Charities are not employing enough qualified staff to handle legacies and will struggle with rising volumes of cases, according to Chris Millward, chief executive of the Institute of Legacy Management.

A lack of qualifications and training has also meant that many charities lack the soft skills to help them deal with difficult or disputed legacy cases, he said.

Speaking at a seminar on the issues facing charity legacies, held by the law firm Bates Wells Braithwaite in central London yesterday, Millward said the problem of staff recruitment was one of the things that kept him awake at night.

“There’s a challenge at the moment in that charities aren’t necessarily employing professionally qualified people to undertake the role of legacy administration,” he said.

The institute needed to work to establish legacy administration as a recognised and respected profession, he said, in much the same way the Institute of Fundraising was with fundraising.

“I think there are some challenges coming down the line, particularly in regard to the rising death rate of the baby-boomer generation,” Millward said.

“What that actually means is that hopefully we’re going to get more legacy gifts, but also that we’ve got a resourcing issue because we can’t currently recruit as many people as we need to do the job let alone do the job well to handle those increasing numbers.”

He said the sector needed to consider what kind of training or professional qualifications candidates should have to make them effective legacy administrators, how they should communicate with those people and encourage them into the profession and how they should be supported once they entered it.

This would also put charities in a better position to focus on supporter care and deal with more complex legacy disputes, Millward said.

“We portray ourselves quite often as the victim in some of these scenarios, unable to do anything about our own situation,” he said.

“But what we’ve failed on is some of those softer skills: communications, being sensitive, influencing, managing internal stakeholders – the stuff that actually is critical and creates those breakthrough moments.”

Michael Clark, legacy and in-memory manager at the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, who also spoke at the seminar, agreed there was an issue with recruitment because the career was not well known and was not seen as a sexy. He said that charities should start raising awareness of legacy administration at universities.

He said there was also a problem with retention.

“Some of the larger charities are starting to implement, good robust structures to enable legacy staff to develop,” said Clark. “But an awful lot don’t employ anybody in the legacies department over management level despite the income probably being greater than any other income within their organisation.”

Legacy administrators tended to stay in post for only 18 months or so because there was very little opportunity to move on once they reached manager level, he said, and for small charities, replacing them could mean having to start again with a new strategy.