Findings: Career Satisfaction

Consistent with workers’ perceptions explored in the Workplace Culture section, art museum workers feel most satisfied with the interpersonal aspects of their jobs and the sense of meaning they derive from their work. They are least satisfied with opportunities for promotion, pay levels, and chances to develop new skills. This points to a prevailing tension in career satisfaction among art museum workers, who feel torn between enjoying their jobs and working with their colleagues but are unable to envision a sustainable future for themselves in the field. 

Executive-level staff report higher career satisfaction than staff at any other position level on nearly every metric, and there is a largely consistent progression in career satisfaction for each metric as position level rises from entry level. In other words, the higher a worker sits within the museum hierarchy, the more satisfaction they feel in terms of job security, stability and predictability of pay, opportunities for promotion, and sense of purpose and dignity in their work.

However, one notable exception to executive-level satisfaction is in relationships with managers or supervisors, where the highest satisfaction is at the entry level. This highlights the meaningful and positive impact of current managers on entry-level workers, a crucial mechanism for retaining younger workers. It also demonstrates a need for art museum leaders to focus on skills building and improvement particularly for those managing executive and mid-level staff, typically another executive-level staff member, the museum’s director, or the board. When it comes to satisfaction with one’s day-to-day work environment and relationships, art museum workers in the middle of the hierarchy are the least satisfied. For instance, while executive-level staff are the most satisfied with their day-to-day work, the next highest levels of satisfaction are found among entry-level and director-level staff, with lower satisfaction found among associate and manager levels. 

Another key aspect of career satisfaction is feeling supported at work or, even better, having a mentor. When asked by whom they feel most supported,³³ most museum workers said their direct manager (45%) or other colleagues (43%). A lower proportion of Black workers reported experiencing the most support from other colleagues (34%) whereas a higher proportion reported support from their direct manager (48%). This distinction for Black workers is notable in the context of our findings in the Discrimination and Harassment section of this report, given the higher percentage of Black workers who have experienced discrimination from colleagues. By contrast, a higher proportion of union members (51%), those with recent experiences of discrimination (55%), and nonbinary workers (56%) feel most supported by their colleagues compared to museum workers overall. 

When it comes to mentors, nearly half of the art museum workforce says that mentors are available to them in their workplaces (48%) and that they have a positive impact on their careers (47%), with a significantly larger proportion in the entry level citing mentor availability and positive impact of mentors on their careers (61% and 57%, respectively).

In addition to the improvements to art museum workers’ overall career satisfaction, there has been a sizable increase in pay satisfaction, up 13 percentage points to 43% in 2025. However, significant challenges remain, as fewer than half of art museum workers are currently satisfied with their level of pay, and executives are more than twice as likely to be satisfied compared to entry-level staff.

When comparing pay satisfaction for art museum workers to US workers overall,³⁴ we find that museum workers are both more likely to be satisfied with their level of pay and more likely to be dissatisfied, meaning far fewer art museum workers are neutral. This highlights an extreme division where some workers are very happy and some are very unhappy with their pay in the art museum sector. We explore this gap further in the next section, on Pay and Promotions, where we analyze the percentage of workers who are paid below and above a living wage.

In 2025, we introduced the Gallup Life Evaluation Index as a benchmark to compare the current and future outlooks of US workers overall against that of museum workers. The Gallup Index “measures life satisfaction by quantifying the difference between the best possible life and the worst possible life” on a ten-point scale and then assigns responses at three levels of well-being: thriving (7 or above), surviving³⁵ (5–6), or suffering (4 or below). This measurement allows us to better understand workers’ overall quality of life now and their level of optimism for the future.

While nearly the same percentage of workers in art museums and the US overall are thriving, far more art museum workers are suffering (17%) than US workers overall (4%).³⁶

However, museum workers are hopeful about their career futures, with nearly three-quarters (72%) seeing themselves as thriving in the next five years. This demonstrates that art museum workers, on average, feel positively about their professional future and anticipate a higher quality of life—a positive sign about art museum workers’ overall mental well-being.

Executive- and director-level workers give the highest ratings of their current life compared to all other position levels, with a consistent progression in scores as position level increases. Nonbinary workers report the highest amount of suffering both in their current life (31%) and their expected career outlook in five years (14%), with rates only exceeded by those who have experienced recent discrimination or harassment (35% suffering now and 21% suffering in five years).  

Measuring workers’ top three emotions offers an additional lens with which to explore the harder-to-identify aspects of their experiences within art museums, namely how they feel at work.³⁷ The data shows that worker emotions have stayed relatively consistent since the last cycle of MMF’s study. The most considerable positive shift is in the proportion of the workforce feeling content, up 7% since 2023 to 41% in 2025. On the other hand, the proportion of workers feeling excited (24%) and hopeful (30%) as well as feeling disappointed (34%) has gone down, all of which points to a nuanced emotional picture. 

Nonbinary workers are having the worst emotional experiences in art museums across the board.³⁸ They report feeling the least content, excited, and hopeful, and simultaneously the most worried, angry, and disappointed about working in their current jobs. On the whole, they experience more negative emotions than even entry-level or Gen Z workers, who are more likely to identify as nonbinary. This points to the uniquely challenging emotional experiences that nonbinary workers face in their museum workplaces and a key opportunity to better support these workers.

As we explored in Workplace Culture, a museum’s budget size has a significant impact on its staff’s emotional experience and well-being. Those working in smaller museums reported experiencing positive emotions at higher rates, while those in larger museums reported negative emotions at higher rates. It is striking that disappointment tends to increase with the size of the museum’s budget, while contentment decreases. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the increased satisfaction of art museum workers on the whole, we see a notable decrease in workers who have considered leaving their jobs. One of the most significant findings in MMF’s 2023 Report was that 60% of art museum workers had considered leaving their jobs and 68% had considered leaving the field altogether. Importantly, that data was collected in late 2022, when the impacts of widespread layoffs and furloughs during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent “Great Resignation” were causing upheaval within art museums and across sectors.³⁹ Now, two years since our last study and more than five years since the onset of the pandemic, the proportion of workers who have considered leaving their jobs or the museum field altogether has dropped to 54% for both.

The top three forces driving workers out of art museums remain the same: low pay, burnout, and a lack of growth opportunities. This data aligns with research on the US nonprofit workforce, which shows that 45% of nonprofit employees are actively seeking new work within five years of beginning a position. That data found that the primary reasons for wanting to quit are low pay (49%), lack of growth opportunities (19%), and poor management (12%).⁴⁰

To gain a clearer understanding of how seriously workers are considering leaving, we also asked workers whether they had actively looked for another job within the past 12 months. About half (49%) of art museum workers said yes.

We see the impacts of low career satisfaction on specific workers’ desire to quit. In particular, for workers with recent experiences of discrimination or harassment—who report some of the lowest career satisfaction metrics for any group—active job searches are significantly higher (77%). We examine the impact of these experiences in greater detail in the Discrimination and Harassment section.  

Through further regression analysis, we found that gender is the most influential factor (of those we tested) on museum workers’ likelihood to be actively seeking another job. This means that a workers’ gender is much more likely to predict their desire to quit than their age, position level, or union status. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of nonbinary workers are actively searching for a new job. In considering the findings of nonbinary workers’ more negative emotions, lower current life ratings, lower future career outlooks, and higher active job searches, art museum leaders must take seriously the largely unfavorable experiences of these workers in order to retain them.

White workers are less likely to be actively looking for another job or to have considered leaving the field compared to their BIPOC colleagues. While discrimination is cited as a reason for wanting to leave the field by only 8% of workers overall, it is cited by more than a fifth (21%) of Black workers who have considered leaving the field. Art museum leaders must give serious consideration to the impacts of discrimination on Black workers at their museums, which also should be understood as a field-wide problem. With 4% fewer Black executives now than in 2023, as noted in the Workplace Diversity subsection, there is reason for concern that discrimination may be driving Black workers out of the field altogether.

It is worth noting that more workers at high-churn museums who have considered leaving their current museum cite poor management as a reason (50% vs. 38% in low-churn museums). Workers in high-churn museums who have considered leaving their current museum also reported a lack of belief in their institution’s capacity to change for the better (27% vs. 18% in low-churn museums), experiences of discrimination or harassment (14% vs. 8%), and low pay (58% vs. 50%) as primary drivers to seek another job. These data points reveal key areas of opportunity for art museums seeking to enhance retention. Even if a museum is unable to increase staff salaries or provide other benefits in the short term, an institution can focus on better management and more accountability for discrimination to improve workplace satisfaction.

Across the data on workplace culture and career satisfaction, we see that those who have more positive impressions of their workplace’s culture also report higher levels of satisfaction. This is consistent with research from other fields about the positive impact of workplace culture on workers’ career satisfaction.⁴¹

We see this correlation most clearly when we look specifically at the career satisfaction of unionized workers. As we explored in Workplace Culture, union members report lower career satisfaction than the art museum workforce overall. The largest difference is in satisfaction with “my job overall” (57% union members vs. 75% overall). These gaps extend to union members’ current career outlook as well. For example, nearly twice the number of union members rate themselves as “suffering” compared to art museum workers overall (30% vs. 17%), and fewer rate themselves as “thriving” (37% vs. 46%). As noted in the union subsection of Workplace Culture, these findings help us understand why workers may be turning to unions as a tool to address their negative work experiences or lack of career growth.