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Success in the protean career: A predictive study of professional artists and tertiary arts graduates

Ruth Bridgstock   

Despite claims that creative workers offer unique capabilities which are essential to economic growth and social well-being in the conceptual age, artists experience the highest levels of unemployment and the lowest salaries of any occupational grouping. Labour force statistics suggest that many creative workers are engaged in ‘boundaryless’ or ‘protean’ careers, characterised by finite-term transactional relationships with employers, where the individual is challenged to rely less on organisationally-based career development and instead actively navigate their own career path. This study uses a nonparametric regression tree methodology to identify key career self-management competence, dispositional and contextual predictors of career success in two samples of artists: (i) a group of 310 professional artists; and (ii) using a prospective approach over 12 months, 122 graduating students from undergraduate Creative Industries programs.

Transcript

Interviewer: I’d like to welcome Ruth Bridgstock, welcome Ruth

Ruth Bridgstock: Thank you.

Interviewer: Firstly can you please tell us what your research is about?

Ruth Bridgstock: Certainly. My research investigates predictors of career success in two groups: Practicing, professional artists, and graduates from Creative Industries programs.  Workers in the Creative Industries face some unusual sorts of career challenges, including what is known in career development literature as boundarylessness.  A boundaryless career is the opposite of your typical organisationally-based career where you have an on going employment relationship with one employer and you move up the hierarchy and at the end of it you get the gold watch.  Boundaryless careerists are often self employed; they work in multiple short term jobs, and they move around and across employment boundaries, hence the name.  They’re ultimately responsible for their own employability and their own career development.  At the extreme end of the boundarylessness scale, we have protean careerists, named after Proteus the Greek Shape Shifting God. In my thesis I argue that many artists are in fact protean careerists; they need to constantly career self-manage, re-invent themselves, shapeshift in order to be successful -- network with potential clients, keep abreast of developments in their art forms so they can keep developing and so on.  

For my doctoral research I conducted a quantitative survey based study with 310 professional artists and 218 graduating Creative Industries students.  I did some predictive modelling using a classification and regression tree algorithm to find out which of the number of career development constructs were important predictors of career success in the groups I was studying.  With the Creative Industries graduates I used a prospective approach -  I collected the predictor information at the point of their course completion, and the career success information one year later so I could see how well what they had learnt at Uni was preparing them for the world of arts work. 

Before doing my predictive modelling, I needed to investigate what career success meant to my participants.  Although most studies of career success use something like total earnings or number of promotions as indicators of career success, these are what is known as objective measures of career success.  There was evidence to suggest that these measures weren’t particularly relevant to artists, who don’t have organisationally-based careers in many cases. In the end I used total earnings, earnings from art and self defined career success ratings as my measures of career success for the professional artists and arts graduates.

I wanted to find out whether career self-management skills were actually predictive of career success in artists and arts graduates.  Career self-management skills are the skills necessary to self-manage a career, things like creating realistic and personally meaningful career goals, identifying and engaging in strategic work decisions, learning opportunities, work-life balance, these sorts of things.  Also the literature suggested that a number of underlying dispositions would be conducive to career success in the arts, things like proactivity, resilience, openness to opportunities.

Interviewer: And what did you find from your research?

Ruth Bridgstock        
Well first of all this was really interesting, I found that the artists and Creative Industries graduates weren’t overly motivated in their careers by external things like earnings or fame.  They tended towards having criteria for success that were less tangible, so things like satisfaction or joy in artistic practice, what Csikszentmihalyi  calls ‘flow’, self development, the feeling that they were contributing to their art form or society, and things like that.  The participants did often talk about money as a success criterion but often they only aspired to a subsistence level of artistic income so the idea that I can support myself through my artistic practice so that I can go and fulfil my other personal career goals when it comes to arts.

Second with my predictive models, I found that there were somewhat different patterns of predictors for the objective measures of career success so like earnings and the subjective measures of career success the self defined career success rating.  However career self-management abilities so both self management skills like the artist’s perception appraisals of themselves knowing what matters to them and their career building skills so the ability to make informed career decisions, engage in learning opportunities, network and create social capital were strongly predictive of career success in both cohorts.  Also strong beliefs and interests in the arts so intrinsic motivation was a huge predictor of career success and support from peers and family was also very important to the groups of artists.  There were some discipline based differences in career success, technical artists like film makers, and digital artists earned more than creative and performing artists but this is really interesting they didn’t perceive themselves to be much more successful than the creative and performing artists did.  Amongst the Creative Industries graduates, paid work experience before the end of their course was also strongly predictive of career success at time 2 one year later.

Interviewer: And what are the implications of these findings, how will this inform further research for education?

Ruth Bridgstock: Well first I think the biggest implication of my study is that in boundaryless careers which does include arts but also in other boundaryless careers where traditional career patterns are becoming less than norm so things like management, entrepreneurs in many fields, academics, career self management skills are very important.  Universities are paying attention to the idea of graduate employability at the moment, but it’s still firmly in the camp of supporting a generic transferable skill approach with graduates, so placing an emphasis on skills that might make a graduate attractive to employers. Whereas my study shows that career education career self-management skill development is actually very important in many fields, and isn’t something that universities have really paid much attention to so far. I argue that career education needs to be built into all undergraduate and post graduate programs particularly the non vocational programs where individual careerists will need to self navigate careers, so things like not only Creative Industries and Liberal Arts Programs, also generic science. Also work integrated learning was demonstrated in my study as being a huge part of the development of career self management skills and predictor of career success.

Second, graduate destinations are currently followed up by Universities about four months after course completion, graduates are asked to fill out a survey at their graduation ceremonies to say how much they’re earning, what their employment destinations are and so on.  My study shows that it’s very important to keep following up on these graduate and their destinations because twelve months from course completion my Creative Industries graduates were only just starting to find their feet career-wise.

Third, my study contributes significantly to what we know about the construct of career success in the boundaryless career.  Previously there were a lot of uni dimensional scales that were based on things like earnings, hierarchical position in an organisation and so on; these indicators really aren’t as useful or as valid in the contemporary career, where an individual self manages and is motivated by internal criteria for success. So as a result of my study I’m working on a multi dimensional career success scale which reflects multiple career success orientations and multiple career anchors. 

During my doctoral study I also developed a couple of scales: ‘Career Self- Management Competence’ based on the Australian Blueprint for Career Development, and also a ‘Protean Career Success Orientation’ scale, which is to do with the underlying dispositions that careerists need in order to successfully navigate a protean career. Both of these scales will be used in future research.

Interviewer: Okay great thank you so much for your time today Ruth

Ruth Bridgstock: You’re welcome.