Future careers will need adaptability, life-long learning and the creativity to apply knowledge

Creativity is at the heart of all human endeavours: creative thinking, or thinking outside the square, is key to all intellectual inquiry.

As we have seen in the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, creativity could even be said to be what ensures the survival of humanity. It was the ability to think laterally about solutions to complex problems, to find connections and patterns, that helped the scientific community produce a vaccine in record time.

QUT has always seen creativity as something that should be embedded across and between disciplines. It is one of the key attributes that will equip our graduates to thrive in a rapidly changing world: a student graduating today is likely to have between five and 15 different jobs in their lifetime, which is going to require adaptability, a commitment to life-long learning and the creativity to apply their knowledge and experience to different work environments.

At #QUT we also have a very strong commitment to the creative disciplines and practice and have launched thousands of careers in the traditional creative arts and also in film and broadcasting, publishing and journalism, games and interactive software, design and architecture, and advertising and marketing.

We recognise that these industries contribute significantly to Australia’s economy: before the COVID pandemic the creative economy contributed $115 billion to the nation’s prosperity and employed more than 600,000 workers, more than mining and agriculture combined.

Although the pandemic has caused massive disruption to the creative industries, skills in design, media and communications continue to be in high demand across industries.

Australia's first National Skills Commissioner, Adam Boyton, told the ABC earlier this year that future jobs growth would be in areas that were hard to replicate with machines: jobs that were non-routine, or that required complicated cognitive or creative processes.

As the university for the real world, QUT understands this and works to ensure that its students graduate not only with the knowledge needed for their chosen profession, but also with the core attributes that will serve them both now and in the future.

Creative practice can be enhanced by interdisciplinary collaboration, and it can be inspired by the challenges of working with industry, government, and community partners, which QUT provides through its curricular and extracurricular programmes.

This is why it’s great to see creative practices in Design the focus of this year’s Alumni Triennial at the QUT Art Museum. Although it is a quality that is difficult to quantify in fields outside of music, art, literature and performance, this exhibition attempts to lift the curtain on the creative process and demonstrate how skills to think creatively serve a range of industries and practices.

Thinking into Being: QUT Alumni Triennial features the work of 11 graduates from the Schools of Architecture and Built Environment, Creative Practice, and Design, who are now forging careers in their fields. Our alumni have worked with curators to create pieces that uncover some of those internal processes: how they work through ideas and come out with a final product, whether it be an object or an artwork.

Each Triennial exhibition has had a completely different feel, and this is because they respond to current ideas and trends and seek to capture what’s happening in the world today. This year we see a recurring theme of sustainability and ethical practice, which are some of our core values at QUT, so we are delighted to see our alumni carrying these ideals into their professional practice.

The exhibition reveals how creative processes may bring about social, political, ecological, and economic change, now and into the future.

Find out more: https://www.artmuseum.qut.edu.au/whats-on/2021/exhibitions/thinking-into-being-qut-alumni-triennial