Future proof

What skills do the next generation of arts managers need to navigate the fast-changing twenty-first century? What are the factors that are going to define their route? In recent debates, I have argued that skills such as marketing and planning will still be needed, but the context in which they are applied is changing hugely. For the past 16 years, the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, an otherwise traditional art school, has included an Arts and Event Management course in its curriculum. It’s the sort of course that I would have done if it had existed when I started in the business over 30 years ago. But it didn’t, so I learnt on the job. And curiously, learning on the job – or ‘learning by doing’ as we call it – is at the core of the three-year degree I now lecture on.

Three weeks ago I sat in feedback tutorials listening to eight second-year student teams reflect on the projects they had just staged. Since last October these teams of three or four had each devised a project idea, developed budgets and project plans, commissioned brand identities, logos and leaflets and then staged the projects in bars, theatres, empty shops and concert halls in Bournemouth and Poole. The events ranged from a comedy circus show on Bournemouth Pier, to a showing of Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ with a live improvised soundtrack, to an art exhibition using only recycled materials in a disused High Street shop. I asked all the groups the same question: were they the same people at the end of the project as when they started? The confident responses hit me and my co-tutor like a blast of hot air: “At the start of the project I was really afraid to pick up the phone and call people for things I wanted,” said one student, whose team recruited international film director, Mike Hodges, as Patron for a high quality film symposium for new film graduates. “Now,” she said, “it’s just routine.” The students have had to manage real-world crises. One team planning a schools cinema education project found itself in January with no schools, no venue and no budget. At its regular Tuesday tutorial it was given some stiff deadlines and by the Friday the group had sourced £1,000, a venue and two schools.
This get-up-and-go that students are encouraged to develop is, I suppose, not a million miles from BBC TV’s ‘The Apprentice’, but without the destructive in-fighting. And the ‘learning by doing’ ethos has been developed into the concept of ‘cultural entrepreneurship’. This development was conceived by course tutors Sara St George and Zuleika Beaven, who tailored traditional risk-averse business school studies to creative sector needs, where risk is a daily reality. In an academic paper¹, they describe how a course review in 2005 resulted in “a ‘re-imaging’ of the curriculum, including the emergence of a synergistic relationship between new Cultural Entrepreneurship units and the practical Project Work”. With this, they argue, the emphasis has shifted from competency training to a view of project work as “an integral part of an enterprise-focused, risk-promoting curriculum”. Third year students now learn a range of business analysis tools, which they use to dissect a local arts organisation, including presenting development options to them. Work like this should ‘future-proof’ graduates with a mix of practical experience and analytical ability.