Creative Soft Skills is an Erasmus+ project aiming to produce a methodology able to identify, strengthen and recognize artists’ soft skills and facilitate the connection between artists and the labour market through the certification of creative soft skills. The project is therefore directed to artists of any kind of art (from visual to classical arts) at the early stage of their career and organizations dedicated to training, developing and promoting sustainable competitiveness through creative soft skills.
Objectives
- Supporting artists in developing new skills that create new job opportunities in non-creative contexts
- Reinforcing artists’ profiles and general understanding of creative competencies in terms of employability
- Developing innovative approaches to recognize, develop and validate competencies in non-formal learning settings
To achieve these objectives, the first activity will be a research aimed to establish the framework of creative soft skills within the Creative and Cultural Industries.
Each skill will be evaluated from an entrepreneurial and an artistic perspective (the artistic fields in which it is implemented, such as directing or conducting for management of leadership; the creation of a piece for creative thinking and problem-solving; the live performances for dealing with uncertainties, etc.).
The second activity will be the development of a methodology aimed to guide artists in the identification, exploitation and developing soft skills. The methodology’s innovative quality is the adoption of Jungian archetypes as representations of soft skills. The contents produced throughout the first two phases will be structured in an open source toolkit that aims to make the methodology accessible and replicable.
The toolkit represents a theoretical and practical base for the last phase of the Creative Soft Skills process that is the Certification of the artists’ soft skills. The certification methodology provides mentoring, peer review and access to qualifications through a cluster of 1-1’s, in small groups or in larger groups in project-based learning and customised skills acquisition and development. Learners will access dynamic and complex professional contexts at the appropriate level for their competences with access to supervision and mentoring support to reflect on further development needs, newly acquired skills and, effectively applied knowledge and skills across a range of different situations.
The project is conceived as an international programme that operates at local and international level connecting learners to professionals within the industry. In this way, it forges an international and interdisciplinary community network that connects local and international employees, freelancers, volunteers, business owners and managers from different sectors and countries to each other.
