The creative trident mark III: correlating creative qualifications and occupations

This article presents an update to the Creative Trident model of creative employment that incorporates creative qualifications, revealing the extent to which they are employed in the Creative and Cultural Industries (CCIs) and in the general labour market. CCI research has struggled in recent years with methodological questions about how to incorporate creative qualifications, while some critics have used ideological and lifestyle arguments to question the coherence of grouping “cultural production” and “creative services” activities as the CCIs. The Creative Trident III approach presented here, and modelled with Australian data, addresses the methodological shortcomings of demand-based models of coding creative qualifications in a manner that can respond to current concerns about the labour market value of creative and liberal arts education. A major finding shows the coherence of the CCIs model at the level of qualifications–the only level at which the commonality of shared skills can be meaningfully addressed.