Starting from the premise that learning and career development happen naturally and optimally through collaboration and social relationships, this book challenges the dominant employability skills discourse by exploring socially connected and networked perspectives to learning and teaching in higher education. With 10 empirical case studies of educational practice, chapters investigate the development of learner capabilities, teaching approaches, and institutional strategies to foster lifelong graduate employability through social connectedness. The book argues that higher education institutions have placed themselves at a disadvantage in learning and teaching by limiting and prescribing interactions that prevent multidisciplinary and cross-functional collaboration, and embeddedness into wider industry and community networks. The book offers new strategies and pedagogic approaches that can support learners to build, maintain and make the most of social connections for purposeful participation in life and work. It also demonstrates how universities can forge effective partnerships internally as well as with industry and community partners to ensure the relevance and vibrancy of university learning. Offering an alternative perspective on learning and teaching in higher education with international relevance, this book is a practical resource that can be used by educators to inform teaching practice and curriculum development. It will be essential for university leadership, as well as academics and researchers focused on education policy and university management.

Policymakers globally are seeing the potential for future growth through embedding greater creativity across their economies. Yet much academic research has focused on the creative industries as traditionally defined, rather than looking at the bigger picture. CCI's research has been the exception, making significant conceptual and empirical breakthroughs in our understanding of creative work in the wider economy. This volume should be required reading for students, researchers and practitioners of innovation policy.' - Hasan Bakhshi, Director, Creative Economy in Policy & Research, Nesta, UK'Hearn and his colleagues have amassed an impressive array of empirical evidence, theoretical insights and policy prescriptions for understanding how creative workers are contributing to a variety of industries outside the purely cultural or creative industry sectors. The scope of their investigations includes healthcare, banking, manufacturing, digital technology, creative services, journalism, media and communication, and higher education. This book significantly advances our understanding of how creative workers are utilizing their capabilities to contribute broadly to the economy. It also offers important insights into professional learning for creative workers and shows how education can prepare future generations of creative study students to succeed in today s knowledge based economy.' - Robert DeFillippi, Suffolk University, US Creative workers are employed in sectors outside the creative industries often in greater numbers than within the creative field. This is the first book to explore the phenomena of the embedded creative and creative services through a range of sectors, disciplines, and perspectives. Despite the emergence of the creative worker, there is very little known about the work life of these 'creatives', and why companies seek to employ them. This book asks: how does creative work actually 'embed' into a service or product supply chain? What are creative services? Which industries are they working in? This collection explores these questions in relation to innovation, employment and education, using various methods and theoretical approaches, in order to examine the value of the embedded creative and to discover the implications of education and training for creative workers. This book will be of interest to practitioners, policy makers and industry leaders in the creative industries, in particular digital media, application development, design, journalism, media and communication. It will also appeal to academics and scholars of innovation, cultural studies, business management and labour studies. Contributors include: D. Bennett, R. Bridgstock, J. Coffey, S. Cunningham, S. Fitzgerald, A. Freeman, B. Goldsmith, G. Hearn, J. Pagan, P. Petocz, A. Podkalicka, J. Potts, A. Rainnie, J. Rodgers, J.H.P. Rodrigues, T. Shehadeh, D. Swan, O. Zelenko

Examining pathways from creative education to work, and preparation for these pathways within higher education programs, in the light of long standing labour debates, this book explores the creative launch experiences, destinations, and contributions of graduates emerging into an enormously diverse and heterogeneous creative workforce. Coming from university degree programs that tend to focus on the development of specialist creative disciplinary skills, graduates emerge into the diverse workforce with fairly narrow career identities. With contributions ranging from quantitative analyses of large longitudinal data sets to in-depth qualitative cases, the book aims to provide a range of studies that speak to the complexity found in creative careers. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education and Work.