What I’ve Learned Supporting Arts and Culture Clients

By Lauren Power

The major fumble that career professionals make with arts-interested jobseekers is treating them as one or the other: arts-interested or a jobseeker, when in reality, creative clients require a different strategy

My job title is Arts and Culture Career Consultant. As far as I can tell, I’m a bit of a unicorn; outside of arts colleges, there are no other career professionals whose primary focus is helping creative individuals who have experienced difficulty developing a career path that is both meaningful and realistic.

Career professionals can feel stumped with how to proceed with their creative clients. It’s understandable, as arts clients are a peculiar bunch. Their career paths are, by nature, unorthodox.
The major fumble that career professionals make when approaching arts-interested jobseekers is treating them as one or the other: arts-interested or a jobseeker.

When faced with an arts-interested client, there’s desire to say “yes” to whatever plans he or she may create, for fear of crushing a dream – we call this “feeding the fantasy.” At the other end of the spectrum, well-meaning career professionals might portray a career attached to arts and culture simply as “unrealistic” and encourage them to move on.

We need a holistic approach to working with arts-interested clients.

In my experience, there are four lessons that can help.

Lesson 1: They are complex

Careers in arts and culture may be considered as whimsical, fanciful and less practical than other careers.

Arts-involved clients can be more complex than typical clients. The types of jobs that many arts-interested jobseekers target are different as they are in the not-for-profit (NFP) sector. By nature of their funding structure, many NFPs can only sustain temporary employment, not long-term jobs. Thus, there is a cycle of unemployment and disengagement from the workplace. For example, in Prince Edward Island in 2015, existing work experience programs had to change direction, away from funding short-term employment by NFPs, as NFPs were unable to sustain employment beyond the length of their wage subsidies.

Furthermore, creative individuals often spend time working for themselves. With no attachment to a traditional workplace, there’s a lack of support that most 9-to-5ers take for granted. These individuals miss out on things like paid vacation and the benefits of daily socialization. Without steady employment, wage instability is a major challenge for creative workers. As such, these clients might need supports in areas from work-related stress to traumatic work-related incidents and each client will need a more robust approach to employability skills.

Lesson 2: They need “the blend”

We don’t force our participants to choose between work and art, because, in the modern labour market, most arts-attached professionals manage both.

Ask any arts-involved professional and they’ll tell you the same: you’ve got to embrace “the blend.”

When we talk with clients about “the blend,” we’re talking about the approach to employment that involves pursuing multiple careers or vocations simultaneously, though we may call it a “hybrid career” or a “slash” (as in, playwright/barista or model/actress).

Among arts professionals, a blended career means that a work week may be divided into two or more distinctive career paths that provide them the ability to pursue their passions in an unorthodox way.

For many, the ups-and-downs of contract work and the freelance game are mellowed by the consistency of a day job. My mental Rolodex contains visual artists, musicians, ballet dancers, filmmakers and performers, all of whom engage in complementary employment to keep the bills paid.

From the perspective of the art-interested client, the blended approach is an opportunity to improve work-life balance over what is possible in most career paths for artists.

This type of learned resiliency is a model for the modern workplace: flexible, knowledgeable, skilled and open to opportunity.

How do we make it happen?

Lesson 3: They need different skills

I encourage clients to take responsibility for their skill development: creative and non-creative. Keeping your skills sharp is an important piece of creativity. Learning new things in your area of expertise as well as outside of your strengths can spark new associations that lead to fresh ideas. It’s as true for artists as it is for jobseekers.

In our experience, entrepreneurial skills are under-appreciated and not codified or captured when young people are documenting their skills sets, leading many to undersell themselves. There are thinking skills that arts and cultural expertise build, but rarely do we assist individuals with understanding the different modes of thinking and how they can apply them to the challenge of labour market participation.

Some skills are particular to arts professionals, like pricing, marketing and art evaluation. To help your client through these inquiries, you’ll need to call in the experts.

Lesson 4: They need perspective

One benefit of working with arts-interested clients is their creative minds. The concept of examining the world through a different lens is second nature to a creative individual. They are natural explorers and investigators.

However, in conversation with clients, there’s often a mental block regarding their skills. When you first introduce the idea of “the blend,” they can’t fathom it. To accept a day job is akin to abandoning a life’s ambition. Add in years of well-meaning parental advice, discouraging the “arts as a career” route, and it manifests as a disconnect with the job market, as they feel that they are “outside” of the in-demand job market, despite their skills.

To help them envision a career path that includes long-lasting, sustainable work (and to break the habit of pre-judging non-arts work as personally unsuitable), these clients need to spend time with arts-involved and non-arts-involved professionals. They observe, interact with and learn from working professionals that exemplify the broad range of skills and knowledge necessary to participate in the current and future labour market.

I introduce this idea as “cross-training”: building knowledge and experience in two or more fields to improve their overall performance.

These activities have the bonus of training arts-interested clients in networking. Learning how to open the lines of communication and make yourself visible are invaluable skills.

At its core, the way we help arts-interested clients with career maintenance is the same way we help every client: encourage them to reach out. Creative individuals live and work in creative communities. To see someone live, work and succeed in their chosen field can be a revelation for a jobseeker, and it can sustain them long after they have left your office.

Lauren Power is the Arts & Culture Career Consultant (MEd, 2007) at the Murphy Centre (murphycentre.ca), serving people at all ages and stages of career development. He works, writes and teaches in St. John’s, NL. You can reach him at laurenpower@murphycentre.ca.

References

Beck-Tauscher, S. (2010, January 22). Hybrid careers: Gaining momentum in the workplace [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://springboard.resourcefulhr.com/hybrid-careers-gaining-momentum-in-the-workplace/

Dex, S., Willis, J., Paterson, R. and Sheppard, E. (2000), “Freelance workers and contract uncertainty: the effects of contractual changes in the television industry,” Work, Employment and Society, Vol. 14, pp. 283-305.

Hamill, K. (2014, September 17). “Monochromatic” job titles are becoming obsolete, or: Embracing being a hybrid [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://blog.freelancersunion.org/2014/09/17/monochromatic-job-titles-are-becoming-obsolete-or-embracing-being-hybrid/

Work Experience PEI job program cut by 70% (2015, July 8). CBC News. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/work-experience-pei-job-program-cut-by-70-1.3142602