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Professional development in the arts is not simply a tick-the-box exercise achieved by attending a training course – instead it’s best thought of as a holistic approach to career development, an interconnected web of connections and a broadening and strengthening of skills by utilising the networks around us.
I think about professional development of arts workers in nuanced way, based on models of artistic development and following similar principles of continual improvement and external feedback. I’ve tweaked the model over the last decade but its origins were developed with Sue Giles at Polyglot and grew out of their Feed The Art model of artistic appraisal and replenishment. We asked: if we’ve worked out a way to grow the rigour around art making, why not also implement that across the management of the organisation? Instead of bringing corporate management think into art-making, why not go the other way around?
I now work with each of my staff to develop a customised professional development plan that looks at career development as a really holistic approach across nine different elements that together consider the arts worker’s short- and long-term career development plans.
Connection
The first element is “connection” which is the idea that who you know is as important as anything else in this industry. I ask my staff, “Who in the sector would you like to meet for a cup of coffee? Who do you admire? Who do you think you could learn from?” And then I use my networks to broker these industry connections for staff and all they do simply is meet them for coffee, ask them about what they do, and try to broaden their own networks and their understanding. Melbourne Fringe just picks up the tab for a glass of wine or cup of coffee.
Catalysts
The next thing we introduce is what we call a “catalyst”. We try to identify what we do that needs exploding. What have we been doing that maybe we go about the same way every year? Or, how can we try and think about a new way of doing something? So we bring in a catalyst who is all care and no responsibility and their job is to come in and go, “Here’s what I think, here are some ideas. Take it or leave it.” It’s a useful way to help explode our thinking of how we do things or how we have always done things.
Critical Appraisal
We also work with the staff to identify the area that they really define as their area of expertise and then we bring someone in to help critique that. We ask – What is the thing I feel I have totally nailed? Then we bring someone in to have a look at that area and help us think about ways we can do it better. It’s the idea that whatever you do, even if it works really well, a real expert can just always help tweak something. This is not fixing something that is broken. This is taken something that works and asking an expert how we can tweak it to make it even better and to give the worker the satisfaction of absolutely nailing the thing they are best at.
Contribution
The next one is something we call “Contribution”, which is essentially an area within the organisation to which the worker might want to contribute that is often outside of their formal role. For example, I’ve got a staff member in admin who wanted more experience in programming, they aren’t suddenly the head of programming, but we identified ways that he could contribute to programming and he got a lot out of that and actually so did we as he had some amazing suggestions. It’s possible that staff have expertise that we’re not utilising because it falls outside of their formal role. So, where appropriate and where it doesn’t impact on their current role or stepping on someone else’s toes, we will find opportunities for them to contribute outside of their official role in areas that they’re interested in.
Context
The next one is “context” and it’s the idea that you can’t really do a really great job unless you understand the context that you’re working in. I want our staff to be outward looking and connected, so we make sure that they understand our work in the broader context of our sector. So we encourage our staff to attend other festivals, industry events and forums, and to see how they work. We encourage this of all of our staff – not just those who work with artists, but equally our operations staff and our marketing staff.
Conversation
The next one is “conversation” and that’s an idea that we just don’t talk about art enough. We try to find opportunities to talk about art, both internally in the office but also externally to go and see work and talk to other artists and raise the level of conversation about our sector.
Career planning
We make a time to talk about long term career advancement and if there is a specific kind of job or type of thing that our staff want to be doing, then we have a conversation about what we can do to help facilitate that and how we might get there over time.
Courses
The second last one is “courses”. It acknowledges that there are times when going on a course is fine. In itself it’s not the focus of the approach, but sometimes a formal skills development or training opportunity is useful.
Continual improvement
The final one is “continual improvement”, which is primarily an attitude. So it’s the idea that we always strive for continual improvement in everything that we do. We ask, what are the areas that we can work together on to improve? What do we need to do to make that happen?
Our approach to professional development is quite formal and we undertake the process with a series of goal setting meetings and we check in on all of those questions twice a year.
We set operational goals, things we want to achieve in a year; Stretch goals, things that will really push us to the edge; and then a personal development goal – for some staff that is about confidence, for others it is work life balance and actually set these formal goals around personal approaches to work as well.
The work that we do in the arts is so unique. We make extraordinary things happen on extraordinarily tiny budgets. It would be easy to just forget for a moment the need to invest in ourselves and our people and the approach to professional development in the arts needs to be quite different. There are often not a lot of formal professional development opportunities for our people and so we need to invent new models and new ways of thinking about career planning that – like everything we do – involves using our resources most effectively and thinking outside the box.
