Graduates can look to auctions as a career, while Apple provide a rich seam of collectables

Sep 10, 2024

Students have headed back to college, pupils to schools, but there are also a lot of new graduates and school leavers looking to their careers now. Should they consider becoming auctioneers?

Having started at the bottom and worked my up, I have no regrets. I still think the best way in is the traditional one: starting as a porter at one of the larger auction houses, graduating to cataloguing and developing specialist knowledge in your chosen field while studying for a fine arts valuation qualification. There aren’t many courses left around the country, but they are worth doing if this game is for you.

A lot of the auction business has already gone online, and I have no doubt that more will in future. However, I also believe that there will always be brick-and-mortar salerooms for people to visit, view and handle the goods first, particularly at the top end of the market where prices run into the millions.

Auctioneering as a career still holds a lot of promise and the chances of setting up your own business and working for yourself in the long term are greater than in most other industries. It’s something you might want to have a think about.

Meanwhile, with the release of the new iPhone 16 Pro at £1,000, it’s worth remembering that Apple products are already sought-after collectables, with some of the earliest Macs selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds. The 1993 Apple Newton MessagePad, the 1998 iMac G3, the 2003 Apple iPod and the 2007 iPhone can already command decent prices if the condition is right.

They all feature in the collection of the Science Museum, providing a fascinating study of the development of technology and its association to social development over the past 40 years and more.

If this is the attitude that the Science Museum has to these objects – presenting them as museum exhibits – then you can be sure that they will also make their impact on the world of collecting in years to come. Millions of iPhones may be circulating the globe as we speak, but as they get updated and the defunct ones disappear, eventually only a limited number will be left to become sought-after collectables. The development of mobile phone technology, as they morphed into handheld computers, thereby changing the way the world communicates and interacts socially, has been the biggest game changer of all. Expect it to be a force at auction as a whole new niche collecting area develops in the future.