This blogpost is adapted from an article that first appeared in a special learning skills supplement of the Times Higher Education.
Employers frequently bemoan graduates’ lack of skills, but the performing arts demonstrate that they can provide students with the variety of ‘soft’ skills coveted by CEOs.
“If I want someone to design and build bridges, I’ll recruit an A-grade engineering graduate, but if I’m looking for potential managers and leaders of this company, I’m more likely to employ the editor of the student magazine or the director of the dramatic society.”
This, said by the chief executive officer of a major engineering company, encapsulates many of the concerns and challenges in the debate on skills in higher education.
Record numbers of young people may be entering higher education but, according to the British Chambers of Commerce, many do not really understand the work ethic and they lack professionalism. This view is shared by many employers across the industrial, commercial and professional spectrum. They claim graduates are leaving universities lacking a number of the essential skills required by the market-driven, consumer-led, image-focused, technology-intensive, AI-challenged, rapidly changing world of employment in the 21st century.
But are employers right?
There is a tendency, particularly in government and policy-making circles, to accept the employers’ view without question.
However, while there are genuine concerns about skills, the views and statements of employers need to be treated with some caution. 20 years ago a report for UNESCO pointed out the disparities between what employers stated to be the case about skills and their recruitment and selection policies. Not much has changed in the intervening years. The views of employers are often based on ignorance of what goes on in universities.
That UNESCO report did, however, find an “amazing consensus” among employers on the attributes they expected graduate recruits to possess. These included flexibility; an ability to contribute to innovation and creativity; an ability to cope with uncertainty; an interest in life-long learning; social sensitivity and communication skills; an ability to work in teams; an ability to take on responsibilities; and to be entrepreneurial.
These skills fall into the area known as “soft” skills, as opposed to the “hard” skills associated with technical or discipline-specific abilities and the basic skills associated with the 3Rs. Soft skills are also related to what has become known as “emotional intelligence”.
The CEO’s example of the director of the dramatic society as a potential manager or leader confirms the belief that the creative arts generally and the performing arts in particular have the potential to provide students with precisely the types of experiences and skills that employers value. Further evidence can be seen in the phenomenon of large companies bringing in leading practitioners in dance, music and theatre to train and motivate staff. This lucrative line of business has grown to such an extent that a number of arts organisations, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, created special units to promote and run such courses.
Through the arts, students learn to innovate and think creatively – qualities that are valued by many new and expanding industries. Performing-arts programmes provide opportunities for the exploration and formation of values, the development of feeling and sensitivity and an opportunity to develop social skills that do not occur as naturally in other disciplines.
The performing arts also help to develop self-confidence. A paying audience arriving at a specific time on a particular day to see a performance is great motivation to develop time-management and decision-making skills. Entrepreneurial, problem-solving and negotiation skills are acquired out of necessity when faced with minimum or non-existent budgets, inflexible production managers and recalcitrant health and safety officers.
But there’s no room for complacency. Some areas, such as the long-established acting, dance and music conservatoires, used to focus little on developing transferable, more general skills required to build and sustain a career in an unpredictable and insecure field of work. But in recent years, acknowledging the wider environments their graduates are likely to enter, they have recognised that training to be an artist is not incompatible with training to be employable and that music-making and theatre-making are skills-rich areas of enterprise.
Research I undertook into the non-arts graduate destinations of performing arts graduates revealed a plethora of graduate-level work across many sectors. One that stood out was a drama graduate getting a place on the coveted (and well-paid) management training course of a major international company. She reported that she was up against dozens of business studies graduates but the feedback she received pointed to the fact that the skills she had acquired through her drama training were precisely the skills the company was looking for.
Certainly, the performing arts have the potential to deliver skills that are in demand, but even in that area of work, arts administrators and managers are known to complain that practitioners are often not equipped with effective entrepreneurial, communication and self management skills. Jobs are increasingly demanding a combination of highly developed specialisms. Many of the recruitment difficulties reported relate to finding the right range of skills.
Two contradictory trends are at work: an increasing specialisation of job roles and a need for what are called “magnificent generalists” – people with the skills and experience to cross boundaries.
Perhaps “crossing boundaries” suggests a way forward for those concerned to enhance and broaden the skills of their students. Engaging with the skills that the performing arts have to offer is not about turning accountants into actors or medics into musicians. But it is about exploiting the many and rich opportunities for skills development that the performing arts have to offer.
Stumbling with Confidence 