Museum work requires similar knowledge regardless of the characteristics of the museum in question. However, local museums do not only function as museums in the narrow sense; they also have to develop a wide variety of services in their area. Meanwhile the number of personnel in these local centres is usually small, so the work is typically more generalist than in larger museums. At the same time, the management of local museums is closely linked with local communities and thus involved in local politics and very closely related to other organisations, services, facilities and various local industries. For all these reasons, people who plan to develop their careers in local museums need, alongside museology training, a complementary training scheme related to the local area.

In this context the experience of the University of Girona (Spain) in the field of museology training is interesting. Over the last 12 years, this university has been developing a museology training programme specialising in the local area, at the degree, Masters and postgraduate levels. Through this specialist training it has become clear that although education in the basic content of museology (museology, museography, management, collections and exhibitions) is essential, this alone is not enough and that general training is needed to cover the characteristics of cultural heritage and its management, as well as knowledge of the local world and its specific qualities. It must be borne in mind that local museum centres develop ever broader functions in their own area which go beyond the strictly traditional functions of a museum. This combined training across the three areas (museology, heritage management and the local world) allows us to provide students with the tools they need to face the problems and opportunities in managing museums, as well as other types of heritage centres, at the local level.

The Master's in Local Cultural Heritage Management is an official postgraduate course at the University of Girona, available to anyone with a four or five year undergraduate degree, and is intended as a specialist continuation of first and second cycle university courses. At present, most students on the Master's course have degrees in History of Art and History, although to date the various postgraduate and Master's courses have also included students coming from other degree courses, always in the social and humanities areas, for example law, philosophy and anthropology.

The aim of the Master's is to foster good relationships between the academic and research world and the professional world, so as to provide a high quality response to the needs of the labour market, both public and private, in areas related to cultural heritage. This implies the need for students to acquire in-depth knowledge of administration and legislation, the latest technologies applied to the heritage field and the most successful recent experiences, as well as the ability to apply an inter-disciplinary approach based on methods and systems from other fields of knowledge (management, team leadership, cultural marketing, new resources and forms of funding, etc.).