Recruitment in a Post-COVID Landscape
As COVID restrictions begin
to lift in the UK, we have to
hope that the end is in sight
and the creative sector, which was
so badly hit during the pandemic,
can start to rebuild and recruit
once again. At Creative & Cultural
Skills, we are committed to ensuring
that this rebuilding will be led by
initiatives such as Creative Kickstart
and apprenticeships, which can give
young people from all backgrounds
the opportunity to pursue their
creative career path, learning and
earning at the same time.
Apprenticeships have the potential to attract a broad and diverse range of talent into our workforce. This not only ensures we can address our sector’s skills needs but can also go some way to helping ensure the creative workforce is representative of the communities it seeks to engage. Our own research shows that employers believe apprenticeships will become increasingly more important in helping to address skills shortages in the future.
While we don’t think apprenticeships are a singular fix for our sector’s workforce issues, evidence shows apprenticeships increase productivity, generating on average £26-£28 for the economy for every pound invested in them. Higher level apprentices will earn £150,000 more on average over the course of their career than their academic counterparts, and more than 90% of apprentices will stay in paid employment at the end of their apprenticeship. No student debt, a salary throughout, a job at the end, and a skilled and diverse workforce to boot. What’s not to like?
“Apprenticeships have the potential to attract a broad and diverse range of talent into our workforce. This not only ensures we can address our sector’s skills needs but can also go some way to helping ensure the creative workforce is representative of the communities it seeks to engage.”
To maintain our status, we must remember to be a sector that is for everyone, by everyone, and with everyone. This means we must open our doors even more widely and remove the barriers that we have placed in the way of diverse talent. We must become inclusive in our thinking and in our actions, which includes recruiting via a range of routes that support individuals to learn and develop in ways that help them flourish. This means ending unpaid work, embracing difference in all its guises, and removing pointless pre-requisites for entry.
The creative sector has already demonstrated its ability to bounce back stronger from major economic challenges. Following the recession in 2008, the creative industries grew exponentially in the years thereafter, making it the fastest growing and second largest sector in the UK economy. An even greater challenge faces the sector now, so we want to help it build back stronger and fairer.
Apprenticeships must be part of how we do this. To those who believe the creative industries might be a second-rate option for a career, please think again. The UK’s creative industries are world leading, from our award-winning television and film, our cutting-edge music, our factual and fictional story-telling, our design that aids everyday living, our architecture, our clothes, the objects we house that help us learn about what has gone before to inform our thinking about the future, our artists who make us question the world around us, and our performers who entertain and challenge us.
And for those that think apprenticeships are only for plumbers and electricians, how about training to be a Venue Technician, a Curator, a Jewellery Maker, or an Animator? These are just a tiny sample of the occupations that can be trained for via an apprenticeship in the creative industries.
Without diverse voices and experiences to influence thinking, bring out a wider range of ideas, challenge norms and drive change, organisations risk becoming irrelevant. To shine a light on this, we have recently launched a podcast series on the theme of ‘Build Back Fairer’. We talk to professionals from across the creative and cultural sector and hear from young people at the start of their careers, to explore the impacts and opportunities that may have been heightened by, or arisen, during the pandemic.
Let’s work together to make apprenticeships and fair access an everyday part of how we operate.
At Creative & Cultural Skills, we work to create fair and skilled cultural sector for the next generation of talent by raising awareness and shaping skills, education and employment best practice. For further information, to learn about our current programmes or to contact us, please visit www.ccskills.org.uk