 Future forward workforce training in content creation technology and entrepreneurship

A recent Brookings Institution report clearly identifies the workforce challenges that may soon impede America’s digital leadership:

Education and training have been losing the race with technology. In the United States, growth in the years of education completed slowed considerably around the 1980’s. So just when demand for higher-level skills picked up as the digital revolution gained steam, the attainment of those skills slowed. Almost two-thirds of workers do not have a college degree. While pre-college education gaps by family income level have narrowed, gaps in college and higherlevel education have widened. The capacity of the systems for continuing education has been far exceeded by the growing need for worker upskilling and reskilling.91

A number of international models illustrate how innovation and entrepreneurship training programs can be connected to STEM initiatives to enhance advanced technology workforce development. The United Kingdom has invested 80 million pounds to support partnerships that apply advanced technologies to the creative industries. And in Australia, because creative companies have been singled out as the focus of industrial policy, the Government of South Australia (the region where Adelaide is located) has explicitly focused on a workforce training strategy that connected “complementary” or allied industries. Training in game design, for instance, simultaneously prepares workers for wider work in the IT sector. The logic is to support the creation of local placemaking “precincts” where computational and creative enterprises co-locate. Citing recent successes with this approach, a recent report concludes that “if the precincts ecology continues to enhance practical creative entrepreneurship, act as a conduit for the movement of talent as it seeks greater challenge and opportunity, disrupt existing norms in innovation practice, and facilitate access to new markets, it will provide a model for rearticulating the creative industriesSTEM relationship.”92

In Georgia, several models exist that aim to accomplish similar goals. The Georgia State University Creative Media Industries Institute has created degree and industry collaborative efforts to supplement traditional arts and media degree training with advanced technology and entrepreneurial coursework; that effort received a $22.8 million facilities renovation boost from the Woodruff Foundation. And a recently announced $10 million gift from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation aims to create a center for innovation and the arts at Spelman College.93

The Georgia Film Academy is playing a vital and coordinative role in organizing new certificate programs that simultaneously build skills useful to new creative careers and connected to new technologies. Two certificates launched in 2021, one that trains students for work in the esports and videogame industry and another focused on digital postproduction, connect closely with the state’s leading content creation firms. In the postproduction certificate, for example, students can acquire AVID certification (AVID is a digital editing software platform heavily utilized in the film and television industries).

92 The Australia example is described more fully in (and the quotation is from) Stuart Cunningham and Marion McCutcheon, “Rearticulating the creative industries-STEM relationship: The case of innovation precincts in South Australia,” Creative Industries Journal (2021; https://doi.org/10.1080/17510694.202 1.1959087).

93 Allison Joyner, “Spelman College receives $10 million grant from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to support innovation, entrepreneurship,” Saporta Report, February 3, 2022.

As the COVID pandemic revealed, the wider need for digital literacy and a deeper knowledge of digital content creation tools are more vital than ever to meaningful participation in the 21st century workforce. As a growing number of workers plan careers around project based (socalled gig) work, one’s ability to create digital marketing, apps, and creatively impressive digital packaging will only grow.