Mary Rose on Discover! Creative Careers Week 2024

We caught up with Mary Rose from Discover! to tell us all about Discover! Creative Careers Week 2024 and some of the events across the country that looked to inspire the next generation of creative industry talent.

Across an extraordinary range of activities, loads of students came in to find out about careers in the creative industries throughout Discover! Creative Careers Week 2024.

Framestore, one of our steering group partners, worked with three schools to learn about careers in the visual effects industry. They ran a workshop and worked on pitching their own Dragon's Den-style initiatives. 

There was a new event with Christie's in London in a collaboration with Black to the Future who ran a host of workshops and talks to engage young audiences.

There was a packed week of activity at the Derby High School in Bury, who put together a careers fair week, built around a focus on the Lion King musical and a really extraordinary range of events. 

We also worked on a new partnership with the Adobe Foundation where we hosted workshops in schools in Rotherham, Sheffield and Darlington to talk about careers in the screen industry. They were incredibly successful and focused on schools based in our priority areas - 77 areas across the country where young people have the least access to creative careers information.

A really big moment for us was a new partnership with YouTube where we worked together to launch a campaign to excite more 11-18 year olds about opportunities in the creative industries. As part of the partnership, we wanted to think about key creative industries that would really chime with their audience and made some mid-form films to help demonstrate the range of roles available. The first of which was created by Leeds based art rock collective, Dilettante, looking at the music industry through the lens of the artist, and really busting open all the careers that support them as they lead up to a live event.

To launch the video, we hosted an event at TMP Creative College in Wigan with their students. We had this incredible afternoon where students on different of their creative careers courses did various things in the day. They set the day up and event managed it, their media students took film footage and photographs responding to a brief that we'd put together. Some of their creative students sang, some of their performing arts students performed from their new Christmas show. Dilettante was there performing. We had an industry panel with extraordinary people. Simon Ricks from Kaiser Chiefs came along. It was brilliant and a real collaboration. I would say it was everything we want Discover Creative Careers to be about in terms of bringing in students' opinions and making sure that creative careers, resources and activities are informed and designed with our young audience. That's something we really want to do more of going forward. 

As we start to pull together some of the week’s feedback, a couple of things have stood out immediately. Wolverhampton Archives ran an event with some students and off the back of that, we know that a number of students have expressed to their teachers more of an interest in the subjects that they might be able to study to support that as a potential career to explore. 

We know one student in particular has expressed an interest in specific subjects at A level. To us, that's an absolute win and everything we want to see. We also know from the Christie's event that students were inquiring about the apprenticeships they run there and that there's some active conversations going on to make sure that those young people are aware of those pathways through their schools and colleges.

This is everything that this programme - inspiring and informing people at an early age so that they can start to really whet their appetite. And then as you get to the older age range, it's about showing them what are those pathways? How do the careers, the curriculum choices that they choose help to support those pathways, making sure that teachers and careers professionals feel empowered to talk about and inform those students about career options. 

Please visit discovercreative.careers to find out more. We work with a huge steering group of industry partners, lots of the information on the site links out to our partners’ websites and their resources. Registrations are now open for industry and schools and colleges to sign up for Discover Creative Careers Week 2025, which will be happening in November.