A creative professional who is also known as a creative specialist is a person who is employed for the extraction of skills in creative endeavors. Creative professions include writing, art, design, theater, television, radio, motion pictures, related crafts, as well as marketing, strategy, scientific research and development, product development, engineering, some types of teaching and curriculum design, and more. Since many creative professionals (actors and writers, for example) are also employed in secondary professions, estimates of creative professionals are often inaccurate. By some estimates, approximately 10 million US workers are creative professionals; depending upon the depth and breadth of the definition, this estimate may be doubled.

History

Although creative professionals have been a part of the workforce for more than 500 years, several events during the past decade have altered industry and public perception of these workers. The change in status began in the late 1990s when demand for creative workers was high due to the internet boom. Creative workers found that their talents in

graphic Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of data, as in design and manufacture, ...

and interactive design were valuable, and so, the workers began to develop independent cultures in select cities throughout the world, notably

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

and

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

. Some smaller cities, such as

Austin Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and largest city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 11th-most-populous city ...

and

Portland Portland most commonly refers to: * Portland, Oregon, the largest city in the state of Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States * Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state of Maine, in the New England region of the northeas ...

also became centers where creative people found abundant opportunity. This trend has been documented in author

Richard Florida Richard L. Florida is an American urban studies theorist focusing on social and economic theory. He is a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Fellow at NYU's School of Professional Studies. ...

's book, ''The Creative Class''. As the creative workforce has evolved in the post-dot.com era, creative workers have continued to flourish.

Daniel H. Pink Daniel H. Pink (born July 23, 1964) is an American author. He has written seven books; five of them are ''New York Times'' bestsellers. He was a host and a co- executive producer of the 2014 National Geographic Channel social science TV series ...

's book ''A Whole New Mind'' describes the transition in American business from

information age The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, Silicon Age, or New Media Age) is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during ...

to conceptual age. Pink describes information-era jobs as expendable and exportable, and offers that the MFA may yield more value for newer American workers than the

MBA A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master's in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accounti ...

might generate in today's economy. ''The Creative Professional'', by Howard Blumenthal, describes the phenomenon from yet another perspective: that of the individual worker now emerging as a serious business professional with specific skills on par with lawyers, accountants, doctors, and other workers who are perceived to be within a special class. The book describes the unique business and career issues for the individual creative worker.

Expansion of scope and study

To date, most of the information about this growing phenomenon exists in book form. Many of the ideas and mechanisms are related to changes in copyright law, as described by

Lawrence Lessig Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard ...

and

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

. University education for creative professionals is often presented under older definitions of music, art, and related disciplines, but the processes related to creative thought, particularly as they apply to work, are found in books about cognitive psychology. Author and cognitive thinking researcher

Howard Gardner Howard Earl Gardner (born July 11, 1943) is an American developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He is cur ...

has defined a variety of intelligences related to creative workers. Psychologist

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi (, hu, Csíkszentmihályi Mihály Róbert, ; 29 September 1934 – 20 October 2021) was a Hungarian-American psychologist. He recognized and named the psychological concept of "flow", a highly focused mental ...

has described the process of creative work effectively in several books, including Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Professors in Business have also started to explore the success factors for creative professionals including Harvard Business School Professor

Teresa Amabile Teresa M. Amabile (born June 15, 1950) is an American academic who is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Biography Amabile is primarily known for her res ...

who has studied and published research on creative professionals like author John Irving among others. Corporate research and the development of products and services specifically for creative professionals has started to crop up as companies hire increasing numbers of creative professionals to compete on innovation. Recent changes to corporate slogans are indicative of the trend. In 2003, GE's slogan changed from "We Bring Good Things To Life" to "Imagination at Work" and Hewlett Packard adopted the slogan "Invent."

References

{{reflist

Bibliography

* ''The Whole Mac: Solutions for the Creative Professional'' Business terms Mass media occupations Arts occupations Professionals