#TheWeekInCareers - Episode 94
Chris Webb
Higher Education Careers Professional / RCDP / Freelance Careers Writer / Podcaster / Co-Host of The #WeAreCareers Show
Welcome to #TheWeekinCareers! If you are a first-time reader (and congratulations if so, you are now part of a 4700+ strong community!), this newsletter is my attempt at summarising some of the key #Careers-related news from across the #Careersphere each week, along with some of the talking points I feel are worthy of further debate amongst the #Careers community! So, without further ado, on to the news!
This week's newsletter is themed around a single topic - Discover! Creative Careers Week 2024, which has been taking place this week from 18th-22nd November. It's not just the fact this excellent initiative is happening right now that makes it worth writing about - it's also an extremely timely subject for a number of reasons, focusing as it does on engaging young people to raise awareness of the myriad pathways available across the creative industries. With funding for the Arts facing ever more challenging circumstances (particularly with the current financial crisis in HE), a new The Royal Academy of Art campaign, 'Art is a serious subject', reminding us of the interdisciplinary importance of this discipline, and the constant presence of AI leading many commentators to speculate what the future of 'human work' could actually look like, the creative sector has arguably never been more vital and of course, careers professionals have a significant role to play in demystifying what a 'creative career' looks like in practice. As usual, I try to distil this meaty topic into a digestible weekend read - plough on, to see if I succeed!
We conclude the newsletter in typical fashion with a jam-packed #BestOfTheRest (it's always SO hard to pick what to include in this segment, with the volume of great work being undertaken by careers professionals across the sector) for you to peruse alongside your weekend coffee (or hot beverage of choice) - as always, I hope you enjoy the newsletter and please do share your thoughts, insights or suggestions related to any of this week's items in the comments thread at the bottom of the newsletter!
Thank you as always for continuing to subscribe, read, comment on and support #TheWeekInCareers! ??
Discover Creative Careers Week 2024 - Why it matters more than ever ??
ICYMI, this week has seen the return of Discover! Creative Careers Week (18th-22nd November), an initiative that aims to both raise awareness of the litany of amazing career pathways within the creative industries and serve as a 'call to arms to employers and individuals across the sector to provide young people aged 11-18 with direct encounters with industry through in-person and online events at workplaces'. In practice, this means initiatives and activities like some of the following which took place during last year's Discover! Creative Careers Week (all of which also served the purpose of helping schools and colleges meet Gatsby Benchmarks 4, 5 and 6 - a topical reference, given this week's launch of the updated Gatsby Benchmarks, about which there'll doubtless be plenty written in the weeks to come...)
However, today's newsletter is not simply about giving the team behind Discover! Creative Careers Week their flowers (as much as this is well deserved!). In truth, this year's initiative has come at a hugely important juncture for the creative sector, with the spectre of AI raising more and more questions about what it means to be 'creative', Higher Education courses in the Arts and Social Sciences facing more challenges than ever (both internal and external) and an in-progress reviews of both the National Curriculum and Post-16 Pathways in England, which it remains unclear will be broadly positive or negative for creative disciplines, and all against the backdrop of an industry that continues to generate a huge amount of value (both economically and culturally speaking) for society. For more on Discover! Creative Careers Week itself, dive into our latest episode of #WeAreCareers with Cerys Evans from Into Film (link below!) but in the meantime, let's dig into 'creative careers' in 2024 and why this topic should be high on every careers professional's list of priorities...
Why the Creative Industries matter ????????????
Amongst the career development community, where as a point of principle ALL sectors matter and a significant part of our work is keeping abreast of what is happening across different industries, highlighting the importance of the creative industries may seem like an exercise in stating the obvious, but it always helps to remind ourselves just how wide a range of pathways we are talking about when it comes to this area of work. As the team at ERIC outline on their website, it's helpful to break the creative industries down into streams, in order to truly see the breadth of opportunities available - ERIC identify 16 different sectors within the broader Creative Industries:
Phew! Now of course, there is often a significant amount of overlap between these different parts of the creative industries, but it's a great reminder of just how far the tentacles of this sector spread throughout the world of work, not just in terms of the outputs created directly via the industries highlighted above, but also in terms of the auxiliary opportunities generated for professionals that work in roles which might not always be considered a 'creative career', such as Finance, Legal, Events, Data Analysis, Logistics or Project Management. As Samantha Hornsby observed in a recent LinkedIn post (see below), as much as people often try to separate the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) sectors from the Creative Industries, there are plenty of examples of collaboration between these two fields, such as a new ￡37 million UK initiative utilising the expertise of chemists to explore and preserve cultural heritage ??
So is part of the problem potentially how we define what makes a 'Creative Career'? I certainly think this can be a contributing factor - as the Royal Academy of Arts' 'Art is a serious subject' campaign (see below) outlines, creative thinking is a skill that is needed across all industry areas and is integral for helping us solve the world's most significant problems, even more so as we enter an era with AI where we are being forced to consider what 'human work' might actually look like in the future (more on this later...). I think there is a risk sometimes that we segment the Creative Industries and creative professionals away from professionals in other areas of work, rather than acknowledging the interdisciplinary nature of creativity and the fact that the the ecosystem of work is rarely separated into neat boxes, but rather is full of interdependent and overlapping projects and partnerships (e.g. data analysts working for creative industry organisations, graphic designers working for corporates etc.), something also identified in the British Academy's Qualified for the Future report from 2020, which showcases the diverse range of industries that graduates from creative disciplines go on to succeed in, such as Finance/Insurance, Real Estate, Public Services and Scientific/Technical:
Are we doing enough to support the Creative Industries? ??
The government of the day in any era might argue differently when it comes to this point but in a word, NO. For a sector that generates an astonishing amount of revenue for UK PLC (as ERIC point out, in 2023 the creative industries contributed more money to the UK economy than the automotive, life sciences, aerospace and oil & gas industries combined!), it's hard to argue that the creative industries get shown the same level of love that other sectors (such as STEM) have received over the years, although the needle does appear to be moving on this front. In West Yorkshire, where I currently work, we have the fastest creative sector growth (a word governments of all political hues seem to adore) outside of London, and gratifyingly the Combined Authority are leaning into this by investing some significant sums of money to maintain West Yorkshire's status as an attractive destination for the Creative Industries and freelance creatives.
But despite the warm words from many politicians when it comes to our creative industries in the UK (lest we forget, the creative sector received a lot of credit during the Covid-19 pandemic for keeping people sane, but this was not necessarily reflected in the financial support the sector and freelance creatives received from the government) and the funding of an increased number of programmes designed to help more young people get into creative industry pathways (hello again, Discover! Creative Careers!), there still appears to be a disparity when it comes to words vs deeds. As identified in the Royal Academy of Arts campaign mentioned above, supporting the creative industries is about more than just funding, it's also about the way we talk about and celebrate the importance of this field of work - in the case of the RA campaign, they talk about how the relentless focus on 'core subjects' within the secondary education system has led to the importance of arts-related subjects being diminished, and the loss of quality art teachers from the profession as teacher CPD fails to meet the needs of these specialists (something my partner, a secondary school art teacher, would certainly back up based on her experience).
We can also see the diminishment of creative disciplines in the public discourse that has been taking place in relation to the Higher Education sector in the UK, particularly in terms of how we classify what makes a 'high/low value degree' - the focus here from detractors of creative disciplines always seems to be related to Graduate Outcomes (e.g. are the graduates from these courses in 'highly skilled employment' 15 months after completing their studies), but a laser focus on this metric alone ignores both the reality of creative industry pathways (the increased likelihood of self-employment and portfolio work linked to pathways in this field can mean it takes longer to establish yourself within industry, and a career in the field is not necessarily as easy to define as it might be for a graduate from an Engineering, Business or Healthcare related course, for example) and the data (both historical and more recent) which shows us that there is plenty more mythbusting to be done when it comes to the idea that creative degrees / courses only lead to underemployment and low salaries. And as the RA note in their campaign, the consequences of a lack of support for the Creative Arts will not simply be economic, but also cultural - if we lose a generation of creatives due to interest in creative subjects drying up in schools and ongoing cuts to creative degree courses in universities (see below), it is not something that can easily be reversed, and this would be a significant loss for both our society in the UK and the soft power that our creative industries grant us globally:
Creativity in the age of AI...??
Against the backdrop of the many challenges facing the Creative Industries, there is another that presents the potential for both crisis and opportunity - the rise of AI, and in particular Generative AI (GenAI). I've written at length about this subject in previous newsletters in relation to career development, as I believe our sector will be heavily impacted by this technology (see the recent white paper from Morrisby and Career Chat UK, Careers 2035: What does AI mean for the future of career guidance? for more on this topic), but I think the Creative Industries are even more central to how we'll come to work with and understand AI moving forward. The reason I think this - Creativity itself. As much as there are significant concerns about the potential for AI to 'automate creativity' and take away the essence of what makes us human, at present the most creative uses of existing AI tech have come from domain experts (and not just professionals working in the Creative Industries, it should be noted) who have used their ingenuity and understanding of the technology to create work that would previously have been unviable or unimaginable. There are some excellent example of this out there already in the Creative Industries - from music producer Timbaland using the AI music generator Suno to complete some of his unfinished songs to legendary artist Sir Peter Blake collaborating with AI tools to create a new performance art installation:
Want another great example of how the AI boom is being fuelled by creativity? Look no further than Singapore, which is arguably leading the way in government-backed AI investment and has seen the incubation of a huge range of AI startups that are solving big problems for different industries in a variety of ways. AI Palette is just one of these companies, an AI-powered data insights engine that is disrupting the market research sector for food companies and helping businesses predict key trends more readily by analysing a huge range of data points from different markets / countries, all in real-time - human ingenuity is still involved in the analysis of these reports and the implementation of the insights (e.g. actually bringing the product to market) but arguably AI Palette has been a highly creative solution to the challenge of keeping up with rapidly moving market trends, which needed an emerging technology (GenAI) and an innovative group of humans to make it happen! If that isn't creativity in action, what is? (as well as being another perfect example of what Samantha Hornsby has described as the symbiosis between the creative and tech sectors - now often referred to by the portmanteau CreaTech):
There are many legitimate concerns about the place of AI when it comes to generating outputs traditionally associated with creatives, from underlying bias within AI-generated imagery (based on the data it is trained on, which, as it comes from us, is of course riddled with bias) to questions around copyright and intellectual property, both in relation to AI-generated artwork (can this be copyrighted?) and the artwork these systems draw from to create 'new' outputs. There are also concerns around what may become of society if we become too reliant on consuming AI-generated art, music and video content - there have been some high-profile examples on X recently demonstrating just how difficult it can be to tell the difference between AI-generated artwork and the real thing, although as AI thought leader Ethan Mollick notes in his X post below, thinking AI artwork looks realistic does not necessarily indicate the presence of creativity. And even when there is evidence to suggest that AI can produce a greater number of novel ideas than a team of human professionals, can we separate the technology from the individuals who are prompting the system?
Of course, just because AI can produce bespoke imagery for us at the click of a button, it doesn't necessarily mean the quality of what is produced is going to be appropriate for the purpose we need it for - I've found AI excellent for generating tailored imagery for presentations (particularly of the more fantastical nature or imagery it's hard to find via stock image sites - see below for an example) but as Lucy Sattler rightly points out in a recent LinkedIn post, many AI image generation tools are still producing the same white, western, male dominated imagery that doubtless reflects the prevalence of this imagery on the Web. As a number of commentators have observed when it comes to the creation of AI-generated imagery, it's clear that a two-pronged approach is needed - it's not just about the training data itself, but also about how LLM models are trained to infer from this data, and reminding ourselves that we are also responsible for the quality and inclusivity of the imagery we put out in the world, given that it is now becoming part of the corpus of knowledge that LLMs will continue to draw from.
Alex Zarifeh is a member of the careers community who believes we shouldn't be attempting to separate AI and creativity but rather, that we should be helping prepare young people to navigate a future where, as Bonnie Greer recently noted on an episode of BBC Question Time, discerning between what is human and what is AI may be a more critical skill than it is today. If you've not yet come across the Futures Readiness programme that Alex has developed (see article below), then I strongly encourage you to take a look and connect with him on LinkedIn - the conversation around AI and creativity goes far beyond the Creative Industries and is something that also offers both challenges and opportunities for our work as careers professionals moving forward:
So, what's to be done? ?
As Discover! Creative Careers Week comes to an end for another year, what more can careers professionals do to take forward the mission of this initiative and ensure we are doing our part to raise awareness of the myriad opportunities in the Creative Industries throughout the year? As I've noted a few times in today's newsletter, for me it's all about the interdisciplinary nature of work - many people may not see themselves as someone 'creative' or as a future member of the 'Creative Industries' but by showcasing the interconnected nature of work (for example, by highlighting large-scale projects that require professionals from all backgrounds working together to solve problems - the creation of the Co-op Live arena in Manchester, for example!) and the overlapping nature of skills (if you have to solve complex problems in your work, you need to be creative!), we can help individuals understand that a 'Creative Career' is never just one thing, and that pathways in the Creative Industries themselves are far broader and more diverse than we might be aware.
What have you been up to as part of Discover! Creative Careers Week? Do you have any great examples of how you have helped to raise awareness of pathways in the creative industries with the clients you support and if so, what works well in your experience? Are there any employers or organisations you know who are really nailing this? Or do you maybe feel that these type of initiatives simply create competition amongst industries to promote themselves, when we could be talking more about the intersectionality of sectors, projects and job roles? Answers, as always, on a #TheWeekInCareers postcard! ?? (or more accurately, in the comments section at the bottom of the newsletter...)
The Best of the Rest: My Hot Picks from the wider?#Careersphere???
?? Careers work in the news...and it's the GOOD kind! - First up this week, it's a welcome injection of sunshine amidst a fairly gloomy November, courtesy of an article from Wales Online, which gives a MASSIVE and well-deserved shout out to Careers Wales and Working Wales , and more specifically, the work of two careers advisers, Linda Thomas and Nick Sparrow, regarding the support they provided to two clients to help them move onto the next stage of their respective careers. It's not all that common we see articles like this in the press, so when something like this comes up, it fully deserves our attention and a BIG #CareersCheers!
?? Six things I’d do if I were choosing a university course right now - Next up, it's a really thoughtful piece from Jonathan Tinnacher in Better Uni Choices, which sees Jonathan reflect on the decision making process behind choosing whether / where / what to study based on the benefit of hindsight - the resulting article provides a valuable checklist for any individuals who might be considering university study now or in the future, taking into account factors such as the importance of the course/subject, the value of trying things out first and taking a wider look at the university experience beyond simply academic study. Well worth a read!
?? Entrepreneur Apprenticeships: Could they work? - From university to apprenticeships, and a fascinating thought-piece from Tom Rogers which explores whether the concept of an 'entrepreneur apprenticeship' could work in practice and if so, what would be needed to make it happen. Tom's point about the number of entrepreneurs the world may be missing out on due to a lack of initial support is well made and he also has a practical suggestion regarding a shorter apprenticeship (something the current government in the UK seem to be receptive to) encompassing fundamentals such as Financial Planning, Securing Investment and Mentorship, which feels pretty viable in principle. Are we missing a trick here or is the essence of entrepreneurship simply too complex to distil into an apprenticeship?
?? UK Space 101 - In my experience, the Space industry often flies under the radar (no pun intended) when it comes to LMI, partly as I think there can sometimes be an implicit bias from individuals that jobs and pathways in this sector are simply out of reach for many. Gratifyingly, Space Careers UK have recently launched the fantastic UK Space 101 site, which helps to demystify what careers in this...well, 'space', can look like, including details about the number of companies in the UK currently involved in the Space sector (1700+ and counting!) and the wide range of roles needed to make Space-related projects happen, from Policy Officers and Space Lawyers to Technicians and Flight Dynamics Engineers!
?? Time to reflect this weekend - We finish this week's newsletter with an excellent resource from David Winter related to an aspect of career development work that should never be neglected - reflective practice. Finding time to reflect in a busy world can often be challenging, particularly if you find this process doesn't come naturally, so David's A-Z of reflective tools and techniques is a brilliant resource to dip into in order to explore the range of reflective frameworks that are out there, from action learning sets to journaling. Give it a look this weekend and take some time to reflect, as you wind down from a busy week at work!
I'm always keen to hear what people think of this weekly newsletter format (e.g. Is it helpful? Does it add value to what is already out there on LinkedIn? What might make it better/more digestible?) so please do drop me a DM if you have any thoughts!
See you in the #Careersphere next time around for Episode 95! ??
Careers Adviser at Abertay University and Psychology Lecturer at UHI Perth
2 天前Thanks, really interesting recording and read. I do agree on the importance of creativity and how it should be considered as part of many different sectors. The same week that Creative Careers Week takes place, Book Week Scotland is on too so we had a couple of author events in Abertay University that were really engaging for students and staff. By the way Scottish Book Trust is a fantastic charity that supports creativity. I've just subscribed to your newsletter, thanks again
HE and Career Guidance (Inclusion Advocate)
4 天前Brilliant insights Chris Webb ! Creative careers have always been an element to my work I enjoy highlighting; as part of Careers Exploration I asked students to use the Warner Brothers Careers website and choose three jobs they didn’t think would be available in the Creative industry (I do the same with hospitals!). I’m definitely going to look into Createch and what Singapore are up to - thanks for signposting! Over the years I have been lucky enough to connect with amazing institutions for creative careers, to mention a few, Savannah College of Art and Design , California Institute of the Arts , LIM College in the USA, Multimedia University and Limkokwing University of Creative Technology right here in Malaysia. Exploring these pathways with students are essential when looking at right-fit. I think added to Jonathan Tinnacher’s great article should be number 7 ; country ! And added into the very important finance area ; scholarships - which can link strongly with country ?? At these institutions, and many other around the world, a variety of funding is available - it could turn out to be a cheaper option than the UK, and for some even a “Free Ride”!
Careers & Employability Consultant at The Open University | EMCC Accredited Coach | FHEA | PGCE
5 天前100% agree on your quote Chris Webb. Also a nice reminder of Chaos Theory - Careers Profs do get attracted to boxes sometimes. "I think there is a risk sometimes that we segment the Creative Industries and creative professionals away from professionals in other areas of work, rather than acknowledging the interdisciplinary nature of creativity and the fact that the the ecosystem of work is rarely separated into neat boxes, but rather is full of interdependent and overlapping projects and partnerships".
?? Level 7 Qualified Registered Career Development Professional (RCDP) ?? Personal and group guidance for individuals, schools, and charities ?? Career education workshops ?? Creator of Shape of Career Cards ??
6 天前Fascinating read about the creative industries Chris and I was scanning the list of sectors from ERIC and realising I’ve worked in 2 or more marketing, publishing and at a push fashion. In non ‘creative’ roles. Or maybe some creativity in there! This morning on 5 Live the creator of Vue cinemas was describing their transition from Law to founding this cinema chain where their passion lies. Ties in with your comments about the intersection and interdependence of creative and other roles. As with sport, there are businesses and they need all range of business and other skills to help them reach for the stars. Enjoying the newsletter in my morning break. Thank you.