Reframing creativity to uncover our place in the universe of skills
Kate Spencer, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Helen Babb Delia, Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Sally McNamara, Daniel Bluzer-Fry, Soolin Barclay and Courtney Guilliatt.
This article is based on a presentation at REMIX Sydney 2023, Australia’s biggest creative industries summit, exploring the future of the creative and cultural industries, cities and the creative economy.
It is no secret that we live in increasingly complex and disruptive times. The what, where, how, and why of work is changing daily.
Covid was a dress rehearsal. GenerativeAI is Act 1, and we haven’t even made it to intermission.
So in the face of such uncertainty, what can individuals in the creative industries do to prepare for whatever is coming next?
Do we need to let go of creativity?
No, I am not talking about whether AI is going to kill creativity or not. I am talking about how we frame our work around creativity and in particular creative output.
One emerging view from our work at RMIT FORWARD is that by reimagining creativity, we could uncover the full breadth of our skills and unlock new opportunities and career pathways to help us navigate a rapidly changing landscape of work.
Welcome to the ‘Creatives Guide to the Skills Universe’.
Reimagining creativity to make our skills visible
We all have different personal interpretations of what creativity is and what it means to us as individuals and to our work. But as I noted in our story ‘Reimagining creativity for the future’, there is a dominant narrative across many sectors that “creative” is solely connected to output rather than process.
In the creative industries, when we talk about our “work”, the dominant narrative is that creativity and “creative” roles and identities are linked to an output.
A photographer creates images.
A musician makes music.
A producer, whether in design, media or the cultural sector, shapes and delivers a creative project.
It also often shapes how we get new work. It’s your reputation, your portfolio and your last gig that opens the door to the next one.
But we are so much more than what we create.
Beneath our portfolios, and the output of our creativity, is a breadth and depth of skills — that are often invisible to ourselves, and others.
For many in the creative industries, it’s easy to overlook the depth and breadth of the skills that we use every day, and that we have acquired throughout our careers. We tend to get on and focus on making “the work”.
Take the photographer, who probably also runs their own small business. Alongside the artistic and technical skills required to make images, they are dealing with insurance and copyright issues, winning over and managing clients, quoting jobs, managing budgets, cash flow and much more.
In addition to skills in making music, the musician also has many other skills needed to manage their music. They will likely be booking and managing tours, negotiating sales, distribution and licensing; designing and sourcing merchandise, and creating images and videos to promote their work on social media.
The list of skills goes on.
There are literally thousands of skill names and clusters across all sectors. Some are very bespoke and technical. Others are highly transferable.
I have started thinking about the skills, attributes and knowledge we bring to work like the stars in the universe.
We each have a unique skills constellation that changes over the course of our careers (and our lives) — we add stars, we let some go, some shine brighter than others and they form clusters that become our superpowers.
We may not use them all the time, but as I wrote in ‘Unlocking invisible skills in the creative industries’, seeing and understanding the value of our skills is key to surviving and thriving in the future of work.
Unless we identify our skills, name them, validate them and have the language to talk about them, these valuable skills will remain invisible.
Learning the language of skills — to navigate a crisis, or create an opportunity
Like many of my colleagues and peers in the creative industries, other than adding a few keywords and skills to fit my CV into a job application or a project proposal, I had not thought deeply about the full breadth of my skills and all the skills I have acquired through my industry experience.
That was until COVID, when I asked: Where to from here? What else could I do for work?
One of the stories that gave me a lot of hope during the pandemic was in the UK. As the live entertainment industry ground to a halt, lighting designers Katharine Williams and Jono Kenyon formed People Powered — a collective that grew to over 1000 freelancers across the entertainment and live event industries.
They came together and approached the National Health Service and other frontline services in the UK to offer their services. By being able to articulate the skills and ingenuity they had honed building festival infrastructure and producing live shows, they were put to work — helping to set up emergency structures like temporary hospital wings and source equipment from outside the usual supply chains.
Covid was of course, a crisis, but it is a valuable lesson that it was the language of skills that made their experience visible and unlocked opportunities in new horizons.
While we can trade on invisible skills as we seek new opportunities in the same industry — where there is an unwritten understanding of the skills required to do a particular role — building a portfolio career, or even just a complimentary second income stream, across multiple industries is a different matter.
Even just communicating what you do within the creative industries can be hard. Without a common language, your skills and capabilities can easily get lost in translation if you move from one part of the ecosystem to another.
As many of the speakers at REMIX Sydney highlighted, work in the creative industries is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary. With the growth of the immersive experience economy, there are new opportunities to collaborate with technologists, city-makers and brands. So now, more than ever, we need a new language to articulate our skills and move across sector boundaries.
In Australia, a report based on the 2021 Census also shows that there is a rise in ‘embedded creatives’, those in creative occupations working in industries outside the creative industries.
Whether it is to unlock these emerging opportunities and career pathways or to adapt to a crisis, we will need to be able to see our skills and have a common language to talk about them.
And that is the language of skills.
A skills map for the creative industries
At RMIT FORWARD, our view is that to be prepared to navigate the future we need to make all the skills in the creative industries visible and have a shared language to be talk about them.
It’s important — for ourselves as individuals, as organisations and as a sector — but also so others outside the sector can see us in a new light and see the breadth of skills we have to offer — in addition to what we create.
It’s also important to attract the next generation of talent, to support a vibrant and economically sustainable workforce for the future by highlighting skill-based pathways both within and beyond the creative sector.
To do so, we need a clear picture of all the skills in the creative industries — at a very granular level. We need to do an audit of the skills we have in our individual and collective constellations — and then see what’s missing.
But unlike other industries, we don’t have a detailed view of the full spectrum of the creative industries in terms of specific skills. There are some discipline-specific resources, but to our knowledge, there is no creative industries skills framework or reference list, for example the SFIA global skills and competency framework developed for the ICT community.
So at RMIT FORWARD, in collaboration with industry partners, we are looking to create a consolidated skills map for the creative industries that shows the full breadth of skills needed, learnt and mastered in one common language.
We are looking for partners, so if you would like to get involved or have knowledge and insights to share, we’d love to hear from you.
Join the conversation by contacting kate.spencer@rmit.edu.au
In closing, we’ll leave you with one more question:
Do you know what your constellation of skills looks like?
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au
