This month, Be Broadcast and Working Options in Education brought 150 young people and people from across the creative industries together at MediaCity for an event built around a problem that has bothered us for a long time.
Around half of people in Britain identify as working class, yet only around 16% of those working in the creative industries come from working-class backgrounds.
There are plenty of conversations about making our industries more representative, but Closing the Creative Class Gap was our attempt to do something practical about one of the barriers sitting underneath those figures: who young people know, what careers they know exist and whether they can picture themselves doing them.
For two and a half hours at On The 7th in MediaCity, we wanted to make the creative industries feel a little more accessible to young people who might otherwise never get the opportunity to meet somebody working within them.
You can’t choose a career you don’t know exists
For Be Broadcast founder Josh Wheeler, the idea came partly from personal experience because growing up he had never heard of public relations, had no understanding of how somebody got into broadcasting and certainly did not have a network of people working across media and communications who could explain it.
That is a surprisingly important disadvantage when you consider how much of the creative economy is made up of jobs that are difficult to understand from the outside.
A young person might know that somebody presents a television programme, writes for a newspaper or performs on stage, but behind those visible roles are producers, researchers, publicists, designers, strategists, editors, camera operators, marketers, content creators, communications teams and hundreds of other careers that somebody may never encounter at school or through their family.
If nobody tells you those jobs exist, explains how they work or shows you a route into them, there is a good chance they will never become part of the careers you consider.
Closing the Creative Class Gap was designed to give young people some of that visibility.
Putting 150 young people in the room with the industry
We were joined by people from broadcasting, PR, communications, comedy, content, marketing and the wider creative sector, including Joel Mitchell from BBC North, Radio 1 and Radio 5 Live, comedian Stephen Bailey, Mammy Maguire from Alzheimer’s Society, Advita Patel from CommsRebel, Liam Heeley from Heads Creative, Chloe Rainford from Virgin Media O2 and Matthew Powell from Loud Speaker.
The young people attending heard about careers, but we were equally keen that they heard about everything that happens before somebody gets the job title that appears on LinkedIn.
That meant conversations about jobs that did not work out, applications that went nowhere, mistakes people had made, confidence, rejection, changing direction and the moments when somebody else gave them an opportunity.
Creative careers can look incredibly polished once somebody has established themselves, particularly when viewed through social media, which makes hearing the messy reality of how people actually got there incredibly important.
Nobody in that room needed 150 young people to leave wanting exactly the same career, because the purpose was to make their understanding of what is possible a little bigger than it had been when they arrived.
Contacts shouldn’t be something you inherit
One of the reasons we wanted to create the event was the evidence around professional networks and employment, with research showing that young people with four or more professional contacts are significantly more likely to secure employment opportunities.
For some young people, those contacts begin accumulating almost without them noticing because their parents, relatives, neighbours or family friends already work in professional environments and can offer advice, introductions or experience.
For somebody without that network, getting the first contact can be much harder because there is nobody obvious to ask what a job involves, whether a CV looks right, how an interview works or whether an opportunity is worth pursuing.
A contact does not need to hand somebody a job to make a difference, because sometimes knowing one person who will answer a question, explain an industry or point you towards an opportunity can change what happens next.
That was why we wanted students to spend time with people actually working in the sector rather than simply sit through presentations about it.
We wanted people to leave with something useful
The event included panel discussions and career conversations, alongside practical employability advice and professional CV photographs taken against the MediaCity backdrop.
Students were also able to hear about jobs, apprenticeships, internships, work experience, mentoring and insight opportunities that could give them a genuine next step after the event.
That practical element mattered because there is little value in telling a young person that they can work in the creative industries if everything that follows still feels impossible to access.
Confidence is important, but confidence becomes much more useful when somebody also knows where to look, who to contact and what they can actually do next.
For us, success was a young person leaving with the name of a job they had never previously heard of, a professional contact they did not have that morning, a photograph they could use when applying for something or the confidence to send an email they might previously have talked themselves out of sending.
The creative class gap will take more than one event
Bringing 150 young people and industry professionals together for an afternoon does not solve a problem that has existed for generations, and the representation figures across the creative industries make clear how much work remains.
What the day reinforced for us was how much can happen when businesses give young people genuine access to the people behind an industry.
Closing the gap does not always require a huge programme or enormous investment, because businesses already have things that can be incredibly valuable to somebody trying to find their way into a career, including their people, their knowledge, their contacts and opportunities to experience the workplace.
Offering a work experience placement, mentoring somebody, speaking at a school, sharing an apprenticeship or spending half an hour explaining your career to somebody who has never met anyone doing your job can all make the industry easier to understand and easier to enter.
For Be Broadcast, this event was particularly important because our own industry has plenty of work to do if we want talented young people from every background to believe there is a place for them within it.
Talent has never been restricted by class, postcode or the jobs somebody’s parents happen to do, but access to the people and opportunities that help turn that talent into a career remains far less evenly distributed.
Getting 150 young people into MediaCity and introducing them to people who could make the creative industries feel possible was one small contribution towards changing that, and we hope many more businesses across our sector will help make those first connections happen.
