A records and information governance manager decides, and defends, what an organisation keeps and what it destroys — a retention schedule that has to balance statutory legal requirements (some records must be kept for a defined minimum period), operational need, storage cost, and privacy law, which pulls the other way: UK GDPR's data-minimisation principle requires that personal data not be kept for longer than necessary. The primary pull is Preservation, but applied to organisational memory and accountability rather than to cultural heritage — the record that survives is what lets an organisation answer for a decision years later, respond to a Freedom of Information request, or defend itself in litigation, and the record that should not survive is a live legal liability if it does.
The daily texture is policy and systems work — building and maintaining retention schedules, running compliance training, auditing whether departments actually follow the policy — punctuated by genuinely high-stakes incident response whenever a data breach, subject access request, or legal discovery demand arrives and every retention decision the organisation has made becomes something it has to account for immediately.
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This is a quietly high-stakes, compliance-heavy role that most students have never heard exists — nobody pictures "the person who decides what a company is legally allowed to keep and for how long" as a job, and the "wait, that's a job?" reaction is common. Getting the retention decision wrong in either direction carries real consequences: destroy something too early and the organisation may breach a statutory requirement or destroy evidence; keep everything indefinitely and it is in breach of UK GDPR's data-minimisation principle, carrying real regulatory and reputational risk. The pay reflects the responsibility more than the public perception of "records" work suggests — the Archives & Records Association's own recommended salary guidance places experienced records managers at roughly £34,700–£41,150, middle management around £51,400, and senior management around £70,700 [official, Archives & Records Association 2026].
An ARA- or CILIP-accredited postgraduate qualification in records management or information governance is a common route in, often combined with information-governance-specific certifications (the BCS or the Information and Records Management Society both offer recognised routes). A meaningful share of practitioners move in from data protection, compliance, or legal backgrounds and add records-specific governance expertise on top, rather than starting from a traditional archives or library qualification.
AI does more of the routine compliance labour while accountability -- under UK GDPR with real ICO enforcement, and under the Public Records Act/FOI Act -- stays locked to a named human who can be personally investigated or sanctioned
Growing; among the field's best-paid and most AI-resilient archetypes, driven by UK GDPR's blanket applicability and the emerging question of governing AI-agent-generated records
People drawn to Records & Information Governance Managerare often drawn to these — in the order they're closest. The ones marked sit in a different field entirely.