Looking for a solid career? Have you thought about “show business”

Terry students help broaden the horizons of Georgia teens by introducing them to jobs in the creative industries
People working on a green screen movie set.

Despite the buzz around the state’s entertainment industry, many high school students still don’t know what jobs are available in the burgeoning sector or what skills they need to land those jobs. That disconnect — between students and one of the state’s fastest-growing industries — prompted University of Georgia MSBA and MBA senior lecturer David Sutherland to ask master’s students in his Creative Economies course to help connect those dots.

Since then, their class research project helped shape the career assessments taken by Georgia middle schoolers in their paths toward secondary education and first jobs.

“We were wondering: do students even know about the creative industry, and ultimately, are we helping them understand what those career opportunities are,” Sutherland said. “We have assessments to gauge students’ interest in service industry jobs or manufacturing industry jobs or in scientific pursuits — but there was nothing on the creative side. It’s a $6 billion part of the economy, but a lot of high schoolers don’t know about it when they graduate; a lot of college students have never considered the industry either.”

The creative economy involves inherently creative jobs such as writing and producing content but also technical and logistics services supporting content creation and the legal and financial services that make creative endeavors profitable.

As part of their capstone project, recent graduates Ava Wonn (MBA ’24), Bridget Sattele (BBA ’23, MSBA ’24) and Mallika Andukuri (MSBA ’24) worked together to survey Georgia high school students about their interest in and knowledge about jobs in the creative and entertainment industries.

Wonn’s team found that 47% percent of the students surveyed were somewhat interested in careers in the creative industries. Their study was referenced in a statewide opinion piece about the need to support students considering jobs in the creative industry.

The Georgia Department of Education plans to use their work to create a career assessment to help students understand what jobs in the entertainment industry entail, Sutherland said.

“The creative economy touches everything,” Wonn said. “Every type of job has some interaction with the creative economy. I don’t think I understood that before taking that class, and I didn’t know in high school.”

She’s hoping today’s high schoolers have one more career field to consider when planning for the future.