Are the creative industries facing a skills crisis?
We speak to creative leaders from the worlds of advertising and design about the industry’s most glaring skills gaps and how agencies are attempting to plug them through a different approach to hiring talent
For a long time, the creative industries were a pretty siloed place, where studying the right course at the right school would help land you the appropriate role for your skillset. But the rapid development of emerging technologies, coupled with an increasingly fragmented media landscape and tighter client budgets means that creative businesses are now crying out for talent with a broad range of highly developed skills.
While the desire for fresh talent among the industry can only be seen as a positive thing, finding creatives with the right blend of skillsets is proving increasingly challenging for companies. In the UK, the VFX workforce is woefully undersized to cope with the boom in demand, a problem that has only been exacerbated in the wake of Brexit. Meanwhile, the well-documented devaluation of creative subjects in schools – particularly in combination with STEM subjects – is leading to a lack of awareness around the variety of career options that are on offer.
Creativity aside, the level of digital fluency and technical skills required to undertake a career in the creative industries is higher than ever now. When Pentagram partners Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell were studying design at Central Saint Martins in the early noughties, they were experimenting with VR, environmental filters and AI years before they were widely accessible. But looking at the talent coming into the industry now, they see a surprising lack of willingness among young designers to stray outside of their lane.