Creative Choices, the career developing and social networking site from Creative and Cultural Skills (CCS) worked with the National Guidance Research Forum (NGRF) team at the Institute for Employment Research to update the labour market information (LMI) relating to the creative and cultural industries. The overall aim of this project was pilot a new way to deliver high quality, sustainable, LMI on the NGRF website covering the Creative & Cultural Skills (CCS) footprint by developing and testing a new approach for updating and maintaining the LMI Future Trends section of the website.

The project objectives were to:

• develop and pilot a new approach to updating the LMI on the NGRF website
• update, extend and disseminate the LMI on the NGRF website for the Creative and Cultural Skills footprint
• explore links between the Creative and Cultural Skills website and the NGRF website

The initial review of content on the NGRF undertaken by Creative Choices and the LMI Future Trends team demonstrated the existing Arts and Entertainment section did not adequately cover the Creative & Cultural Skills footprint. A completely new section was produced to both increase the coverage on the sector and align with the Creative & Cultural Skills footprint. The Creative Blueprints, produced by CCS as part of the Sector Skills Agreement, were identified as a key resource for the update and extension of sector LMI and some new sources of LMI were identified. Career toolkits were produced by the team for inclusion on the Creative and Cultural Skills and NGRF websites. The approach adopted to update the LMI on the NGRF in partnership with CCS was foudn to be both sustainable and feasible for future updating on the NGRF. It was also found that the process of updating the LMI on the NGRF was a resource intensive process, but that the role of the SSCs was pivotal in this process as they not only produce the most up-to-date and reliable sectoral data, but they also have the resources and understanding to distil this information in to a format required by career guidance practitioners.

Outputs:

• 30 Career toolkits were produced, which were loaded on the NGRF and Creative & Cultural Skills websites
• Hutchinson, H., Barnes, S-A. & Bimrose, J. (2008) Creative and Cultural Skills LMI: Piloting an approach to update LMI on the NGRF website, London: Creative & Cultural Skills.
  

Project duration: 2008

IER project team:

Sally-Anne Barnes

Jenny Bimrose

Project partners:

Helen Hutchinson, Creative Choices, Creative and Cultural Skills

Funder:

Sector Skills Development Agency