Unlocking invisible skills in the creative industries
Kate Spencer, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Pete Cohen, Sally McNamara, Inder Singh, Helen Babb Delia, Daniel Bluzer-Fry and Courtney Guilliatt about unlocking invisible skills and developing skills literacy for the creative industries.
When it comes to the world of work, skills are the new currency.
As we embrace a future where more people will have multiple careers, and across different industries, throughout their lives whether by choice or as a result of the disruption caused by the 4th Industrial Revolution, understanding the value of our skills currency is key to surviving, and thriving, in the future of work.
Yet it’s easy to overlook the depth and breadth of the skills that we use every day and we have acquired throughout our careers. Unless we identify our skills, name them, validate them and have the language to talk about them, these valuable skills will remain invisible.
While we can trade on our 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 across multiple industries is a different matter. This requires us to develop a skills literacy and a new language around skills to make those skills transferrable.
Precarious careers built on diverse skills
As part of our explorations at FOWARD into the skills needed to empower creative talent and creativity to thrive into the future, we are looking at what it means to uncover invisible skills and ways to build skills literacy for creative industry professionals.
Our view is that by empowering people to identify and unlock invisible skills, it expands the available portfolio career opportunities and enables people to move between, and across, the creative industries, and beyond.
The creative industries, and in particular the arts and cultural sectors, have always been a precarious and unpredictable place to work even though the creative industries contributed an estimated $111.7 billion to the Australian economy in 2016 and employed 868,098 people — 8.1% of the Australian workforce.
The fallout from the pandemic brought the precarious nature of the industry into much clearer focus, with the result that many creative industry workers (and with them, their skills) left the sector, both temporarily and in many cases permanently.
Creative work always was a gig economy. Creative careers often develop organically: some people may start their career with industry-specific training and qualifications, but after that skills are honed and acquired over years, or decades, of industry experience and peer learning.
In an industry dominated by freelancers and micro-businesses, the onus for skills development falls on the individual. Skills are practised, honed and updated job by job, project by project and gig by gig. Moving from one festival, gig or project to another, articulating one’s skills may have not been a barrier to gaining future work. Reputations, connections and portfolios did the talking.
But these skills are often taken for granted, and the value of specialist and transferable skills acquired throughout a career are often overlooked — or simply not recognised, especially by those in other sectors — and without the skills literacy to articulate the value of transferable skills acquired on the job to other sectors, accessing work opportunities in new horizons can be a challenge.
As Adam Simmons, a jazz musician who recently pivoted into a dual career in data analytics, wrote:
A career in the arts demands that we develop creativity, resourcefulness, resilience, and adaptability. We become communicators and storytellers. We develop skills across sales, marketing, digital, media, budgeting, networking and more. Not to mention leadership, project management, teamwork, stakeholder engagement, counselling, research, mentoring, and so on. Unfortunately, despite having some or all these skills, musicians are often dismissed as “you’re just an artist you wouldn’t understand”.
By recognising and naming skills, it becomes easier to develop them. Imagine if we didn’t need to transfer skills to other domains to make ends meet and if we applied them within the creative industries to build things up instead. Or we created a range of career pathways like the sport or health sectors and made the most of the incredible knowledge base within the creative sectors.
Adam’s experience is shared by many others, who left the peak of their artistic careers at the height of the pandemic to find work in another — and in some cases, any other —sector. Some people were lucky enough to pivot their skills into new domains, but in many cases, creative industry professionals retrained completely, leaving behind years of industry skills. Without the ability to recognise and name the valuable and transferable skills they acquired in the arts — those skills are the ones that remain invisible.
While we would like to think that the worst of Covid19 is behind us, the reality is that it has a long, disruptive and unsettling tail. The future of work is uncertain, and disruption remains with us day by day and on the horizon.
We think that if the value of creative industry skills were better appreciated, and better understood, by both creative industry professionals and by those in other industries, it would strengthen career pathways within and beyond the creative industries and support career resilience.
So as we look to the future of work for the creative industries, building skills literacy is a skill in itself — one that could be an important part of making careers in the creative industries a little less precarious.
Making the invisible visible
We are working with CLOCK Your Skills, who have developed an international accreditation framework tailored to the creative industries to recognise, validate and accredit on-the-job creative industry skills.
Through a peer-to-peer learning and assessment model, using internationally recognised industry mentors and peer reviewers, the program makes visible the invisible skills learnt through industry experience. The program also provides a pathway for future study by helping to identify skill gaps and opportunities for further learning. The program was developed in the UK, and is aligned to the Scottish and European skills frameworks for the Creative Industries.
As Denise Stanley-Chard from Clock Your Skills says:
CLOCK creates a level playing field for skilled creatives and entrepreneurs irrespective of where or how they learned their skills.
We are thrilled to be partnering with the Victorian Music Development Office and CLOCK Your Skills on a program of skills workshops from 30 August to 2 September 2022.
FORWARD are sponsoring 10 of the 27 funded places available in the Skills Discovery Workshops on Tuesday, 30 August in Melbourne. There are also opportunities to take part in a 3-day sector expert boot camp to have high-level skills validated and accredited through a certified master’s level award in the Creative and Cultural Industries.
Whether you work in the Victorian music industry as an employee, freelancer, volunteer, trainee, intern, senior manager, or entrepreneur, come and join us to uncover, recognize, appreciate, and value your skills.
If you can’t make the workshops, but are keen to get involved in the discussion around future skills, creative industries and creativity, join the conversation by contacting kate.spencer@rmit.edu.au
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
