Creative PEC Industry Champions
Creative PEC prides itself on being evidence led. Robust data has been vital in helping us to achieve a step-change in the quality of evidence making the case for the creative industries. As a Policy Unit, it’s our job to make this work meaningful to the wider world, to find where it connects with real issues, and to identify where policy change can happen. Our Industry Champions network of leading creative practitioners helps us to do this. Through their expert insight, we have been better able to understand the challenges facing the creative industries beyond the headline numbers.
In November, we convened the Industry Champions for a roundtable exploring a topic that is of special interest to Creative PEC’s policy work and research: lifelong learning in the creative industries. Together, we asked what lifelong learning looks like for workers in the creative industries today, what challenges creative professionals face and what needs to happen to transform the skills system for the better? The Industry Champions addressed each question in breakout rooms. This industry insights blog covers the challenges, with a follow up blog looking at possible solutions.
Why does lifelong learning matter for the creative industries?
Lifelong learning refers to all further study or training beyond formal education. Workers might be self-motivated to pursue a course to sharpen existing skills or gain new ones, or they might receive job-specific training for responsibilities employers consider important. Skills Use, Development and Progression is identified as one of the key pillars of job quality as defined in our Good Work Review. We also know from the research conducted for the Review that most creative workers are less likely to have accessed job-related training in the past three months. And because there are more self-employed people working in the creative industries compared to the wider economy, the financial burden of additional training is more likely to fall on workers themselves, which can mean it is unaffordable. On top of this, the skills system is notoriously hard to navigate, a problem that’s compounded by the nonlinear and portfolio-based nature of many creative careers.
In its first six months in office, the UK Government has prioritised skills as a key policy area, creating Skills England to understand gaps and needs in learning provision. It is reshaping technical training through the establishment of the Growth and Skills Levy, allowing greater flexibility for employers for spending on CPD, and the 2026 rollout of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, which will overhaul the way individuals can access and fund their own training. Alongside an emerging industrial strategy, lifelong learning is going to be especially important for the creative industries, ensuring that creative workers and firms have the skills they need to thrive.
The Challenges
The Industry Champions agreed that the current skills landscape for creatives remains difficult, and that work needs to be done to develop an expansive, equitable lifelong learning offer. Discussion clustered on a few core themes, which are summarised below.
Getting qualifications right
Learning and training look quite different depending on what part of the creative industries you’re in. For many creatives, a lot of learning isn’t tracked or accredited in a way that is easily made visible to prospective employers, especially where it involves informal (but no less valuable) knowledge sharing. They also tend to rely on portfolio work that showcases their developing experience and talent, with formal qualifications being complementary. This quirk of creative practice may make it harder to get recognition for their work without extensive networks.
However, our Industry Champions pointed out that subsectors like Architecture, IT and Software and Advertising and Marketing already have well-established, standardised routes for CPD, many of which are necessary for progression. What works in these sectors may not transfer well to others that have more openness to alternate pathways. There was also a concern around developing “qualifications for qualifications’ sake” and the possibility of flattening creative development into narrow, tick-box exercises.
What type of skills do the creative industries need?
Because the range of roles in the creative industries are so diverse, individual lifelong learning needs are likely to look quite different depending on context. In the screen sector, the needs of a producer, scriptwriter, actor, lighting technician and VFX artist will all look quite different, not to mention the wider army of supporting managerial, service and technical workers. Where skills were felt to be more intangible in nature, such as for designers, it becomes harder to make the case to employers to invest in learning.
This inevitably means that opportunities to upskill or learn will vary considerably depending on employer priorities and understanding of where their skills gaps are. The place of soft skills for younger creative workers was also discussed, especially the difficulty of teaching these in traditional classroom settings. Creative PEC’s researchers hope to uncover some of these questions around skills demand and shortages in upcoming reports in our Education, Skills and Talent thematic area.
Issues of access to creative education
Industry Champions pointed to persistent inequalities in access. They noted uncompetitive wages and declining number of teachers in the further education sector in general, which adds an additional dimension to our summer 2024 report on declining numbers of students in Creative FE. This decline is likely having a knock-on effect on the ability of both learners and learning providers to find the relevant experience, especially where there are highly specific requirements—which is by no means unusual for the creative industries. The rise of digital learning was viewed as a positive, but not without caution. While it can open provision to those who are historically excluded for reasons of geography or socioeconomic background, it can potentially also lead to shallower learning experiences.
Unblocking the talent pipeline
While lifelong learning is most often about what happens during a worker’s career, the Champions emphasised that many skills issues started in formal education. To have a truly lifelong offer, creative learning needs to be nurtured from early years onwards—exactly the period of life that locks too many young people into a fixed trajectory that is hard to address retrospectively. There was an emphasis on the need for experiential learning that gets young people thinking and working creatively. Crucially, the point was made that learning is not a linear process, but one that can go in many parallel directions.
Industry Champions also spoke of the importance of vocational pathways, but added that simply expanding these would not be enough. Paying young people properly for their work, including when they are in apprenticeships, is vital to making these routes viable for those from diverse backgrounds.
Structural and cultural issues in the creative industries
The Industry Champions also discussed some of the wider cultural and structural issues within the creative industries that prevent meaningful change. Careers within the sector are often non-linear and demand intense hours, which can make knowing how to prioritise training difficult for individual creatives.
Here, Champions also highlighted some of the issues of inequality that persist between London and other parts of the UK: some musicians outside London and South East England, for example, may feel they have to move to these areas in order to secure mentoring and engage with labels, due to lack of investment back home. This encourages creatives to become generalists in order to have sustainable careers before they can think about things like CPD. Others noted that in the museum sector, the tendency was to direct attention to generic training for all staff, at the expense of more specialist or technical learning. Where specialist skills are needed, museums tend to hire contractors.
There was a perception that a culture ‘learning by doing’ has led to a situation that actively works against the idea of learning being either formalised, accredited or paid, which is perhaps one reason why unpaid internships persist within the sector. Industry Champions suggested that creative firms should be shouting about good practice – and potentially be willing to call out bad practice where it occurs. On a more general note, the importance of access to networks as a way to get ahead was highlighted as a particular issue and that a lot of gatekeeping still exists within industry around this.
Finally, the issue of (lack of) funding, especially for those sectors reliant on public financing came out a a key challenge. This has a direct knock-on effect on the ability of organisations to offer learning.
Read part 2 of the blog here, we look at the potential solutions to encouraging lifelong learning that our Industry Champions touched on.
This blog summarises views expressed during the Creative PEC’s Industry Champions Roundtable on lifelong learning. The views expressed are not necessarily the views of the author or the Creative PEC and no comment is attributable to a single individual.
Image Credit: Matthieu Comoy
