Building a sustainable career in the creative industries is a challenging proposition. Creative workers face high levels of employment insecurity and limited career development opportunity. Those working in the sector must build discipline-oriented career self-management skills, while also finding ways to cope with the psychologically demanding nature of precarious work. Two competencies that contribute to creative career success are self-efficacy and career optimism, both of which support resilience and persistence in the face of career obstacles. This study used narrative data from 28 interviews across six creative disciplines to examine how creative workers who work within communities of practice build self-efficacy and career optimism. The findings suggested that, by participating in communities of practice, creative practitioners not only build professional skills that align with their discipline but also gain psychosocial support that promotes resilience. There is an opportunity, therefore, to enhance understanding of communities of practice with creative career development offerings.
Arts leadership can have various meanings and associations, both in the context of arts practice as well as in the challenges of running an arts organization. This chapter focuses on the leadership of arts festivals. The two common models of leadership within arts festivals are individuals and duos (where one member of the duo is the general manager/executive director and the other is the artistic director). When it is an individual leader, the festival’s organization is usually built around their skills and needs. In the duo model, either organizational leadership is shared between the role of executive leader and artistic leader, who both report to the board, or one is given the overall role of organizational leader. Recently, though, in arts festivals this duo model has evolved into more complex collaborative leadership approaches. This chapter explores two such examples: Rising, where three individuals share the CEO role, and Next Wave, which has created an eight-person artistic directorate.
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