and rights clearly. PastPerfect, TMS, and CollectiveAccess are common choices.
Conservation-first care: Preventive conservation beats repair. Environmental monitoring, integrated pest management, safe handling, condition reporting—routine, not optional.
Clear policy: Keep current policies for acquisition, loans, access, and deaccessioning. Align with professional codes and your mission. Review annually.
Risk and redundancy: Disaster plan, insurance, location tracking, separation of critical records (onsite/offsite). Drill the plan; don’t just file it.
Broaden access: Publish online records, build digital exhibits, and offer research appointments. Track use; fix friction points.
Collaborate: Share expertise and standards with peer institutions. Joint projects raise quality and reduce cost.
How to Display Collection Management Skills on Your Resume
2. Archival Research
Archival research means digging into primary sources—finding, authenticating, interpreting, and weaving them into exhibitions, labels, and scholarship. It’s detective work with footnotes.
Why It's Important
It grounds interpretation in evidence. With strong archival foundations, narratives hold steady under scrutiny and feel richer to visitors.
How to Improve Archival Research Skills
Work digitally and physically: Use tools like Omeka and ArchivesSpace while honing reading-room skills, handling protocols, and citation discipline.
Strengthen metadata: Descriptions, subjects, and rights statements must be consistent and searchable. Use controlled vocabularies and document decisions.
Map the sources: Create a research plan and a sources registry. Track gaps, permissions, and follow-up actions.
Context first: Situate items in their historical, social, and cultural settings. Biases and silences belong in the story.
Preserve your trail: Keep thorough notes, transcripts, and copies where permitted. Version your files; back everything up.
Network: Archivists, historians, and community keepers unlock hidden collections and context you won’t find in finding aids.
How to Display Archival Research Skills on Your Resume
3. Exhibit Design
Exhibit design shapes movement, mood, and meaning. It blends narrative, objects, lighting, sound, and interactives so visitors don’t just look—they connect.
Why It's Important
Design is the delivery mechanism for interpretation. It changes comprehension, accessibility, and emotional impact. A show lives or dies in the details.
How to Improve Exhibit Design Skills
Define the takeaways: One core message, a handful of key ideas. Everything points there.
Prototype quickly: Paper mockups, scaled plans, foam-core labels. Test flow and placement before fabrication.
Design for all: Follow inclusive and accessible practices—clear type, high contrast, touch alternatives, captions, audio description, and multisensory options.
Tell a story: Orient, build tension, resolve. Use objects like characters. Vary pacing. Offer choice.
Use technology with intent: AR, projections, audio, and interactives should clarify, not distract. Maintain offline fallbacks.
Light with purpose: Conservation limits first, drama second. Model illuminance and glare; test in situ.
Iterate from feedback: Observe visitors. Note bottlenecks, skipped labels, overlong queues. Adjust and measure again.
How to Display Exhibit Design Skills on Your Resume
4. Cataloging Standards
Cataloging standards are the rules and schemas that make records consistent and interoperable. Think RDA, MARC 21, Dublin Core, and the controlled vocabularies that tame chaos.
Why It's Important
Standards let collections talk to each other. They improve discovery, reduce ambiguity, and keep data durable across systems and decades.
How to Improve Cataloging Standards Skills
Use recognized schemas: RDA with MARC 21 for rich library-style records; Dublin Core for flexible digital collections. Plan for linked data (BIBFRAME) where appropriate.
Authority control: Names, places, and subjects should point to a single, verified identity. Getty AAT, ULAN, TGN, and Library of Congress authorities are mainstays.
Consistency over time: Build a style guide for local fields, diacritics, dates, and capitalization. Train, spot-check, revise.
Accessibility: Structure digital records to meet WCAG 2.2 principles. Clear alt text, readable language, keyboard-friendly interfaces.
Quality workflows: Peer review new records, batch-audit legacy data, and document changes. Measure completeness and error rates.
Plan for images: Use stable identifiers, rights statements, and, when possible, IIIF to serve high-quality imagery at scale.
How to Display Cataloging Standards Skills on Your Resume
5. Digital Preservation
Digital preservation keeps files authentic, accessible, and intelligible for the long haul. Formats change. Storage fails. Good practice anticipates that.
Why It's Important
Collections increasingly live as bits. Without active preservation—policies, checks, migrations—today’s assets vanish tomorrow.
How to Improve Digital Preservation Skills
Adopt a framework: Use OAIS concepts to define ingest, storage, data management, access, and administration. Write it down; follow it.
Redundant storage: At least 3 copies, 2 media types, 1 offsite, and ideally 1 offline/immutable. Geographic separation is nonnegotiable.
Fixity and audits: Generate checksums (e.g., SHA-256). Automate regular fixity checks and report exceptions. Keep audit logs.
Format strategy: Prefer open, well-documented formats. Monitor obsolescence; plan for migration or emulation. Track provenance and PREMIS events.
Documentation: Capture descriptive, technical, and rights metadata. Package with BagIt or similar for transfer and validation.
Test recovery: Run restoration drills. Measure RTO/RPO against policy. Update after every incident or near miss.
How to Display Digital Preservation Skills on Your Resume
6. Educational Programming
Educational programming turns collections into learning experiences—workshops, tours, lesson plans, talks, and digital activities that meet audiences where they are.
Why It's Important
It deepens relevance. People connect, question, and remember. That’s mission in motion.
How to Improve Educational Programming Skills
Know the audience: Use quick surveys, teacher roundtables, and front-line feedback to spot needs and barriers.
Design for variety: Blend Universal Design for Learning principles—multiple ways to engage, represent, and express. Offer multilingual and sensory-friendly options.
Co-create: Partner with educators, artists, and community advisors. Co-curate content and share credit.
Hybrid delivery: In-person, live-streamed, and on-demand modules. Short, modular content scales reach.
Assess impact: Define outcomes, not just attendance. Pre/post checks, quick reflections, and follow-on actions tell the real story.
Iterate: Pilot small, refine fast, retire what doesn’t land. Document what works so others can replicate.
How to Display Educational Programming Skills on Your Resume
7. Fundraising Strategies
Fundraising fuels acquisitions, conservation, exhibitions, and outreach. Grants, sponsorships, memberships, major gifts—each lane has its rhythm.
Why It's Important
Financial resilience keeps programs alive and collections cared for. With funding, bold ideas get built, not shelved.
How to Improve Fundraising Strategies Skills
Case for support: Clear need, specific outcomes, compelling stories, and tangible benefits. Align tightly with your mission.
Prospect research: Map donors by affinity, capacity, and connection. Build moves management plans and track touchpoints in a CRM.
Diverse streams: Mix grants, corporate partnerships, individual giving, planned gifts, and events. Avoid overreliance on one source.
Stewardship: Thank fast, report impact, recognize publicly (when appropriate). Make renewal the default.
Events with purpose: Mission-forward programs that create access to curators, behind-the-scenes looks, or first-to-know moments.
Measure and adapt: Track conversion, retention, average gift, and cost to raise a dollar. Reinvest in what works.
How to Display Fundraising Strategies Skills on Your Resume
8. Public Speaking
Public speaking for curators means translating scholarship into moments that land—opening remarks, gallery talks, donor briefings, media interviews.
Why It's Important
It builds trust and excitement. People back what they understand and feel.
How to Improve Public Speaking Skills
Audience first: Calibrate depth and language to who’s in the room. Name what matters to them.
Structure simply: Hook, roadmap, two or three big points, memorable close. Trim the rest.
Rehearse out loud: Time it. Record it. Tweak pace and transitions. Cut jargon that snags the ear.
Use visuals wisely: Fewer slides, bigger images, minimal text. Let objects carry weight.
Vary delivery: Pauses, inflection, questions, brief stories. Energy rises; attention follows.
Nerves to fuel: Breathe low and slow. Plant your feet. Begin with a sentence you know cold.
Seek feedback: Ask for one thing to keep, one to change. Apply it next time—quickly.
How to Display Public Speaking Skills on Your Resume
9. Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop powers image prep for catalogs, exhibitions, and press: color-accurate reproductions, clean backgrounds, consistent crops, and respectful retouching when appropriate.
Why It's Important
Strong image handling elevates interpretation and access. It protects fidelity while presenting work clearly across print and screen.
How to Improve Adobe Photoshop Skills
Layers and masks: Non-destructive edits by default. Name layers, group them, and mask instead of erasing.
Selections that hold: Practice the Pen tool, Select and Mask, and channels. Precision saves time later.
Color management: Calibrate displays, set working spaces, and soft-proof for output. Keep profiles embedded.
Adjustment layers: Curves, Levels, Hue/Sat—stacked and tweakable. Avoid baking changes into pixels.
Actions and batch: Automate repetitive steps for consistency across large sets.
Content-aware tools: Heal, fill, and patch judiciously. Document any substantive changes.
Templates: Build export presets and layout templates for catalogs, labels, and social assets.
How to Display Adobe Photoshop Skills on Your Resume
10. Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office (now widely framed within Microsoft 365) anchors day-to-day work: Word for proposals and labels, Excel for budgets and inventories, PowerPoint for decks, Outlook for coordination.
Why It's Important
It keeps projects organized, numbers clean, and communication steady. Mundane, yes—also essential.
How to Improve Microsoft Office Skills
Customize your workspace: Tailor the Ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar to surface frequent actions.
Template everything: Branded label sheets, report shells, meeting notes—consistent and fast.
Excel fluency: Pivot tables, conditional formatting, data validation, and lookup functions. Reduce manual edits.
Automate: Record macros for repetitive tasks. Keep a shared macro workbook for the team.
Collaborate in real time: Co-author documents, track changes clearly, and use Teams/SharePoint for version control.
OneDrive discipline: Logical folder structures, naming conventions, and shared permissions that make sense.
Stay current: Update regularly; new features often replace clunky workarounds.
How to Display Microsoft Office Skills on Your Resume
11. Social Media Platforms
Social platforms extend the gallery beyond the gallery. Bite-sized stories, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and community voices amplify reach and relevance.
Why It's Important
Audiences discover, discuss, and decide online. A thoughtful presence drives visits, learning, and support.
How to Improve Social Media Platforms Skills
Strategy first: Define audiences, goals, and tone. Pick platforms that match—don’t post everywhere by default.
Editorial rhythm: Build a content calendar with series (spotlights, staff picks, process videos). Mix formats: short video, carousels, stills, live Q&A.
Accessibility: Alt text, captions, descriptive hashtags, and high-contrast visuals. Inclusion grows reach.
Community care: Respond fast, set conduct guidelines, and highlight follower contributions. Feature artists and partners.
Measure what matters: Track saves, shares, click-throughs, and conversion to memberships or ticketing. Adjust content accordingly.
Workflow tools: Use schedulers, asset libraries, and style guides. Protect accounts with multi-factor authentication.
How to Display Social Media Platforms Skills on Your Resume
12. Grant Writing
Grant writing turns vision into a fundable plan. Clarity, alignment, and proof of impact carry the day.
Why It's Important
External funding widens what’s possible—exhibitions, conservation, digitization, and programs that would otherwise stall.
How to Improve Grant Writing Skills
Matchmaker mindset: Research funder priorities and past awards. Only pursue strong fits.
Sharp problem statement: Define the need with evidence and context. Why now, and why you.
Specific objectives: Make them measurable and time-bound. Tie activities to outputs and outcomes with a clear logic chain.
Sound budget: Align costs with work. Include indirects, staffing, evaluation, accessibility, and sustainability.
Evaluation plan: Methods, metrics, timelines, and responsibility. Show how you’ll learn and report back.
Proof and polish: Peer review, compliance checks, and clean attachments. Reuse strong boilerplate but tailor every narrative.
Steady pipeline: Track deadlines, submit early, and debrief losses. Each attempt strengthens the next.
How to Display Grant Writing Skills on Your Resume
