Creative resources

As it stands, the British creative industries are ahead of the global curve. Whether it is the global reach of British television, film, fashion or advertising, the creative industries in the UK are worth a staggering £71.4bn to the economy every year, accounting for 5.6% of British jobs. But against the development of an ever-reaching, mass consumer market and increasingly niche demands, being a creative in Britain does not mean the same thing as it did ten years ago.

People now have more leisure time, more disposable income and higher expectations from the things they are able to purchase and enjoy. This calls for a higher degree of creative input across the board, whether it be engineering, communications or design, which creates new skill demands both upon creative professionals and within occupations not traditionally considered creative. Put simply, the creative industries have had to change in order to keep pace with the market.

Forming the world’s largest e-commerce market per head, British consumers are considered to be among the world’s most technologically savvy. Calling for different, innovative creative content across a variety of technological platforms, new products and services require new degrees of technical dexterity. For instance, people with skills in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) are particularly sought after by employers, with over two fifths (43%) saying they have found it difficult to recruit workers with the required STEM skill sets. As industries become increasingly digitised, the CBI reports skill shortages within the creative sector despite an over-supply of new entrants.

Employers are on the hunt for creative staff with lateral and secondary skills, particularly those with marketing and sales knowledge

Employers are on the hunt for creative staff with lateral and secondary skills, particularly those with marketing and sales knowledge. As well as a need for broader skill sets, there is also a marked need for specialist, technical skills in areas such as grading, pattern cutting and certain types of craft, such as a wig maker working in costume design. A general lack of basic computer, numerical and literary skills among graduates has also been pointed out, with over 225,000 young people failing to achieve the benchmark GCSE grade C in English.

Decisively the nation’s centre for creative growth is London and the creative industry in the capital has grown faster than any other in terms of output. But the city is experiencing key shifts in its creative structure. While the west of London remains the centre of the creative business industry, hosting multinational kingpins such as Sotheby’s, the BBC and EMI, a number of burgeoning creative clusters in the north and east are gaining traction. Creatively speaking, London is highly clustered, with a third of its 33 boroughs accounting for 71% of all jobs in the creative industries. As well as the West End (including Soho and Mayfair), east London’s Southwark, Tower Hamlets and Hackney are key zones of creative activity, while inner London is a hotspot for the computer games, software and electronic publishing sectors. Running from Heathrow Airport to the centre of London is also a corridor of creative activity, encompassing the boroughs of Wandsworth, Richmond upon Thames and Ealing.

Experiencing an artistic boom in the 1990s, hordes of creatives flocked to East London to take advantage of ample warehouse space which could be cheaply converted into studios. While the trendy areas of Shoreditch, and to a lesser extent Hackney, are now much more expensive, artistic growth in Hoxton and the borough of Tower Hamlets has increased markedly. Today there are approximately 80 commercial and non-commercial art galleries from Hoxton to Shoreditch and then on to Whitechapel, with many architecture, advertising, photography and design businesses heading east to set up shop.

But while East London may be considered the keeper of London’s emerging creative culture, exclusive data from Hotcourses reveals that searches for art courses and classes were the highest in the capital’s north, clocking the third highest amount of searches out of the entire country. Creative and cultural industries (CCIs) in Camden are responsible for 15% of the city’s entire CCI turnover, with a larger proportion of music, visual and performing, radio and television, and video film and photography employers than both the rest of London and the UK. Camden is also home to approximately half the jewelers working across all of inner London, while the publishing industry has marked key growth in Islington.

And this growth has not failed to escape the world’s attention. The gross value added (GVA), the economic measure of the value of goods and services produced by an industry or sector, for the British creative industries has increased by 15.6% since 2008, including TV, film, fashion, design, crafts, games and advertising. However, as the skills required for new types of creative input diversify, there is a danger for job roles to become less decisive. Careers in creative fields often tend to be unstructured, and may rely at times on doing part-time or temporary work. For instance, a musician might work on a gig-per-gig basis, while an artist may rely on getting commissioned work. It is also widely acknowledged that most creative graduates have lower salaries than those in other fields.

However, with a culturally diverse and readily skilled workforce, sophisticated infrastructure and direct access to rich consumer markets, London is rivaled only by New York in terms of creative resource. Further afield, creative industries nationwide continue to develop and grow, and present new opportunities for workers to take on creative roles. Creative industries remain the UK’s fastest growing sector, and against economic conditions were seen to retain their considerable potential for further growth.

Monica Karpinski is Digital PR and Marketing Executive for Hotcourses Ltd.
www.hotcourses.com