★ Challenges traditional educational concepts and explores how informal creative art spaces cultivate young people’s core professional competencies.
★ Based on authoritative empirical research, it innovatively proposes a micro-credential system for youth creative practice and optimizes skill certification mechanisms.
★ Integrates art, industry and education, reconstructs youth employment training models, and promotes equitable social mobility for young people.

Collaboration, critical thinking and cultural competency are essential skills that shape young people’s futures. These key skills are often cultivated in the informal, creative spaces that society easily overlooks.
Drawing on the Australian Research Council and industry co-funded Vital Arts project, this book offers a bold and practical new vision: an inclusive, practice-based micro-credential system that recognises the competencies that young people build through creative cultural participation. Challenging prevailing policy narratives that pathologise young people, the book shows how partnerships between industry, cultural organisations and youth-led initiatives can reimagine education, diversify pathways into work and support genuine social mobility.

Offering fresh conceptual tools, compelling empirical insights and a transformative model for accrediting skills, this book repositions youth arts organisations and creative programmes as key actors in constructing more equitable and meaningful routes into employment.

Anna Hickey-Moody
Anna Hickey-Moody is Director of the Arts and Humanities Institute at Maynooth University and inaugural Senior Academic Leadership Ireland (SALI) Professor of Intersectional Humanities.

Sophie Hartley
Sophie Hartley is Research Associate at Deakin University and Researcher at the Commons Social Change Library.

Peter Kelly
Peter Kelly is Professor of Education at Deakin University.

Tammy Wong Hulbert
Tammy Wong Hulbert is an artist and curator, and Senior Lecturer at the RMIT University School of Art.

Scott Brook
Scott Brook is Associate Professor of Communication at RMIT University.

Rimi Khan
Rimi Khan is Associate Professor of Fashion and RMIT Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at RMIT Melbourne.

Christen Cornell
Christen Cornell is Research Fellow and Manager of Research Partnerships at Creative Australia.

Preface

1. Introduction

PART I: Reimagining the problem of youth

2. Reframing youth agency
3. The futures of skills, work and credentialing

PART II: The creative industries: partnerships, practices, diverse economies

4. Promising partnerships and technology futures
5. Practices
6. Diverse economies
7. Conclusion