How can the UK’s creative industries become better, more responsible employers in the face of continual challenges including endemic precarity, the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of living crisis? What roles can mentoring play? Several studies have demonstrated the value of mentoring within creative enterprises in relation to both personal career development and increasing equitable access to creative occupations. However, these accounts offer only a limited depiction of the huge variety of mentoring practice which exists across the variegated set of industries which constitute the UK’s creative sector. This article draws upon survey data generated in 2022 by an interdisciplinary research project which was supported by an industry policy body. We examine mentoring as a set of developmental, helping relationships, primarily at the formal initiative level across all sectors of the creative industries in the UK. Our investigation offers a new understanding of the nature of mentoring programme provision and the challenges the creative industries face in developing sustainable mentoring programmes since the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings indicate that while many mentoring initiatives are instigated to tackle the barriers of inequality for new entrants and existing employees, their outcomes are often compromised by sectoral precarity in the creative industries.
Cateridge, James Dibeltulo, Silvia Gannon, Judie
School of ArtsFaculty of Humanities and Social SciencesOxford Brookes Business School
Year of publication: 2024Date of RADAR deposit: 2023-12-07