Meet the Thinker - Kate Spencer
Kate Spencer
Our third thinker of this series is Kate Spencer.
Kate currently holds a number of positions including Adjunct Senior Industry Fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne. She is also a creative producer planning and delivering creative placemaking at Fishermans Bend, one of Melbourne’s largest urban renewal areas with an aim to develop connections within community.
Holding more than one role is normal for Kate. She is a living example of the breadth of skills creative professionals are needing to become comfortable with according to her exploratory research. Creatives producers are unique in the workforce for their ability to blur categories and add value to industries other than their own.
Kate is currently working on a skills mapping project aimed at bridging the gap between existing frameworks and the skills needed in the creative industries. She is developing a baseline for the creative sector and creating a set of tools to aid skills assessment and career planning in a dynamic and future-orientated creative ecosystem.
In this article you will read about:
How Kate’s career evolution led her to consider the essence of creative skills and how they can add more value to the economy
Why the exact make up of creative skillsets is difficult to pin down
How employers can tap into hidden talent by reframing our view of creative skills
How did you become interested in creative work and skills?
Throughout my career, I found the idea of settling for one sector or field of expertise very dissatisfying. My career evolved pretty organically from a start in graphic design that evolved to arts administration and now what I call ‘creativeproducing’ with many other stops along the way. The ‘producer’ term is an intriguing one because it encompasses all the skills and competencies needed to get an idea to exist and be experienced in the real world. It’s broader and more skilful than a project management role, it offers a more holistic understanding of where a project exists in a broader system. It demonstrates how creativity as a skill can be applied to the process as well as the outcome and how this creative skillset enables creatives to move with agility between different sectors.
The hallmarks of a creative mindset from a skills and competency perspective include:
having a level of comfort with entering into unknown territory, being able to deal with the cognitive dissonance with confidence
knowing what you don’t know and being willing to listen until the constraints of the project are clear to you
being able to navigate multiple disciplines and workstreams, synthesise information and visualise the outcome
We know that more and more creative industries professionals have portfolio careers and being able to operate in many different contexts will be part of success in the future. Creatives are great synthesisers but bring curiosity and originality to that process as well. They are also really good at translating ideas into reality. It’s a mindset that would also materialise in other aspects of your life.
What is the focus of your current work?
My current focus is around reimagining what creativity as a skill, or set of skills, might look like for the future of work. As part of that I have been looking into an emerging discussion about the creative producer role and the practice of creative producing. A bunch of really energised and strategically thinking creative professionals delved into this topic during Covid-19 lockdowns and summarised the discussion in a Creative Producing Manifesto which is a great step in the materialisation of a new profession. Watershed in the UK have also done some great work in this space.
My aim is to expand on this and look at how the creative producing mindset and set of skills is applied in other contexts, in the hope of making something materialise that speaks to what we need creativity as a skill(set) to look like for the future. Once I have that skillset and mindset documented, the next step is to socialise this skill base to employers in a range of industries.
How do we change employer mindsets around the value of employing creatives?
What we know is that creatives are often typecast as a particular type of person, one with lots of imagination and little structure. This really isn’t the case at all. We’re working on how we might talk to employers about the value of the broad skillsets offered by creative producers and how these are applicable to a range of sectors, not just the creative industries. The talent is currently being overlooked because we’re still operating with outdated conceptions of how labour should be divided between specialisms. With such a fragmentation and siloing of work, the creative producing skillset is even more important to reassemble the components and give them meaning.
Shaping a local agenda:
The findings of my exploratory work at RMIT will help shape how we embed this creative skillset into our workforce through education and training, whether it be vocational and tertiary education or micro-credentials. But most importantly, it will give visibility and recognition of creative producing skills, to empower people already working in this way and to inspire people to follow this career path, whatever sector they may be in.
