Developing entrepreneurial skills in arts training programs : employability issues for creative workers

The aim of this article is to further investigate the skills of creative workers.Since 2014, we have indeed noted the Ministry of Culture's injunction to strengthen the professionalization of young creative workers.The development of entrepreneurial skills is the spearhead of this professionalization.This injunction is based on the premise that entrepreneurial skills could enhance the employability of creative workers and would be a means of tackling the high level of job insecurity.In this context, the aim of this article is to explore the degree of alignment between the expectations of cultural stakeholders in the arts, culture and creativity sector in terms of creative workers' skills, and the training programs offered by higher arts and creative education establishments.It provides a theoretical and conceptual framework as well as a research design to identify the expectations of the sector's cultural stakeholders in terms of competencies, to then identify the competencies in which higher education institutions' programs provide training, and to analyze the gap between these two categories of competencies.To achieve this, the empirical research is based on a single embedded case study: the Provence-Alpes-Cte d'Azur region and its visual arts sector.The results confirm a trend towards the managerialization of the creative workers' profession, and the exercise of a variety of competencies throughout their professional careers.They also reveal a low degree of alignment between cultural stakeholders' expectations in terms of entrepreneurial skills and the training offered by higher arts and creative education establishments.