Correlating creative qualifications, occupations and industries: Adding a third dimension to the creative trident

The first sub-project of the Beyond the Census project builds a new and innovative version of the QUT Creative Trident model, adding creative qualifications to form a three-dimensional Trident III. This will, for the first time in Australian academic research, provide a creative and cultural industry coding of the Australian Standard Classification of Education to accompany the creative and cultural codings of the Australian and New Zealand Standard industrial and occupation classification standards (ANZSIC and ANZSCO) developed by Cunningham and Higgs (2007). By applying the influential ‘dynamic mapping’ method (Bakhshi et al. 2013) to creative skills—that is, identifying qualifications as creative or cultural based on the skills they develop—this sub-project identifies the prevalence of creative qualifications across the Australian workforce. Here we test the hypothesis that creative and cultural qualifications are held by a wider range of workers and are valued across a much wider range of industries than previously thought, identifying career pathways for creative graduates (Brook et al. 2020). This part of our inquiry has implications for the current Australian Labor government’s review of the previous Conservative government’s major reforms to university funding which priced media and communication degrees in the most expensive band of qualifications on the grounds they did not reflect labour market needs.