In a blog for GuildHE, Richard Woods explores and explains the new Create Britain tool. It aims to support creative individuals find work by focusing on enabling users to dynamically promote their skills to potential employers. This approach recognises and reflects the creative system of work and helps to visualise the skills, specialisms and availability of those seeking creative employment opportunities.

No kidding – let’s guess… 

If you read any sector reviews, strategies or visions produced by our sector leaders, they say we need to boost talent pipelines, plug skill gaps and get educators and industry working together better. Same old… 

But are these systemic problems down to supply and demand or a lack of visibility, connectivity and the price we pay for not having invested in a single, industry-wide digital infrastructure to bring everything together?

Never mind the #@!!@£X$…!

Fed up with the ‘establishment’s top-down siloed approach’, Jeremy (multi-discipline creative) and me Richard (head-hunter) found their inner Punk reactivated; enough was enough, time to shake things up! 

Joined by an A-Team of tech innovators we are building CREATEBritain.com, a new and free online platform for finding, promoting and connecting everyone and everything creative. It’s still early days but we are already partnering with 90+ colleges and universities and awards bodies, endorsed by the Office for Students and governmen- funded to reimagine grassroot employability. 

Time to ditch the CV…

Where have you worked? What was your job title? How long did you work there? These are probably some of the least relevant questions to someone entering the creative workforce. Even more ridiculous – can you describe your creativity? Presenting high-impact audio, visual or immersive content as text is challenging, and not always within a creative’s skillset. To top it off some employers may not read a CV anyway. 

It gets worse – our obsession with job titles! Creatives have many skills often with industry-wide applications, yet we give them a single job title and place too much emphasis on someone’s last gig, regardless of whether it’s their strength or passion. 

…everything must change! 

CREATE Britain has reconstructed the CV to focus on ‘skills liquidity’. By using indexing instead of algorithms, our platform break down the areas of expertise, specialisms, software packages, styles, genres, etc into granular detail, and ask ‘what can you do’? Regardless of when you did it or for how long. Allowing you to showcase work in any format against your skills, which will appear in search results wherever it is used throughout the industry. 

The platform works in favour of emerging talent, edgy underdogs and those without the connections or resources to promote themselves. A true level playing-field, with no premium profiles and crucially free from ‘likes’ and ‘trolls’. A silent gallery where students can take risks, be the best version of themselves and where everyone who invests time in developing their profile has the opportunity to be found. 

Anyone seen our Graduates..? 

If FE/HE’s can’t track their own students outcomes – how is industry meant to find them! We know creatives don’t follow linear career paths and can take time to get established but if we release them without any reference points, we run the risk of them slipping under the radar and being lost from our talent pipeline. 

To the benefit of students, educators and employers, CREATE Britain have developed digital badges. Awarded during education they provide authenticity, act as a buoyancy aid (always searchable) and allow educators, awards bodies and future students to track and better understand career progression. The badges will soon provide students with valuable introductions to multiple networks (chats) with local industry, even before they leave education.

Digital badges work both ways – for the first time providing Britain’s 287k micro businesses with free, direct and real-time access to a continually replenished pool of potentially 200k creative graduates. An alternative ‘clearing system’, helping the transition from education into industry.

Rethinking Recruitment…

Creative is an industry of 2.3m workers, with 95% working independently or in niche businesses; a third are freelance and almost two-thirds work in micro businesses (2-9 people). This SME sector is arguably the most dynamic, entrepreneurial and exciting sector to work in, yet students often don’t approach them and businesses themselves are often too busy to recruit.

They don’t have HR, the time or money to advertise / use recruiters and don’t know where to find the ‘talent door’ at their local educators. Unnecessarily, they work through the night and weekend because it’s easier than recruiting – missing opportunities to grow businesses and launch careers. 

In response, CREATE Britain is developing Talent Radar, an employability App, providing employers with the power to search by evidenced skills, job mechanics (availability, location, rate) and to instantly meet the creative (via pre-recorded videos). This reduces recruitment timelines from 6 weeks to 10 minutes. 

Don’t leave anyone behind…

We fundamentally believe that your ability to be found or your access to work should not be determined by who you know, how many ‘likes’ you have, an ability to pay or even serendipity. Nor should everything happen in a moment of crisis – most employers and employees (including freelance) can anticipate change weeks or months in advance and the tools CREATE Britain are developing will allow people and organisations to declare an early mutual interest and start conversations. This will help businesses build bench-strength and creatives to maximize career possibilities.

Bring it on..!

So, is 2024 the year we all start working together better on this new shared digital infrastructure? Maybe it’s the year students stop obsessing over ‘likes’ and rediscover their true creative identities. And maybe it’s the year we all find our inner Punk, tell the establishment that it’s not all about the top five percent and that Britain’s future creative legacy belongs to NextGen, that they demand change and it’s coming, from the bottom up..! 

To learn more and explore collaborations, please contact CREATE Britain Co-founder Richard Woods: richard@createbritain.com