You’ve heard of the gig economy and the portfolio career. Now quite popular terms, they come from the ways artists work. Think musicians gigging across small bars and large arenas, visual artists with portfolios of work in print, in galleries and online, or actors engaged on a range of short-term projects across a given year.

Once celebrated for flexibility and personal choice, these terms are now synonymous with exploitative, casual and precarious employment, or working conditions lacking entitlements, such as superannuation and sick leave.

But there is much to be learnt from the creative industries when it comes to understanding the future of work.

“Creativity” has been identified by the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund and global business analysts as the key to our future economies.

It was the number-one skillset demanded two years in a row by the 20 million job ads on LinkedIn, which labelled it “the most important skill in the world”.

Creativity is complex. It’s not straightforward to teach and it’s not straightforward to understand. That’s what’s so exciting about it.

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