Michelle Nadon is managing director of Toronto-based MediaIntelligence, which offers end-to-end recruitment and training services for the Canadian media and culture employment markets, providing a tangible connection between talent, employers and cultural industry stakeholders.

The business case for training the Canadian cultural industries’ core business and creative talent is not a hard sell… or is it?

Canadian content creators continuously strive to provide training for their workforce, but much work remains to be done at the management level before they can realize stronger and steadier returns on their human-capital investments.

There are many compelling reasons for training employees. Training that is subsidized or provided outright by an employer is a major attraction for entrants to our workforce. Training also has a domino effect on employee retention. It is a valuable way to keep employees who are in long-term, static positions involved, engaged and more contributive to employer end-goals.

Training further enhances loyalty and performance, and leads to better-integrated operations, greater synchronization in corporate culture and, ultimately, more innovative product.

Training also has an external, bottom-line benefit. Customers whose needs are understood and met through stronger representation and delivery of Canadian cultural products and services are more satisfied and therefore more likely to maintain the business relationship through the greater customer life cycle.

An in-depth review of small and medium cultural enterprises (Nordicity Group/Department of Canadian Heritage survey of SMEs, March 2004) reported fairly healthy statistics overall regarding training, and offered interesting contextualization of skills-shortages issues unique to the media sector.

Encouragingly, the report showed a healthy 65% of companies to be conducting some form of informal, in-house training, and that training was not necessarily dependent on government funding. The biggest challenge reported, however, was financial – having the resources with which to offer meaningful and sustained training programs.

Another challenge is that many culture and media workers are employed on a seasonal basis, making it more difficult to achieve a solid return on investment in training, and clearly limiting the retention of corporate knowledge to the core management who remain in command from project to project. This, juxtaposed against the reality of a knowledge-based industry…

An interesting artifact of cultural employment was noted, in that many enter Canadian media based on its creative potential. With employment for entry to mid-level individuals in broadcast and production being largely on a project-to-project basis, it can be difficult if not impossible for these individuals to acquire the necessary business skills so critical to our long-term economic health.

A similar effect was found in cultural entrepreneurs bringing new products and abilities to market, yet not necessarily having or being able to acquire the high-caliber management skills needed to take these businesses to greater and more enduring levels of success.

A shortage of management skills was also a prevalent finding in this survey, with respondents citing the highest training demands as being in leadership and vision, finance and business planning skills, and sales development skills.

This shortage of management skills was mirrored in the Cultural Human Resource Council’s findings (Building on Success: A Human Resources Development Strategy for the Cultural Sector, 2004) in which ‘the management capacity of the sector was frequently cited as a weak link’. It further identified management skills development, support for career self-employment and access to career-long learning as the central human resource issues.

And while many culture-specific training options exist, and indeed are being employed by a reported 17% of cultural enterprises, disparities were noted in that, while considered very useful, management training programs are often not practicable due to the associated time and financial costs. They are also often unsuccessful in addressing the specific needs of the cultural enterprises.

While it recognizes the need for more in-depth and updated data on new forms of culture creation and consumption, the CHRC has successfully pinpointed the cross-sectoral need for strengthening management functions, acting on skills development for the career self-employed, and the need for an effective program for lifelong learning focused on culture-specific skills.

It further notes that these issues will require commitment from the sector through greater recognition of management skills, and greater recognition of the value of training, as well as appropriate content and delivery mechanisms.

The merits of concerted training exist, and options for improving cultural training have been identified. The challenge remains in building a network of professionals and/or a community of interest across media and media training institutions, perhaps not unlike the extremely successful Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Taskforce for Diversity, to spearhead dialogue, to share best practices, and ultimately commit to new models surrounding skills-building and management training.

Much of the preliminary research has been done; perhaps it’s time for a real hard sell on creating a framework for management skills training that will better support Canadian content creators in their respective journeys down the road to cultural riches.

-www.culturalhrc.ca

-www.mediaintelligence.ca

-www.nordicity.com