Gathering the real data from creative industries graduates one year out

Australian Journal of Career Development, Autumn, 2008 by McCowan Oam, Joanna Wyganowska

University student outcome data in Australia is collected via the Graduate Destination Survey component of the Australian Graduate Survey at the referent date three months post-graduation. This timeline gives consideration to graduates to enter directly into traditional vocations. For graduates from non-traditional areas and/or with non-traditional career structures, three months is insufficient to get a true picture of their portfolio, protean or boundaryless-style careers. The Careers and Employment service at the Queensland University of Technology collaborated with the Creative Industries Faculty to collect data from their graduates 12 months after graduation. The outcomes reflected a wide range of career structures entered into by Creative Industries students and was compared to general outcome data for graduates. The data was particularly useful for students, career counsellors and faculty career programs. A further, more refined process will be extended to another non-traditional career group in the following year.

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Universities play a key role in assisting individuals to establish or change their career path. For many years the concept of career or career path was seen as linear and bounded by orderly employment arrangements and progression through a single firm and occupation (Hall, 1976). This concept has been broadened to definitions such as, 'having a clearly defined pathway of work in a particular field' (McCowan & McKenzie, 2000). Although this does not characterise the full spectrum of possibilities, Watts (2005) argued that definitions like these have been the dominant construct of careers for most of the 20th century. Given factors such as the introduction of new technologies and globalisation of the economy, the notion of this 'bureaucratic' type career has been challenged by the emergence of 'professional' and 'entrepreneurial' careers.

Watts (1996) identified these changes as resulting from 'careerquake', a shaking of the foundations of traditional conceptions but with the opportunity to build new and more robust structures in its wake. Bridges (1994) was another who alerted us to the major 'jobshift' happening around us. The more recent paradigm shift outlined by Jarvis (2003) reminds us of the need to develop individual career management skills within an increasingly flexible labour market characterised by project-based work, insecurity and changing skill requirements. Within this context, the 'new career' concept has emerged from a variety of authors who present different versions of it--including portfolio, protean and boundaryless.

NEW CAREERS--THREE FORMS

Handy (1989) promoted the concept of a portfolio career where an individual has a range of skills that he/she sells to a portfolio of clients. Like a financial port folio, Cawsey, Deszca and Mazerolle (1995) claimed its purpose was to manage risk firstly by accumulating skill sets that produce a variety of value-adding activities, and secondly by having individuals deal with several clients so the cost was not extreme if a relationship with one client ended. Ironically, job security is acquired not on the basis of loyalty and commitment to an organisation but by detachment and diversification. Handy (1989) described five types of work--wage, fee, home, gift and learning work--where learn ing work is the most important as it creates the next generation of skills that provide wage or fee work. As Drucker (1994) pointed out this reflects a dramatic shift to a 'knowledge society' where the knowledge workers own the tools of production.

Hall (1996) proposed the 'protean career' (derived from the Greek god Proteus, who could change at will) with three key elements. These elements consist of personal identification with meaningful work; personal responsibility for career management; and subjective, psychological measures of success which are unique to the individual, such as personal accomplishment, feelings of pride, achievement or family happiness. The personal qualities required for this success include continuous learning, personal responsibility and autonomy. The protean career is characterised by organisational relationships that are driven by the individual and subject to change as the person or environment change (McDonald, Brown, & Bradley, 2005).

Arthur and Rousseau (1996) introduced the 'boundary less' career which could take a range of forms and was not bounded by a single organisation but rather consisted of a sequences of experiences across organisations and jobs. Boundaryless careers are characterised by inter-organisational mobility and psycho logical contacting. Arthur, Khapova and Wilderom (2005) describe boundaryless careers in two fundamentally different ways--subjective (personal aspects) and objective (publicly observable aspects). Career success can involve both subjective and objective aspects (Melamed, 1995).

Subjective career success is derived from any dimensions that are important to that individual, while objective career success is derived from tangible indicators such as job level and income. The two dimensions may hold different levels of significance for different people. For example, an artist may be more likely to define success in terms of gratification they receive from their work, than in objective terms such as sales of their work, while a salesperson may be likely to define success more in terms of money earned than in terms of intrinsic rewards of the work itself. In the case of careers in the creative industries, it is also argued that 'the reality is that most artists build their careers over a long period of time, and may spend a lifetime contributing to the arts with out ever deriving a living salary from their artistic pursuits' (Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), 2004, p.1). Authors such as Greffe (2002) and Bridgstock (2005) stipulate that individuals working within the well-established fields of fine and performing arts fit closely to a protean model and have careers which could easily be framed as portfolio and/or boundaryless. Given that the notions of protean, portfolio and/or boundaryless careers strongly connect to the fine and performing arts fields, a more sensitive categorisation of career outcomes needs to be employed, over a longer period of time. There also needs to be a new way of showing the diverse pathways followed for these new careers to develop within this specific population of graduates.