American Jazz Museum

Position: Museum Docent Manager

Department: Visitor Experience & Collections

Reports to: Deputy Director

Category: Fulltime; Exempt

Salary: $40,000-$48,000

Job Purpose:

The Docent’s leadership ensures quality and consistency of tours and programs and helps plan new initiatives and projects to enhance the visitor experience. The Docent helps develop, evaluate, and expand tour programs and ensures that current best practices are being observed in the docent and tour programs. The Docent will utilize techniques of dialogue and inquiry, and role play and storytelling to encourage and educate the community about jazz in the American Jazz Museum. This position is a core member of the Visitor Experience and Collections Team, working with and Education Programs Manager as well as the Collections staff on developing a tour experience that complements our permanent, select pop-up, and/or traveling exhibitions as well as enhancing central components or our mission. This position will report to the Deputy Director of the American Jazz Museum.

Duties and Daily Responsibilities:

• Docent program administration, including meeting and event coordination, tour schedule paperwork and coordination, docent communications including regular e-newsletters and website updates, and financial paperwork
• Serves as primary liaison and point of contact between staff and docents for other museums
• Plans and implements docent continuing education series and teaches some sessions.
• Special tours and activities to complement public programming
• New tour offerings in collaboration with docents, such as virtual tours and new school tours
• Oversee all educational and logistic support materials, including ordering of supplies and art materials.
• Assist with the development of resources and interpretive materials designed for school and teacher audiences to ensure integration of state standards in all prek-12 tour programs.
• Develop comprehensive knowledge of the museum’s collections and special exhibitions.
• Present gallery talks, lectures, teacher professional development workshops and classes as needed.
• Teach all grades in galleries as needed for school programs

Performance Factors and Necessary Skills:

• A sincere and genuine interest in people of all ages.
• A love for and excitement about learning and teaching.
• Attention to detail and accuracy.
• A sense of flexibility and cooperation.
• An attitude of tolerance and respect for all people’s points of view.
• Excellent leadership and organizational abilities
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to work independently and as a team player.
• Demonstrated initiative, creativity, and innovation.
• Proficient with Microsoft Office Suite or related software.

Adaptability & Change Management: Adapts to changing business needs, conditions, and work responsibilities and works with a variety of situations, individuals, groups, and varying customer needs.

Communication & Cooperation: Optimizes communication across departments with staff and throughout the organization for collaboration and efficient processes.

Judgement & Decision Making: Makes timely, informed decisions that considers the facts, goals, constraints, and risks.

Goal & Objective Setting: Ensures joint ownership of goal setting, commitments, and accomplishments.

Defining tasks and milestones to achieve objectives, while ensuring the optimal use of resources to achieve those objectives.

Diversity Orientation: Values all people for their unique talents and takes an active role in promoting practices that support diversity, inclusion, and global work, as well as cultural competence.

Working Conditions

Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer. Must be able to navigate various departments of the organization’s physical premises. May on occasion by exposed to loud sounds and distracting noise levels, office equipment, and shared workspaces. Standard office environment requiring regular use of phone, computer and copy machines. This position requires the ability to move throughout the Museum for extended periods, must be able to communicate verbally and work with computer. Hours may include some evenings and weekends.

Requirements

Qualifications and Requirements

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Proficient with Microsoft Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and databases
• Strong research skills and ability to synthesize information from various sources
• Exceptional organization skills
• Strong interpersonal skills with ability to work with a broad constituency
• Ability to work evenings and weekends as program schedule requires
• Ability to work with the public and interact with people of various ages and cultural backgrounds
• Docents must be enthusiastic, cheerful, and willing to learn.

This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, skills, efforts or working conditions or qualifications associated with the job. While this is intended to be an accurate reflection of the current job, management reserves the right to revise or to require that other or different tasks be performed when circumstances change, for example, emergencies, changes in personnel, workload, or technological breakdowns in departments.
American Jazz Museum