Supporting Creatives through redundancy… and beyond.
Earlier this month, two longstanding creative institutions made headlines with some truly sad news.
Channel 4 announced significant cuts to its workforce as part of a restructuring programme, while within the same 24-hour period London's Gate Theatre announced that it would close its doors after more than 50 years.
When we think of the more challenging events that can occur in anyone's career, being made redundant typically comes to mind. Within the creative sector, where precarious and unpredictable work is already a familiar feature of many careers, suddenly finding yourself without regular, stable income can hit particularly hard.
In sectors dominated by larger organisations, redundancy may come with outplacement services, structured career support and HR infrastructure designed to help people navigate what comes next.
Across the creative sector, that infrastructure is less consistently available.
For many creatives, being made redundant means navigating the unknown road ahead largely by their own steam.
So what can be done? And what shape could professional career support take?
As a career practitioner and coach, I've supported hundreds of creatives through the pandemic, redundancies and career crises of different kinds. One thing this work has reinforced for me is that redundancy isn't only the loss of a job.
It is a career transition.
And career development has a substantial body of research, theory and professional practice that can help people navigate it.
Knowing the road ahead
Being able to see something of the path ahead can give us greater confidence that it can be travelled successfully.
Redundancy and other major career changes involve moving through a period of uncertainty: from something known and familiar, through the anxiety and ambiguity of not knowing, towards whatever comes next.
With hindsight, these liminal spaces are sometimes spoken about as periods of ultimately positive change. Someone may eventually describe redundancy as the painful event that freed them to pursue another career, retrain or make a change they had been considering for years.
But that's rarely how it feels when you're entering the uncertainty of unemployment.
As a practitioner, one framework I regularly use with creatives is Mark Savickas's work on Career Adaptability.
Career adaptability is one of the most extensively researched constructs in contemporary career psychology. It describes four psychosocial resources; Concern, Control, Curiosity and Confidence that help us prepare for and respond to career tasks, transitions and disruptions.
Research has linked career adaptability with outcomes including employability, career satisfaction, engagement and wellbeing.
Its value in creative careers extends beyond redundancy.
Once familiar with the framework, a creative can use it when losing a role, entering a new project, considering a change in direction or navigating the ongoing uncertainty that characterises many non-linear careers.
Rather than simply helping somebody solve the immediate problem, career support can begin developing capabilities they can draw upon repeatedly throughout their working life.
Help creatives take stock
The future horizon for any creative is deeply affected by their awareness of their existing experience.
It is a particular challenge of redundancy and unexpected career crisis that we are asked to do some of our most creative and courageous thinking at exactly the point when we may also be feeling at our lowest and most disoriented.
Even when working with creatives who have proactively chosen to move their careers in a new direction through desire rather than necessity, I often find we have a blind spot to our own experience.
One pattern I've repeatedly encountered is how easily experienced creatives discount what they've learned simply because it became part of "doing the job".
Yet almost nobody leaves a role as exactly the same person who entered it.
We have solved problems. Built relationships. Adapted to changing circumstances. Learned new technologies. Managed people. Developed judgement. Made mistakes. Acquired knowledge.
Supporting someone to accurately and fully understand this experience can transform their thinking and broaden the horizon of what they perceive as possible next.
In my own practice, I usually begin this stock-take by concentrating heavily on strengths, skills, resources and experience.
There may well be skills gaps to address later. But during the disorientation of an unexpected career transition, helping somebody recognise what they already carry can provide a more confident foundation from which to explore what comes next.
Imagination before information
One of the assumptions we can easily make about career support is that better career decisions simply require better information.
Show somebody the available jobs. Explain the possible pathways. Give them the relevant websites, contacts or opportunities.
Information matters enormously.
But career theory suggests that our decisions are more complicated than that.
Phil Hodkinson and Andrew Sparkes's theory of Careership, drawing partly on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, challenged overly rational accounts of career decision-making. Our career decisions don't take place on a blank sheet of paper. They are shaped by our previous experiences, social environment, sense of identity, the opportunities and constraints around us and, crucially, what we can imagine as possible for someone like us.
As a career practitioner, I encounter this regularly.
You can give somebody information about a possible career path, but that information has limited value if they simply cannot imagine themselves as the type of person who could pursue it.
This is why I often like to put imagination before information.
Before narrowing the conversation to vacancies, retraining routes or practical constraints, create some space for imaginative and creative thinking about possible futures.
What could the next chapter look like?
What might you want more of?
What could you carry forward from your previous work?
What possibilities have you dismissed before properly considering them?
Information expands what somebody knows exists.
Career work can also help expand what they can imagine as possible for themselves.
That doesn't remove very real systemic barriers or make every imagined possibility achievable. The next stage is precisely to explore those possibilities against the individual's circumstances, needs, resources and the realities of the labour market.
But beginning with imagination can prevent us from prematurely reducing someone's future to the options they can currently see.
Career support can sit alongside mental-health support
There is little doubt that redundancy and prolonged periods of unemployment can have a significant impact on wellbeing and mental health.
The creative sector has made considerable progress in recognising this and developing services through which creatives can access professional mental-health support when needed.
Career-development support shouldn't attempt to replace that provision.
It can sit alongside it.
I have regularly worked with creatives managing career crises who have engaged with mental-health services before moving into career work, as well as those who haven't.
What I've often noticed among the former is that they arrive at the career conversation having already had some space and support to understand the emotions and thoughts they are experiencing.
That can create a more balanced foundation from which to begin asking a different set of questions:
What now? What do I want? What do I already have? What are my options? And how do I begin moving towards them?
These are related to wellbeing, but they are also specifically career-development questions.
This is where I think there is an opportunity to think more carefully about the architecture of support we provide around redundancy and other significant career disruptions.
Mental-health provision can support somebody experiencing psychological distress.
Financial and welfare support can help address immediate material pressures.
Industry information can provide knowledge about opportunities and pathways.
Mentors can share experience, contacts and sector knowledge.
And professional career development can help someone make sense of their experience, navigate uncertainty, develop possibilities, make decisions and construct a pathway towards what comes next.
These aren't competing interventions. They address different aspects of the same transition.
One hour is rarely the whole journey
Ideally, career support around redundancy should provide a bridge from one side of the disruption towards renewed employment, direction or career confidence.
That journey rarely proceeds in a straight line.
Having worked with hundreds of creatives looking for new work, new roles and new strings to their bow, the road is inevitably marked by potholes of rejection, disappointment and changed plans.
Even when somebody finally finds themselves interviewing for the role they wanted, another challenge can emerge:
Who am I to be doing this work?
Am I really experienced enough?
And once they secure it, another transition begins: entering a new working environment, developing relationships, understanding expectations and beginning to see themselves in a different professional identity.
For many creatives, the last sustained conversation they had specifically about the development of their whole career may have been with a careers adviser at school or university.
A 60-minute webinar can provide valuable information. A single mentoring conversation can offer insight. A one-off coaching conversation may unlock an important decision.
But a significant career transition such as redundancy is rarely a 60-minute event.
That raises a useful question for organisations designing support:
Are we providing information about career transition, or providing support through career transition?
They are not quite the same thing.
From career crisis to career sustainability
There is a bigger opportunity here.
We can and should continue advocating for systemic changes that create the conditions in which sustainable creative careers become more possible.
But we can also work at the level of career education, language and capability.
If the conversation about career is reserved for moments of crisis; redundancy, unemployment, burnout or the urgent search for the next job we risk neglecting the longer-term question:
What enables a creative career to remain sustainable over time?
The work of Ans De Vos and colleagues on sustainable careers provides a useful way of thinking about this.
Rather than viewing career sustainability simply as an individual's capacity to keep going, their work considers careers dynamically across person, context and time, with health, happiness and productivity forming important indicators of sustainability.
That distinction feels particularly relevant to creative work.
The question isn't simply whether somebody can secure their next job.
It's whether they can continue developing a career that remains viable, meaningful and healthy as their life, work and surrounding conditions change.
Over the last twenty years, our understanding of mental health has shifted dramatically. Across the creative sector there is now much greater recognition that creative work can carry particular pressures and that professional support should be available when those pressures become difficult to manage.
I think our approach to career development needs a similar shift.
One that recognises that redundancy, uncertainty, non-linear progression, portfolio working, career change and questions of professional identity aren't simply problems creatives should be expected to figure out alone.
They are genuine career-development challenges.
And there is an established professional field, evidence base and body of practice that can help people navigate them.
A mature support infrastructure for the creative workforce might therefore contain mental-health provision when it is needed, financial and welfare support, industry information, mentoring and professional networks alongside professionally facilitated career development across transitions and across the career span.
Not only helping creatives when a career reaches crisis.
But developing the capabilities, confidence and understanding that might help more creative careers remain sustainable in the first place.