When thinking of how to prepare students for careers in the creative industries, it has become typical in higher education to consult industry leaders. We ask them questions such as: “What skills might graduates need?” “Where are the gaps, the shortages?” “What behaviours and attributes are employers looking for?” and “How might we, as educators, better embed these skills and attributes into our curricula to empower our graduates as they navigate an increasingly competitive sector?”
But what if we asked the students themselves? What might they tell us about their projected careers, about the kinds of lives they wish to live?
Over the past six years, we have been asking students enrolled in cultural and creative degree programmes to talk to us about their futures. What we found was that students rarely, if ever, made the transition from student to empowered graduate – despite all the teaching we had hoped would support them to do so.
Rather, we heard over and over again of the pressure to live up to the “ideal graduate” – a fictional peer with better grades, more extracurricular achievements, stronger sector links, a driving licence and so on. This notions of an “ideal graduate” compels students to compete with each other. Importantly, universities also drive this narrative by promoting a narrow view of employability “success” in their marketing materials, and where opportunities for placements or skills development tend to be based around competition.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that this pressure to live up to expectations simply reinforces students’ self-perception as lacking or deficient. Thus, we witnessed anxious students, who, despite good grades and comprehensive extracurricular records, placed themselves at the bottom of their peer group. We saw students panic and witnessed their hopelessness, especially during the pandemic, as job markets collapsed and whole sectors in the creative industries shrank. We watched students grapple with a sense that they had come too late, that they had missed the heyday of the cultural industries. We noted, with concern, that these feelings were often far more pronounced in students who lacked the privilege often needed to find relevant employment.
A key issue here is that the concept of employability emerged during a period of relative socio-economic stability, and not in the extended periods of crisis that followed. In this sense, employability has largely been thought of as something done “to” or “for” students, and not as a lived and embodied phenomenon capable of transforming their understandings of self and their hopes for the future. Indeed, it has often been a conversation held without student input of any kind.
This leads us to a somewhat uncomfortable impasse. What if, for all our best ambitions, teaching for employability has done harm to our students? What if, rather than producing empowered graduates, we are instead forcing our students to develop psycho-emotive strategies and selves to contain a sense of threat and panic?
As educators, we see the situation as urgent. We have a responsibility to listen to our students and to make space for their voices, their hopes and concerns. We cannot pretend that we are not in crisis. The pandemic and the climate emergency, combined with the effects of looming economic recession, global conflict and rapid development of artificial intelligence systems, continue to impact and reduce opportunities in the creative and cultural labour market in a variety of ways. Similarly, structural inequalities in the cultural workforce, precarious working conditions, an increasing reliance on voluntary work and decreasing levels of pay mean that the sector has been in crisis for some time.
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We must urgently revisit the ways in which we talk about, and teach for, employability in the cultural and creative industries. We are trying to:
Make space for students’ voices and feelings
We must pay attention to students’ experiences and concerns, and how these shift over time. For us, this involves being honest with students about the challenges that we see in their prospective sectors. This means resisting the temptation to respond to students’ concerns with platitudes about how things might “pan out” in the future in favour of making space to listen to and really hear students – even if we don’t have any answers. It means both listening out for individual students’ anxieties in our everyday teaching, as well as creating dedicated safe spaces for students to collectively explore their future plans (such as by drawing timelines that have multiple pathways and that pre-identify sources of support).
Make fewer assumptions
Students have been left out of the employability debate, and we can’t assume that they have the language or the tools to get back in by themselves. Students may not know how to tell us what they want to do, how they wish to do it or the kinds of work they’re interested in. They may not see industry-specific expectations and norms. We need to discover what our students do not know and to support them so they can take part in industry-wide conversations. We ask students to produce word clouds with key terms relating to their futures, and then help them, one to one, to add detail and subject-specific vocabulary that better reflects their goals and makes job searches more productive (such as by helping students understand that they are interested in public programming in small-scale contemporary art venues, and not simply “curating”). A colleague has also produced a podcast called Cultural Peeps that aims to demystify the employability journey via interviews with cultural sector leaders about their career paths.
Change our teaching methods
Rather than relying on graduate panel talks and CV workshops, which can foster competition and panic, we are adopting teaching methods rooted in self-care and collectivity. These encourage students to view each other as valuable resources for solidarity and change-making, rather than as competitors. For example, we actively encourage peer knowledge-sharing (such as by creating time for students to share their experiences of a conference or talk with the whole group over a cup of tea), introduce and support DIY and self-organised activities ranging from ’zines and Instagram accounts to curatorial projects that enable and empower students to act) and co-produce self-care strategies and phrase banks that help students navigate rejection. While some of this work remains extracurricular, other strategies are embedded within taught modules, where we can work alongside, and in conversation with, all our students.
It is time to ditch the deficit model of employability. We urge educators across higher education to join us in radically rethinking employability provision by doing the above and more. And, most importantly, by working with and alongside our students.
Emma Coffield and Katie Markham are lecturers at Newcastle University.
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