For many graduates in the creative industries, the question “what do you do?” has never had a simple answer.
A graduate might be holding down part-time work in a gallery, freelancing in digital design, tutoring on the side, stage managing in the summer, and selling their own work online. It’s a patchwork, a blend, a portfolio.
And yet when we measure their success through Graduate Outcomes, the official data collection exercise on graduate employment, they’re told to tick a single box. The reality of hybridity is flattened into the illusion of underemployment.
This is not a trivial issue. Policymakers rely on Graduate Outcomes (and reports based on the collection, like this year’s What do graduates do? out today) to make judgements about which subjects, courses and institutions are “succeeding” in employability terms. Yet in the creative arts, where portfolio working is both the norm and, in many ways, a strength, these categories misrepresent lived reality. The result is a story told back to government, employers and students in which creative graduates appear more precarious, less stable, and less successful than they often are.
Portfolio careers are current and they’re the future
The creative economy has been pointing towards this future for years. In What Do Graduates Do? , the creative arts overview that Elli Whitefoot and I authored, we found repeated evidence of graduates combining multiple sources of income, employment, freelancing, self-employment, often in ways that nurtured both security and creativity. The forthcoming 2025 overview by Burtin and Halfin reinforces the same point: hybridity is a structural feature, not a marginal quirk.
This hybridity is not inherently negative. Portfolio work can provide resilience, satisfaction and autonomy. As Sharland and Slesser argued in 2024, the future workforce needs creative thinkers who can move across boundaries. Portfolio careers develop precisely those capabilities. At the Advance HE Symposium earlier this year, I led a workshop on future-proofing creative graduates through AI, entrepreneurship and digital skills, all of which thrive in a portfolio setting.
Policy writers and senior leaders need to wake up quickly to realise that creative graduates are early adopters of what more of the labour market is beginning to look like. Academic staff, for example, increasingly combine research grants, teaching roles, consultancy and side projects. Tech and green industries are also normalising project-based work, short-term contracts and hybrid roles. In other words, the creative industries are not an outlier; they are a preview.
Why measurement matters
If the data system is misaligned with reality, the consequences are serious. Universities risk being penalised in performance frameworks like TEF or in media rankings if their graduates’ outcomes are deemed “poor.” Students risk being discouraged from pursuing creative courses because outcomes data suggests they are less employable. Policymakers risk designing interventions based on a caricature rather than the real graduate experience.
As Conroy and Firth highlight, employability education must learn from the present, and the present is messy, hybrid, and global. Yet our data systems remain stuck in a single-job paradigm.
The wider sector context is equally pressing. Graduate vacancies have collapsed from around 180,000 in 2023 to just 55,000 this year, according to Reed. Almost seven in ten undergraduates are now working during term-time just to keep going according to the latest student academic experience survey. And international graduates face higher unemployment rates, around 11 per cent, compared with 3 per cent for UK PGT graduates. The labour market picture is not just challenging, it is distorted when portfolio working is coded as failure.
Without intervention, this issue will persist. Not because creative graduates are difficult to track, but because our measurement tools are still based on outdated assumptions. It is therefore encouraging that HESA is taking steps to improve the Graduate Outcomes survey questionnaire through its cognitive testing exercise. I am currently working with HESA and Jisc to explore how we can better capture hybrid and portfolio careers. These efforts will help bridge the gap in understanding, but far more nuanced data is needed if we are to fully represent the complex and evolving realities of creative graduates.
So what should change?
Data collection needs to become more granular, capturing the combination of employment, self-employment, freelancing and further study rather than forcing graduates into a false hierarchy. Recognising hybridity would make Graduate Outcomes a more accurate reflection of real graduate lives.
One complicating factor is that students who do not complete a creative programme, for example, those who transfer courses or graduate from non-creative disciplines but sustain a creative portfolio, are even less likely to record or recognise that work within Graduate Outcomes. Because it isn’t linked to their area of study, they rarely see it as a legitimate graduate destination, and valuable evidence of creative contribution goes uncounted.
We also need to value more than salary. The “graduate premium” may be shrinking in monetary terms, but its non-monetary returns, civic participation, wellbeing, and resilience, are expanding. Research from Firth and Gratrick in BERA Bites identifies clear gaps in how universities support learners to develop and articulate these broader forms of employability.
Evidence must also become richer and longer-term. The work of Prospects Luminate, AGCAS CITG and the Policy and Evidence Centre on skills mismatches shows that snapshot surveys are no longer sufficient. Graduates’ careers unfold over years, not months, and portfolio working often evolves into sustainable, fulfilling trajectories.
Beyond the UK there are instructive examples of how others have rethought the link between learning and employability. None offers a perfect model for capturing the complexity of graduate working lives, but together they point the way. The Netherlands Validation of Prior Learning system recognises skills gained from outside formal education, Canada’s ELMLP platform connects education and earnings data to map real career pathways, and Denmarks register-based labour statistics explicitly track people holding more than one job. If the UK continues to rely on outdated, single-job measures, it risks being left behind.
Beyond the creative industries
This is not an argument limited to art schools or design faculties. The wider labour market is moving in the same direction. Skills-based hiring is on the rise, with employers in AI and green sectors already downplaying traditional degree requirements in favour of demonstrable competencies. Academic precarity is, in effect, a form of portfolio career. The idea of a single linear graduate role is increasingly a historical fiction.
In this context, the creative industries offer higher education a lesson. They have been navigating portfolio realities for decades. Rather than treating this as a problem to be solved, policymakers could treat it as a model to be understood.
The full beauty of graduate success
When we collapse a graduate’s career into a single tick-box, we erase the full beauty of what they are building. We turn resilience into precarity, adaptability into instability, creativity into failure.
If higher education is serious about employability, we need to update our measures to reflect reality. That means capturing hybridity, valuing breadth as well as salary, and designing policy that starts with the lived experiences of graduates rather than the convenience of categories.
Portfolio careers are not the exception. They are the shape of things to come. And higher education, if it is to remain relevant, must learn how to see them clearly.
