The creative industries do not just have a skills gap. We have an access, confidence and opportunity gap.

Our latest Liverpool City Region Local Skills Improvement Plan conversation around the creative industries started with skills.

It quickly became about much more than that.

AI. Digital capability. Leadership. Freelancers. Apprenticeships. Work experience. Neurodiversity. Class. Confidence. Education. Employer capacity.

All of these things are connected.

Because if we want Liverpool City Region’s creative industries to grow, we need the people who can help those businesses grow with them.

And that means thinking beyond a traditional list of technical skills.

At GoodShip*, we spend a lot of time working across the spaces between creativity, technology, strategy, business, education and community.

Increasingly, that feels important.

The future workforce is unlikely to divide neatly into creatives, technologists, strategists and commercial people.

The people and businesses that thrive will increasingly be those able to move between those worlds.

So the skills conversation cannot simply be:

What jobs do we need to fill?

It also needs to ask:

What capabilities will people need to adapt?

How do we give people meaningful experience before they enter the workplace?

How do employers become part of education rather than simply waiting at the end of it?

And how do we make sure more people can access those opportunities?

Those were some of the bigger questions behind the conversation.

The skills we need are changing

The discussion started with five broad priorities emerging through the LSIP work:

• digital and AI capability

• fusion skills

• freelancer business skills

• leadership and management

• talent pipeline and progression

These are all areas we recognise directly through our work at GoodShip*.

When we work with organisations, we rarely find that the challenge fits neatly into one discipline.

A website project can quickly become a conversation about brand, audience, data and business strategy.

An AI project becomes a conversation about people, workflow, confidence and organisational change.

A community programme becomes a conversation about communications, partnerships, events, digital platforms and impact measurement.

A creative brief can become a commercial challenge.

That is why our own work spans areas including strategy, creative, digital and technology, consultancy, activation, education and empowerment.

It is also why the idea of fusion skills feels particularly relevant.

The strongest people do not necessarily need to know everything.

But they increasingly need to understand how their work connects with everything around it.

Creative and technical.

Technical and commercial.

Strategy and delivery.

Ideas and execution.

Technology and people.

The creative industries need people who can join the dots

One employer described looking for people who can do their technical role well, but can also speak confidently with clients, work effectively within a team and understand workplace relationships.

That feels significant.

Someone can be an exceptional designer, developer, filmmaker, producer or technician but still struggle if they cannot respond to feedback, communicate an idea or understand the commercial context around the work.

Likewise, somebody can have excellent commercial instincts but struggle to create something useful if they cannot collaborate with specialists.

The future creative workforce needs both depth and breadth.

At GoodShip*, some of the capabilities we increasingly find ourselves developing with people are not necessarily the things traditionally listed in a job specification.

Questioning.

Presenting.

Problem-solving.

Research.

Storytelling.

Facilitation.

Working with uncertainty.

Making decisions with incomplete information.

Collaborating with people who think differently.

Using technology to move an idea forward.

These capabilities sit alongside technical skills rather than replacing them.

And they are becoming more important as technology changes faster.

We need to rethink what we mean by “work ready”

One of the most important parts of the conversation was around younger people entering work.

There is an easy narrative that younger generations are disengaged, entitled, lazy or unwilling to work.

I do not think that gets us anywhere.

Sometimes what looks like disengagement is uncertainty.

Sometimes it is fear of getting something wrong.

Sometimes it is a lack of confidence.

Sometimes there are simply too many options.

I talked about my 17-year-old stepdaughter.

She is looking at university, apprenticeships, employment, travel and combinations of all of them.

That is not a lack of ambition.

It is almost the opposite.

The number of choices available can itself become overwhelming.

So perhaps we need to rethink the phrase work ready.

Yes, young people need to understand expectations, communication, responsibility and professionalism.

But employers also have a responsibility to become better at bringing people into work.

Are we explaining enough?

Are we creating environments where people can ask questions?

Are we providing meaningful early experiences?

Are we helping people understand why the work matters?

Are we giving young people permission to learn rather than expecting them to arrive fully formed?

Work readiness has to work in both directions.

AI is a skills challenge, but confidence may be the bigger challenge

AI obviously featured heavily.

But the most interesting conversation was not really about prompting or specific tools.

It was about confidence.

Students are being told that AI is going to transform the workplace they are entering while, at the same time, many encounter AI primarily through conversations around plagiarism, cheating and misconduct.

That creates a contradiction.

We heard examples of educators taking a much more constructive approach.

Instead of asking AI to produce an answer, learners might use it to critique something they have created, identify errors, explore another perspective or help them understand a concept.

That moves AI from answer machine to thinking partner.

Within the creative industries there is an additional challenge.

If somebody uses AI to create an image, video, piece of writing, campaign or prototype, where does their individual contribution sit?

The future skill is not simply producing something with AI.

It is understanding:

What did you contribute?

Why did you make those choices?

What did you reject?

What did you change?

Can you explain your thinking?

Can you recognise when the AI is wrong?

Can you take responsibility for the finished work?

Those are much more interesting questions.

AI Activator has taught us that the technology is only the starting point

This is something we have seen directly through AI Activator, the programme we developed at GoodShip*.

On the surface, it is an AI programme.

But that description increasingly feels too narrow.

Participants work in teams on live briefs provided by real organisations.

They research the problem.

Talk to the client.

Explore ideas.

Use AI and other digital tools.

Develop strategies.

Build prototypes.

Create presentations.

And ultimately stand in front of people and explain what they have done.

In a matter of days, somebody can move from having relatively little confidence with AI to presenting an idea, product or solution back to an organisation.

The technology accelerates what is possible.

But the development happening around it is much broader.

We see people build confidence.

We see people discover they are capable of doing something they did not believe they could do.

We see people learn to present.

We see people challenge one another.

We see people make mistakes and recover from them.

We see people u