Closing the Skills Gaps through Technical Teaching in Higher Education: Insights from the Creative Arts
- Dr Tim Savage
- 18 hours ago
- 5 min read
The recent Creative Industries Skills Audits make for timely and important reading. They show clearly that the creative industries do not simply need more qualifications. Rather, they need people with the right skills. Indeed, 72% of employers with hard-to-fill vacancies reported that candidates lacked the skills required for the role, while just 19% pointed to a lack of qualifications.
This is nationally significant because the creative industries are one of the eight core growth-driving sectors set out in the Modern Industrial Strategy, and are among the fastest-growing areas of the economy; filled jobs in the field grew by 54.9% between 2011 and 2023, rising from 1.6 million to 2.4 million, 4.3 times the growth rate of the wider UK economy. A further 366,000 jobs are forecast to be created by 2030, the majority of which are at the graduate level. Accordingly, the educational pipeline has never been more critical, as nearly three-quarters (73%) of people employed in creative occupations hold qualifications at degree level or above, compared with 44% across all UK jobs. Yet, despite this vibrant and expanding labour market, growth is being choked by a skills gap, and creative arts graduates continue to exhibit poor graduate outcomes.
So, this prompts the question, ‘Why is it that the UK has an apparent oversupply of creative arts graduates but an undersupply of the skills employers need in the creative industries?’ There are many complex reasons, and certainly more than I can cover here. But, from my perspective, one important contributing factor is the transformation of art schools, colleges, and institutes from institutions founded to educate workers for local manufacturing industries into universities. In the space of a generation, these formerly technical and practically oriented institutions have reinvented themselves as academic centres of knowledge, scholarship, and research. In the process, the balance of learning, teaching, and assessment has shifted towards theory rather than practice.
As a result, contemporary art students are too often taught how to talk about and critique creative outputs, rather than how to actually make them. Universities tend to reward the former forms of knowledge, while government, the regulator, and employers expect and demand the latter. Critics have termed this transformation the strange death of the art school, and the root of the mismatch between what is taught within universities and what is needed in the professions as ‘the missing middle’.
I accept that the caricature I have set out is an oversimplification, but it is grounded in my experiences of studying for numerous creative arts degrees and in my work as the Director of Technical Learning at a leading UK arts university. Over my career, I have seen how, as many academic roles have been drawn away from practice, desegregated, and deskilled, technician roles have progressively occupied that space and taken on additional and increasingly sophisticated teaching responsibilities.
When I studied photography in the 1990s, academic staff would teach students, while technicians would work behind the scenes, preparing the facilities, fixing machines and processes, and occasionally helping learners when they got stuck. Fast-forward to now, and these workforce stereotypes no longer reflect reality. Technicians in practical disciplines are increasingly devising curricula and teaching the skills, techniques, practical know-how, and aptitudes and habits of the professions. These forms of learning are not just epistemological (new knowledge), they are ontological (leading to new ways of thinking, acting, and being in the world).
These workforce changes have occurred via creep rather than strategy and remain under-recognised in pedagogic literature, curriculum design, quality assurance processes, or policy discourse. All too often, technicians remain framed as ‘support staff’, while teaching is incorrectly perceived as an exclusively academic activity. Indeed, accepting that technicians teach in universities can be an emotive issue, with many institutions carefully choosing the language used in technician job descriptions ‘induction, demonstration, instruction, and tutoring’ rather than ‘teaching’ to avoid blurring the distinction from academic roles. These systemic and cultural practices can lead to institutional paradoxes in which universities rely on technical teaching while simultaneously sustaining cultures that deny that technicians teach.
However, there are signs that the sector is beginning to recognise and respond to this shift. The 2025 PA Consulting survey of UK Vice-chancellors describes a 'sector in crisis', with 72% of VCs planning to provide technically focused courses to reflect the expectations of government and policy (e.g., the Industrial Strategy, Skills England, expansion of T-Levels, Technical Excellence Colleges, Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQs), degree apprenticeships, and so on).
At a policy level, the Research England-funded TALENT Commission (2022), on which I served, exposed this trend further, drawing on empirical data to demonstrate that technical staff make a significant contribution to student teaching and learning. A subsequent study found that 81% of technicians reported being involved in teaching, which increased to 95% in the creative arts. The report also found that technicians are taking on ever-increasing teaching duties, in many cases blurring the lines between academic and technical teaching activities. I found evidence of the same trends in my analysis of Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) provider statements, which shows that just under a fifth of providers referenced technicians in their 2017 submission, rising to over a third in 2023. A forthcoming study will show that providers who included technicians in their narratives of institutional teaching excellence performed substantially better than those who didn’t.
However, despite these shifts, to date, there has been almost no research completed on how technicians teach and support learning in higher education. Virtually all educational research on the teaching of skills is almost exclusively written by academic authors, about academic practices, for academic audiences.
Recognising this knowledge gap, I completed a doctorate to explore this field, and I have recently transitioned my thesis into a book, Technical Teaching in Higher Education: Insights from the Creative Arts, to provide authentic, empirical research, language, and educational frameworks that help the sector, institutions, and individuals recognise, develop, and improve how technicians teach and support learning.
A core message of the book is that higher education providers can improve productivity, quality, and efficiency through integrating technical and academic pedagogies within a constructively aligned curriculum. This recommendation is consistent with the Skills Audits' recommendations, which describe employer requirements for the creative industries as an ‘alchemy’ of technical, digital, transversal, and business-critical skills. To create the conditions for these attributes to be taught and learned, in education, and applied throughout life, creative universities need to move beyond the academic/non-academic binary that characterises higher education, think more holistically about the potential of their people, and recognise and develop the pedagogies of the entire workforce that educates students, not just those employed on academic contracts.
Bio
Dr Tim Savage is a consultant, author, and trainer specialising in technical learning, technicians, and institutional change in HE. He is a Principal Fellow of Advance HE, recognised for sustained strategic leadership and expertise in technical learning and teaching.
