Preparing Musicians for Precarious Work

Transformational Approaches to Music Careers Education

Nicole Canham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000432817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica e business

Preparing Musicians for Precarious Work: Transformational Approaches to Music Careers Education promotes career counselling-informed techniques that encourage and guide musicians to drive their careers in necessary new directions. In exposing the 'dark side' of precarious work in the arts sector, these approaches acknowledge the high levels of risk many musicians face and focus on the fundamental and urgent skills they need to navigate uncertainty and hardship. The author calls for a greater recognition of the psychological magnitude of managing such work, drawing upon training as a career counsellor and the lived experience of a career musician to advance transformative learning principles as pathways for artists, students, and educators alike.

Representing a radical shift from the content-knowledge approach to career development, a counselling-informed method is fortified by a broad range of ideas from vocational psychology and narrative therapy, emphasising the importance of change readiness and flexible identities while identifying the need for a post-portfolio paradigm. Preparing Musicians for Precarious Work proposes a new model for musicians' career learning – the CHOICE model – in a timely and practical guide for 21st-century musicians looking to future-proof their careers.

1 A Bird’s-Eye View

DOI: 10.4324/9780429344794-2

You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind.

C. S. Lewis (1945, preface)

The complicated nature of career development in the arts is evident from various perspectives: for example, policy makers and parents may think about career development in terms of future employment prospects, while musicians may be more concerned with creative goals. Yet, although employability is now generally agreed as a key outcome of higher education (HE), educators may question their role and responsibilities when it comes to their students’ career learning (Bennett, Richardson, & Mackinnon, 2016; see also Carruthers, 2008). Indeed, places of higher education can seem just as volatile and unpredictable as the music professions when institutions are negotiating new roles and survival strategies in a world where “the future of academia is and will be complicated, challenging, and uncertain” (Pucciarelli & Kaplan, 2016, p. 311).

Much of the occupational literature has been driven by observations that tertiary training often fails to equip young musicians with the non-musical skills and information needed to establish and sustain a career in the music professions (e.g., Bennett, 2008; Bennett & Bridgstock, 2015; Cutler, 2010; Slaughter & Springer, 2015). These are important observations which have implications for stakeholders’ perception of the value and purpose of a music education. Some HE providers have taken steps to address the resulting gaps in music graduates’ beliefs, values, skills, and work-related expectations. However, it is time to acknowledge that in the field of career development, understandings of fundamental aspects of the career development ‘problem’ have moved on. Working out how to get gigs can be very consuming, but understanding how to make careers sustainable on other levels is critical.

The way musicians’ career education is designed and delivered is a crucial aspect of preparing young musicians for their transition from study to work, and perhaps there is some “luggage,” as Lewis (1945) put it, that needs to be left behind. In today’s landscape, powerful career learning experiences are not determined by their content but rather by a person’s ability to process information in order to make it “personally usable” (Emmett, 2001, p. 149). For these reasons, the two primary areas of music careers education should be (1) assisting young musicians to understand and create cognitive structures that will support new, often disconfirming, information about work and (2) teaching them how to recognise and cope with the way that the work context (complex, chaotic, and precarious) impacts their lives. These psychological foundations are required to process and adopt the wide range of other non-musical skills and content we currently teach in the career education space, and without them, that other vital content cannot be absorbed.

Career development in the arts is not just complicated (consisting of many intricate parts (Oxford English Dictionary, 2020)). Rather, the work and learning environment is increasingly complex (consisting of many intricate parts and not easy to understand or analyse (Oxford English Dictionary, 2020)). Teaching career development to musicians is a complex task for educators and an equally complex undertaking in practice (Bartleet et al., 2019). However, while these complexities are acknowledged in occupational research, they are not always directly addressed in curricula or research frameworks through explicit teaching about complexity and the ways complex systems operate. Much of the existing research explores the career development problem from particular angles which reflect academic traditions of bounded studies and the expectation of addressing specific gaps. Careers education, as implemented, is not always fit for purpose or designed and delivered by those with career development qualifications (OECD, 2004). While there may be good reasons for these approaches, the subjective experience of career development is often underrepresented. How might understanding of musicians’ career development challenges shift if what students took away, rather than the content being taught, formed the core of career learning?

Chapter Overview

The following sections provide a bird’s-eye view of the complex system influencing musicians’ education and their career learning. Each topic reflects a different aspect or force that very often requires some form of individual and collective adaptation. First, I show links between complexity science and career development. Then, I reconsider employability as a lens for understanding musicians’ career development challenges and the role training environments play in shaping young musicians’ understanding of their employability. Finally, since the nature of musicians’ work resonates with broader discussions concerning global career development challenges, I explore three alternative approaches for framing music careers education: student well-being, psychological ownership of career, and meaningful work.

Complex Systems and Career Development

Complexity science effectively conveys the unpredictable nature of many aspects of contemporary career development (Boyatzis, 2006; Patton & McMahon, 2006). Patton and McMahon’s (2006) systems theory framework (STF), for example, highlights the dynamic nature of career development. Patton and McMahon take the view that careers are “open system[s]” (2006, p. 154) in which open boundaries between people, their environment, and influences allow for a range of interactions which, over time, contribute to individual change. Chance also plays a role in modern career development. These three factors – the iterative nature of multiple internal and external influences, the way these influences change people over time, and the effect of chance or unexpected events – together provide a holistic understanding of career development.

Complexity theory is similarly helpful for understanding the factors that interact to shape people’s behaviour and their knowledge management (Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007). Boyatzis (2006) describes the structure of a complex system in terms of three interacting parts. The scale of the system refers to the different levels of systems. The architecture of a complex system indicates how the parts of each level and system interact or connect with each other. Finally, the function of the system can be understood in terms of “the possible ways that inputs relate to the outputs” (Boyatzis, 2006, p. 608). The interactions between different parts of the system produce outcomes that are unpredictable or adaptive, and the combinations of interactions are infinite.

It is this fluid environment that people must be better equipped to manage. If the goal is to design careers education for musicians that is truly transformative, processes are needed that support a person’s understanding of complex and changing environments. While it is impossible to predict the exact circumstances a person will encounter, a multitude of forces (personal, professional, and contextual) will shape their career. Young musicians need to be aware of what these forces are and to understand how to work through the interactions of these forces in their lives. This is an enormous individual undertaking. A closer examination of employability as a complex system offers some reasons why.

Shifting Responsibilities: From Employment to Employability

Employability was originally presented by Fugate, Kinicki, and Ashforth as a psychosocial construct combining elements of “career identity, personal adaptability, and social and human capital” (2004, p. 14). Employability encompasses both skills and personality traits, though stakeholders may understand these skills and traits differently.¹ The emphasis on employability in higher education environments signalled a fundamental shift in practical and policy-related understanding of work and the function of HE in preparing young people for the work environment. Although employability is now recognised as a desirable graduate outcome in many parts of the world (Kreber, 2006), emphasising employability can be seen as shifting places of higher learning away from “teaching, research and public service” towards an “increasingly marketized” outlook (Pucciarelli & Kaplan, 2016, p. 312).

The change in discourse from employment to employability reflects the devolving of responsibility for finding and sustaining work from government and institutions to individuals (see Bridgstock, 2005; Savickas, 2011). From a complex systems perspective, the scale of the system therefore reflects shifts in both responsibilities and priorities of some key stakeholders, including government, industry, HE providers, and individuals. One resultant assumption is that people require particular skills (including a willingness to continually upskill/train) in order to be competitive enough to remain employable (see Connell & Burgess, 2006). This outlook, which demands a new set of skills and capabilities from educators and equivalent learning outcomes for students, has been met with some resistance. Studies exploring ways to embed employability skills development into higher education report challenges of both implementation and student engagement (e.g., Tolmie & Nulty, 2015), including that educators may not feel it is their responsibility to teach skills associated with employability (Bennett et al., 2016).

While it can be argued that embedding employability skills in teaching and learning is positive, for precarious or flexible workers employability generates additional meanings with broad consequences. First, opportunities for meaningful on-the-job training are limited (Connell & Burgess, 2006) and underemployment among creative arts graduates is common (Bridgstock & Cunningham, 2016; Throsby & Zednik, 2010), which has implications for perceptions of success, failure, and talent. Second, musicians often undertake work that is poorly paid or unpaid as part of an “economy of favors” (Umney & Kretsos, 2015, p. 317; see also DHA Communications, 2012), normalising the undervaluing of creative work. Third, as the career establishment phase is often protracted for precarious workers (see Umney & Kretsos, 2015), the postponement or avoidance of adult milestones such as home ownership and starting a family is prevalent, which marginalises creative people on financial and personal levels. Finally, although these limitations are largely driven by scarcity and work-related instability, many feel personally responsible for their career outcomes (Moreau & Leathwood, 2006). On the other hand, each of these limitations might be framed as an employability ‘virtue’: willingness to volunteer or take on unpaid work to gain experience, demonstration of high levels of motivation, willingness to be patient, and willingness to adapt to or take responsibility for the circumstances.² From these perspectives, employability places all the responsibility for work-related outcomes in the hands of individuals.

From a complex systems perspective, however, this is not how things work, and employability, therefore, might be viewed with greater scepticism. Bloom, for example, suggests that the idea of employability as an empowering opportunity for “self-mastery” (2013, p. 786) is an illusion. He observes that one of the negative consequences of the employability discourse is that people must now “psychologically deal with the eternal failure to control their professional and personal destiny through continually attempting to master their self via employability” (Bloom, 2013, p. 787). In other words, when the input and output do not match, people blame themselves rather than acknowledge the scale of the system and the multitude of factors at play. Jones cautions against teaching “narrow vocationalism” which is “the teaching of skills without locating (and evaluating) those skills in the...