Karen Hands

In response to the challenges of the creative labour market, this paper examines an alternative work-integrated learning (WIL) initiative delivered at a peri-urban Australian university designed to prepare graduates for creative employment. A balanced set of hard and soft skills is necessary for navigating the precarious, gig-based creative labour market, presenting challenges to traditional WIL programmes and compromising graduate career readiness. The Rise project complemented traditional placements, with students producing an event under the joint supervision of an academic and university manager. We evaluate the Rise project’s rationale and effectiveness within the local socioeconomic context. Through the lens of Protean Career Theory, we critique how the burden of adaptability has been disproportionately placed on emerging creative workers and propose that alternative forms of WIL can redistribute some responsibility to institutions. We argue Rise presented a contextually responsive and pedagogically just model of WIL that prepared students for contemporary creative careers.

Short stories published on Reddit have been selling for lucrative amounts to studios like Warner Bros, Amazon MGM and Netflix. It seems there’s no need to write a full screenplay: a few thousand words in a short story could be enough to kick start a Hollywood dream.

I Pretended to be a Missing Girl, the story attached to Warner Bros, with Sydney Sweeney producing, was posted in 2020 by English teacher Scott Cote to Reddit’s popular horror community r/NoSleep, where stories must be written as if true, in the first-person – and commenters must act in the same spirit. Film rights sold last year.

Stop-motion animator Marcus Kliewer also found success on r/NoSleep, where his short story We Used to Live Here attracted the attention of a producer who sold it to Netflix in 2021, with Blake Lively set to star and produce. Kliewer then got a book deal. An expanded version of his story became his debut novel. His second novel, The Caretaker, published last month, was also based on a short story (unpublished), with film rights already sold; it will be produced by Sweeney, too.

Online platforms such as Reddit and Wattpad, a platform for publishing and sharing fiction, have become part of a legitimate acquisition pipeline. New York magazine reported in late 2024 on the “booming subgenre” of movies based on Wattpad stories (including Amazon Prime’s most popular original film worldwide in 2023, My Fault).

This research starts in the second act. 

While opportunities to participate in the creative labour market increase, the sector remains characterised by high levels of job instability and unpredictable income. Citing financial insecurity and the emotional toll, many creative workers leave the sector within the first few years of entering it or when planning for milestones such as homeownership, starting a family, and retirement (Been 2025; Hands 2024). However, many continue to identify as artists despite being employed in non-creative fields (McRobbie 2016). The strength of artistic identity, combined with increased personal security and an unwavering commitment to the craft, can influence a return to the field in the mid- or later stages of life.

This research examines the experiences of performing arts workers who have returned to the professional sector in various capacities after periods of absence or disengagement. Drawing from a qualitative survey conducted in mid-2025, the research is positioned at three intersecting contexts: the precarious—yet flexible—creative labour market, the purported role of arts policy in shaping creative labour conditions, and the endurance of passion as a driver of creative careers. It explores creative career transitions and the decision-making process along a capricious trajectory.

While resisting the neoliberal notion of embracing precarity as an efficient economic means of sustaining cultural production, this research considers how welcoming and legitimising unconventional artistic career cycles within the creative labour market might transform and enrich the professional performing arts sector. The research contributes new insights to arts policymaking, organisational management, creative labour markets and individual career transitions.

This exploratory qualitative research utilizes historical policy and analyzes documents and primary interviews to explore the dynamics between policy-introduced structures and the artistic director’s tenure in the Australian subsidized theater sector. The research probes the effect of tenure length on the sector and examines decision-making about career mobility and the role of the individual passion of the artistic director. Short-term or project-based work dominates employment opportunities in this sector, yet the full-time artistic director position presents an anomaly to typical work patterns and career pathways. Incumbents of this role have forged a career in this precarious environment to attain an elite artistic leadership position that forms part of a dual leadership model. This research offers insight into how arts policies shape artistic careers, specifically the career pathways of artistic directors, which may contribute to a deeper understanding of the role, the development of future arts policies, and supported artistic leadership pathways.   

This research examines three political moments in the Australian theatre sector as turning points in contemporary understanding of the sector’s financial foundations. Socio-cultural and economic conditions leading to the establishment of The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1954, the instigation of the Industries Assistance Commission Inquiry in 1976, and the commissioning of the Major Performing Arts Inquiry in 1999, and their impact on the theatre sector, are reviewed in this paper. These political moments took place against changing economic policies in Australia. By reviewing the economic transition from Keynesian 'welfare' to economic rationalism, the interventionalist nature of these policy moments and their effect on the artistic vibrancy of the sector is understood. This paper reveals a tension between the sector’s Keynesian foundations, which underpinned the Trust's intentions to establish a financially sustainable sector, and the now dominant economic rationalist model which restricts the performing arts’ capacity to flourish. Through analysing secondary documents and scholarly discussion, this research reconsiders the legacy of the Trust as a key policy landmark. It proposes that The Trust succeeded in delivering artistic outcomes, but failed in its financial objective to establish a sustainable sector. The role of the Trust is often misconstrued in scholarly and professional discussions about the necessity of arts funding, and by reconceptualising these political moments as interventions of policy, a new perspective of the foundation of Australian arts funding can be appreciated.