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I was talking yesterday to a lecturer at Central St Martins, possibly the leadings Arts College in the country. She was telling me how proud she felt working there, of the tremendous wealth of talented students that that were coming through and how she felt we were producing an astonishing new wave of creativity in British Art, Design and Fashion. And yet, she was frustrated. Because on graduation there was nowhere for this talent to go; no jobs sufficiently demanding of their skills, no challenges that could fully engage their creativity. As an economy we are not making any real use at all of the creative and hence commercial opportunities we have.

It is a similar story to what is happening in the media industries. I have written about it before. Thousands of talented young people with good media degrees, desperate to work in film, TV and journalism, scraping around for short term contracts, working a few days a month, earning peanuts, eventually giving up.

And why? Because the funding is not available for creatives to make a success of their careers. If they want to work at a high level they have to go to North America, Europe and the emerging economies- which is where many of them end up. There is just no opportunity here.

Our economy is entering a new phase. We can no longer rely on the financial services sector to underpin it. We need new industries, new jobs. There is talk of a revival in manufacturing but for that to stand any chance the pound will have to remain low, oil high and labour markets elsewhere in the world inefficient. Meanwhile we have our own home grown talent here, a dearth of competition elsewhere in the world, and only a lack of funding stopping us from exploiting it.

Anybody who lived in London in the 1960s as I did will know that creative waves only last a short time. The moment has to be seized. We have a moment right now, and we are not seizing it. Politicians and entrepreneurs take note.

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Tags: Art, Design, Fashion, Film, media, TV

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 6:48 am and is filed under Career Planning . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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