How do you know when a student is "work ready"? Ask this question in any university or creative workplace, and you’ll likely get a very long pause. Or a very different answer depending on who you ask.

In our QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project, we’re building a Work Readiness Education (WRE) Framework for the Creative Industries. Not just for creative students, for any student entering the brilliant creative sectors. But before we can design solutions, we need to understand the problem: What is work readiness, really? and how is it currently defined, assessed or supported, if at all, across creative education? These are the questions we have been wrangling with over the last few months as we prepared the literature critique to support our national study.

Our just-finished literature review, authored by research associate Dr Lizzie Ridley, and QAA CEP partners Dr Leo Burtin, Dr Miri Firth and Elli Whitefoot, reveals a sector rich with passion, talent and promise, but also one plagued by structural ambiguity, uneven support, and growing disconnects between graduate expectations and employment realities.

What do we mean by “work readiness” and who gets to decide?

Unlike regulated sectors like healthcare or law, there is no single model of success in the creative industries. As Banks and O’Connor (2009) warned, the creative industries remain a “shapeless policy construct.” Their boundaries shift depending on who’s defining them.

This matters. Without shared definitions, it becomes nearly impossible to design clear pathways into work, align curriculum with employer needs, or evaluate student outcomes in meaningful ways. Our review highlights this lack of consensus as a barrier for educators, careers professionals and students alike.

Even the term “work readiness” itself is contested. It’s often used interchangeably with “employability” or “career readiness,” yet it may mean everything from technical skill and professionalism to resilience, self-efficacy and creative agility.

For many creative students, “getting ready” means navigating the unknown

Creative work is often non-linear, freelance, and relational. Over 30% of those working in the creative industries are self-employed. This is more than double the rate in the wider economy, and rising to over 70% in some sub-sectors. This reality is reflected in recent Graduate Outcomes data: while 56.4% of all graduates secured full-time work, only 45.8% of creative arts graduates did so, with a further 27.7% moving into part-time roles. The data shows up to 24% of creative graduates were self-employed, running their own business, or pursuing a portfolio career compared with just 8% across all subjects.

These figures are more than just statistics. They tell a story about the shape of creative careers. Where part-time work, side-hustles, and blurred boundaries between study, practice and employment are not signs of failure, but often the norm.  As Leo Burtin and Matt Halfin recently noted in What Do Graduates Do?, these graduates are balancing creative practice with other work, building multiple income streams, and defining success on their own terms. Even if that doesn’t align neatly with traditional graduate metrics.

This is not yet well understood by the systems that measure “graduate success.” As highlighted in Wonkhe, current outcomes frameworks tend to privilege linearity, stability, and upward progression. These are often out of sync with the patchwork and every-changing paths many creative graduates must pursue. The creative industries thrive on talent, adaptability, and entrepreneurial spirit, yet much of higher education still prepares students for jobs, not for lives of work that defy conventional expectations.

So, what does this mean for Work Readiness Education?

Our review shows that this shifting landscape demands more than soft skills or standardised CVs. It calls for education that supports students to build creative confidence, navigate complex networks, and shape their own professional identities. This includes embedding professional practice into learning, demystifying portfolio careers, and addressing the social and economic realities of freelance work.

Many students aren't just preparing for a job, they’re preparing for a career that may not exist yet. The real challenge, and opportunity, is how universities respond.

So, what does this mean for curriculum and career support?

It means we need to stop assuming one-size-fits-all models of employability will work for creative disciplines. Instead, our project team is working towards a flexible, inclusive and practical framework for Work Readiness Education, learning from and building on the variety of approaches across the creative industries, shaped by the realities of sectors like film, music, fashion, publishing, heritage and gaming.

The literature identifies several key considerations of note:

• Embedded experiential learning, not just placements but live briefs, real-world simulations, and reflection-in-action, creating a safe space to fail as well as succeed.
• Support for intrinsic motivation and self-directed career management — especially important in portfolio careers.
• Building space for developing creative and lateral thinking – beyond group work, providing real impact on students’ ability to keep pace with technical requirements within the Creative Industries, rather than trying to keep up with the technological developments.
• Understanding exclusion — from who gets access to unpaid internships to who has the cultural capital to navigate informal networks.
• And crucially, reframing professional identity as something students can build, not inherit.

An invitation to shape what comes next

As we develop our WRE framework, we’re not looking to create another generic employability matrix. Instead, we’re asking: How can universities and partners across the creative sector co-create a model that’s adaptable, honest, and future-facing?

We want this work to be useful to you. Whether you're an academic redesigning modules, a careers professional embedding employability into your practice, or a policy lead wondering how to invest in the skills pipeline.

Over the coming months, we’ll be publishing sector summaries, testable tools and consultation opportunities across our QAA project page. If you care about preparing students for creative futures, not just creative qualifications, we’d love you to join us. Complete our form here to find out more: Work Readiness Education for the Creative Industries – Fill out form