Celebrating talent – comment by CEO Craig Robertson

On Friday Christies sold a digital artwork Everydays: The First 5,000 Days and at $70m fetched more than physical works by better known artists. The sale positions the artist among the top three most valuable living artists.

In the age of the internet where it is so easy to copy material and so difficult to be satisfied about authenticity perhaps the buyer was a little crazy spending that amount on a product whose value could soon be whittled away.

The artwork comes with a non-fungible token, however, as a guarantee of its authenticity. Based on blockchain the token is an electronic identifier confirming the digital collectable is real by recording the details on a digital ledger.

Perhaps the biggest lesson out of this transaction is the democratising effect of digital art. No need to fight for access to arthouses for hanging pieces only to fail in getting recognition. There’s ready access to a much larger community on the internet to leverage value.

One of the biggest criticisms of workplaces is how talent and creativity are often quashed in favour of the process and culture of work production. It dictates a certain way of doing things, for good reason no doubt, but the fear of working outside of norms makes supervisors nervous and reluctant to take any risks.

No one is saying that we will all be working outside the routine of process and hierarchy, but the digital artwork has proven that real value rests in the innate capability of the artist, which the 22 million people who participated in auction can attest, not the work of art houses or the largesse of art agents.

Much of what we train for in VET is based on assumptions of working in place and in process. This provides enterprises with a degree of quality control, but at the same time feedback from employers says they want more initiative from workers.

This dilemma is most pronounced in the evidence to the Aged Care Royal Commission back in late 2019. In the face of questions about the seemingly poor skills of personal care workers through the Certificate III in Individual Support, witnesses were very clear to point out that it is indeed a Certificate III with tightly prescribed roles. The solution is not to load more process into the qualification or overlay with heavy supervision.

The more modern way of the workplace, even in aged-care, is person-centred drawn from capable and adaptable workers – or in the parlance of digital art – drawing on the innate talent of the digital artist.

This needs a revolution in the way we shape vocational education, however. Imagine the return from VET for industry if there’s an educational paradigm which develops technical skills that also lifts talent and capability. It can be achieved and is already in pockets, no doubt. A good education focused on building up those core personal attributes in conjunction with technical skills and knowledge.

Often referred to as 21^st Century Skills it covers those important human elements such as effective communication, problem-solving and creativity which could be summed up as being an effective sole operator.

We will need to move aside the heavy prescription of tasks and make a way for a new order of capability.

Would it make a difference? Talent lives longer than a list of skills, so that must give some confidence to give it a go.

And we all have talent – sometimes we just need to uncover it.  Peter Shergold in his report on Post-secondary Pathways says much the same thing.  The report provides the vision:

The certificate of achievement with which students leave school should record and verify the full range of their knowledge and attributes, including academic and non-academic skills, to provide a more wide-ranging view of student achievement, and a more reliable measure of the whole person.