Talent Accelerator OLD

All young people 5-25 across East Sussex (excluding Brighton & Hove) who are interested in careers in the Creative Industries.

Connecting young people to the support they need to move to the next stage of their creative career this could be *Highlighting opportunities to develop skills *Connecting you to work experience/placements in creative businesses/cultural organisations *Accrediting your experiences with digital badges so that you can clearly show the skills that you have gained *Identifying training/apprenticeships to help you to gain the skills needed.

Follow us on Instagram @talentaccelerator_ to see what we are up to or get in touch talentacc@dlwp.com The project has no cost involved for the young people involved.

Do you have a creative project for young people that would benefit from input from Talent Accelerator?  Does your business wants to support the next generation of creatives but are struggling to work out how? Get in touch and we can talk about the support available to help you realise this ambition.

Starting off by signing up for East Sussex Careers hub Open Doors scheme to show young people inside your place of work. The creative industries can be mysterious and many of the jobs it offers aren’t widely known about. The careers hub also have Enterprise Advisors and Industry Champions who bridge the gap between industry and education-participation is on a volunteer basis around the time you are able to offer.  The next stage would be offering work experience/placements these can be briefs set by a creative business/cultural organisation to be completed in school/college or a more formal in person placement over an academic year. Consider an overhaul of your approach to employing young people-do you have space for an apprentice?

If you are a school/college/organisation working with young people who haven’t yet joined the conversation, please get in touch to see how we could work together to support young people in East Sussex into creative careers.

Talent Accelerator can offer Creative Careers assemblies for primary and secondary schools to help you meet the requirements of the Gatsby benchmarks. These are bespoke for the school and are available for delivery to full year groups, classes or out of school provision groups. Workshops are available for colleges to support young people to identify how to get a creative career started including the training/support they need. Currently we are working hard to develop the range of creative industries work experience that is on offer across East Sussex and can work with schools/college to develop placements that match the requirements of your students. This can be in work placements or through a facilitated in school/college project. Finally we are working with a number of partners to offer high quality skills development activities for young people that support and extend what is on offer in curriculum. If you aren’t already in conversation with us we would love to hear from you.

• Towner Gallery
• East Sussex College Group
• Blackshed Gallery
• Youth Employability Service
• De La Warr Pavilion
• Devonshire Collective
• Hastings Rother Arts Education Network
• Beeching Road Studios
• Flatland Projects
• Newhaven Young Creatives
• Play on Shakespeare
• East Sussex careers hub

We know first-hand the two-way impact of having an apprentice join your team and we were delighted to appoint our own Talent Accelerator Apprentice Mehrin Miah who joined the team in February. You can find out more about Mehrin on the blog she wrote for DLWP here.

Working with East Sussex College Group, we’ve helped to set up a Creative Venue Technician apprenticeship specifically to aid young people into the technical positions at creative venues such as sound and lighting. Contact Talent Accelerator for more information.

DLWP are seeking a flexible, energetic and hardworking individual who would join the team to deliver marketing campaigns, taking a digital first approach, that will grow and diversify audiences for DLWP daytime visitors and generate income for the organisation. A proactive approach and willingness to learn is essential. Find out more here.

5 exciting volunteer opportunities for young people in St.Leonards. Great chance to learn new skills and gain new experiences!

Head to the TA Instagram Linktree for more.

Love music and want to pass it on to the next generation? This is your chance!

Seaglass Arts are running weekly creative music sessions with under-5s at All Saints primary school, Bexhill, East Sussex, over the Autumn term.

These sessions will be led by experienced musician Sam Glazer, offering playful activities, songs, rhymes and games, and musical child-led free play.

You’ll be supporting these sessions, with a focus on listening, noticing, recognising and assisting the children’s own musical and creative impulses. Get involved in playing, singing and more, with the option to lead small sections of the lessons, with mentoring and support from Sam.

You don’t need any formal training or qualifications, but you should be a confident singer or able to to play an instrument, good at communicating with young people and adults, and open to developing your skills.

Sessions run between Monday 18 September and Friday 8 December. You will agree on which sessions you will attend at the beginning of the project.

You’ll be paid £10.42 per hour.

You will be scheduled for a 3-hour training event, three 7 hour days of Community Facilitation, and two 1-hour INSET training events.

Apply here

This programme is now underway

DLWP sought young people, aged 18 to 25 from coastal East Sussex who wanted to develop their careers as music promoters.

The organization offered a paid one-year programme to discover and empower eight emerging music promoters to develop their careers within the vibrant live music scene of coastal East Sussex, from Eastbourne to Rye.”

Eight young participants have been selected and will receive micro-grants to promote and deliver a series of gigs at local venues, supported by talks, masterclasses and mentoring from music industry professionals and DLWP’s Talent Accelerator programme.

Find out more here.

On 10 July Talent Accelerator brought together students from Cavendish and Willingdon schools in Eastbourne to give them the opportunity to showcase their performing talents on the Congress stage and explore their possibilities for future careers in the Creative Industries.

We kicked off the day with a Creative Careers workshop identifying the key skills needed in creative jobs, what jobs are available, identifying opportunities and using facts to dispel the myths that young people are told about in the instability of working as a creative. This was followed up by singing rehearsals lead by Natalie Roberts, Performing Arts Co-ordinator at Cavendish school, getting everyone ready for their rehearsals for the evening performance. In the afternoon everyone was able to meet three fabulous creative industries professionals all from East Sussex who explained their experiences and took questions. Elie Haffenden told us all about her work at DSM on Six the Musical, Rachelle Diedericks told us about her life as an actor who has worked on The Take That musical, The Band, Our Generation and The Crucible with the National Theatre and Thomas Hopkins who owns and operates TPH and Ginger Quiff Media about his career producing theatre in a wide variety of theatres both in the UK and US. In the evening we welcome friends and families to join us to watch a performance including two wonderful choral pieces which included all of the children and young people from both schools.

If your school/college would like to work on a creative careers event with Talent Accelerator in 2023/2023 please get in touch.

It is our goal to retain the creative talent in East Sussex, and to empower employers to work with young people to help drive their businesses.  To help keep things on track, we’ve developed, along with our partners, an accredited Talent Accelerator pathway.  This system sees young people achieve and collect accredited digital badges to motivate learning and ambition and to help them build a purpose driven pathway through the Talent Accelerator programme.

How Digital Badging works:

The ERIC app is an shining example of a platform that brings resources and opportunities together for young people. The app filters live opportunities, projects, vacancies, schemes and programmes tailored to the needs of the young person.  A hyper bespoke tool where relevant content comes directly to you is tailor made for young people, a huge success, super engaging, and something we have been championing at Talent Accelerator.

Since we launched the Talent Accelerator programme last autumn, we have engaged with students and young people as well as employees about the creative industries, careers, and opportunities in our region. We’ve given talks in assemblies, invited students to discuss creative careers onsite at cultural venues, and spoken with educators to raise the profile of the creative industries in the region. It was now time to find an identity that reflected that.

In the spirit of the programme, we’ve been working with an early career local designer Jem Lewis to help develop a look and feel for Talent Accelerator.  It was important that we found an identity for the programme which reflected the values and intention of the programme so we teamed up with young people from the region to help us shape how a logo for the programme may look.

We had working sessions with young people and students from St Richards School, Bexhill High, and East Sussex College Group Eastbourne to find out what Talent Accelerator meant to them and from there, the common themes and design ideas were worked up by Jem.  The brief was complex, with over 100 contributors and we are delighted with the result and the collaborative design process.  We are pleased to launch our Talent Accelerator logo with the supporting strapline: Supporting young people in East Sussex into creative careers.