The future of work in the creative sector – Part 1: Detecting emerging roles through social listening
Text: Katerina Kalimera Translation: Tilde Svensson
Image: NextAtlas
In the early days of cinema, there was no such thing as a film editor. Directors cut their own films, often with the help of assistants whose job titles – if they had them at all – were vague: “assistant”, “helper”, “negative cutter.” But as films grew longer and more complex, a distinct skill set emerged: understanding rhythm, pacing, narrative continuity, the emotional impact of juxtaposition. By the 1920s, “film editor” was a recognized profession, and pioneers like Margaret Booth were shaping Hollywood storytelling. The role hadn’t been planned or predicted; it crystallized from practice, defined by practitioners who were doing the work before anyone thought to name it.
Today, across Europe’s Cultural and Creative Industries, a similar process is unfolding. The Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) are undergoing rapid transformation. Artificial intelligence, immersive technologies, and shifting audience expectations reshape the landscape and entirely new professional roles are emerging. The question facing policymakers, educators, and industry leaders is urgent: how do we identify these emerging roles early enough to prepare the workforce effectively?
Within the ekip project , we are addressing this challenge through an innovative approach: social media listening combined with backcasting methodology. We monitor in real-time conversations across creative communities in Europe, we identify the jobs of tomorrow before they become mainstream and more importantly, we map practical career pathways from today’s roles to future opportunities.
Why jobs matter: More than titles and tasks
Before diving into methodology and data, it’s worth pausing to consider why this conversation matters so profoundly. Work is often seen as transactional, when in reality it shapes identity, purpose, and possibility. The question “What do you do?” is really asking “Who are you in the world?” A job is where we spend the majority of our waking hours, where we find community, where we exercise our capabilities and discover our limits. When professional landscapes shift beneath our feet, we’re confronting questions of meaning and belonging.
For societies, the nature of available work determines who can participate, who thrives, who gets left behind. The jobs we create or fail to create shape the texture of cities, the viability of regions, the distribution of opportunity. And for the future, particularly in the cultural and creative industries, the work we do today becomes the culture we leave behind tomorrow. The stories we tell, the experiences we design, the heritage we preserve or reimagine: this is the very substance of shared life. And it matters. To talk about emerging jobs, then, is to talk about emerging possibilities for human flourishing, both individual and collective. This is why getting it right matters more than ever. Understanding the signals early enough to respond with wisdom and intention, rather than panic, is practical and very essential.
Crucially, these emerging possibilities don’t unfold uniformly across geography. Innovation clusters in specific places, shaped by local culture, regulatory environments, existing industries and community networks. One of the most fascinating insights from ekip’s social listening research is that different European regions are acting as laboratories for different kinds of future roles, each bringing distinct strengths and addressing particular challenges through creative professional evolution. As Debora Bae, Head of Insights and Greta Cappellini, Insights Specialist at Nextatlas point out:
Northern Europe, according to Debora Bae and Greta Cappellini at Next Atlas, is really becoming the engine for Sustainability and Transparency. Research on the New European Bauhaus and the Fashion Transition shows they are moving beyond just ‘being green’ to defining the complex processes behind it, striving to propel the green transition beyond mere imagination into concrete action. Meanwhile, Central and Eastern Europe are emerging as a hub for tech-led innovation, particularly in driving the conversation around experimental immersive tech and new promising applications of AI. Western Europe is focusing heavily on governance and legal frameworks – as AI grows, Western practitioners are asking the hard questions about ethics, copyright, and intellectual property rights, effectively shaping the boundary-keeping roles of the future.
Southern Europe, notes Greta Cappellini, Insights Specialist at Next Atlas, represents a significant center for fashion, craft, and cultural heritage. As these countries face ongoing challenges related to small manufacturers and cultural tourism, local practitioners are actively experimenting with new frameworks that challenge established models and explore new ways of reactivating heritage practices. You can read more about local practitioners and how they are actively experimenting with ways to bridge traditional craft knowledge with contemporary innovation, recognizing that ancient skills, from pottery to leatherwork, hold surprising relevance for sustainable futures.
This geographical diversity matters immensely for policy. It suggests that effective workforce development strategies must be place-sensitive, building on regional strengths rather than imposing uniform solutions. It also highlights opportunities for knowledge exchange, Southern expertise in heritage innovation can inform Northern sustainability approaches; Central European tech experimentation can enhance Western governance frameworks. The emerging professional roles we identify exist within ecosystems, and understanding those ecosystems’ geographical dimensions helps translate insights into context-appropriate action. But regardless of where innovation clusters, all regions face the same fundamental challenge: the fundamental mismatch between the pace of professional evolution and the speed at which educational institutions can respond.
The challenge: When education can’t keep pace
Traditional education systems operate on timescales measured in years or decades. Curricula are developed, approved, and implemented through lengthy processes, designed for stability and quality assurance. Yet, the professional landscape, particularly in the CCI’s, evolves at internet speed.
Consider the role of an “Interactive storyteller”: a professional who designs narrative experiences allowing audience participation across games, VR/AR, interactive installations, and transmedia projects. Five years ago, this was not a recognised job title. Today, it represents a convergence of storytelling, user experience design, spatial computing and interactive systems – a blend of skills that no single traditional degree program was designed to provide.
This gap between educational supply and market demand creates what researchers call “skill obsolescence”, (Kaufman J. 1974) when professionals find their expertise no longer matches market needs. For mid-career practitioners especially, this presents a critical challenge. They possess valuable foundational skills but need strategic guidance on how to pivot toward emerging opportunities.
A new approach: Listening to the conversation
The ekip project’s foresight exercise takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than projecting current trends forward, we start with a desirable future state, specific emerging professional roles, and work backward to identify the practical steps needed to reach them.
“Our methodology begins by defining ‘future creative personas’: new professions in the CCIs identified through monitoring emerging skills and job mentions within European creative communities,” explain Debora Bae, Head of Insights and Greta Cappellini, Insights Specialist at Nextatlas, the research partner conducting this analysis for ekip. “These personas are identified by tracking real-time conversations across social media platforms, helping stakeholders anticipate change.”
This social media listening approach leverages the fact that professional communities discuss emerging skills, experimental projects, and novel collaborations long before these appear in formal job postings or educational curricula. Creative practitioners experiment, share failures and successes, and collectively define new specializations through their online discourse.
But how exactly do these signals emerge? According to Debora Bae, Head of Insights at Next Atlas, there isn’t a single formula for spotting a new role before it hits the job market, it really depends on what is driving that shift. The research team can detect a tech evolution as well as an increase in the mention of a specific skill, or even more often, different phenomena that signal a broader societal shift that will likely require new roles. “The power of social listening lies in its flexibility,” Bae explains. “It mirrors what people are saying without prompting, and the challenge is to interpret the implications of these shifts in how people talk.”
One of the earliest signs is when people start discussing new tools, exploring ways to solve novel problems, or experimenting with methods that do not fit neatly within existing roles. Over time, these conversations become more frequent, more confident, and more technically detailed. What begins as scattered commentary gradually evolves into a shared vocabulary, as individuals across different domains realize they are grappling with similar challenges.
These linguistic shifts, Bae notes, are often the first indication that a new role is emerging. “Often, people begin to talk about what they do long before the labour market has a name for it.”
The method: From signals to career pathways
Next Atla’s approach combines advanced data analytics with human expertise to transform social media signals into actionable career intelligence. The process unfolds in several stages:
Signal detection: Proprietary algorithms scan conversations across social platforms, identifying emerging terminology related to job roles, required skills, tools and professional practices. The system doesn’t count mentions but analyses context, sentiment, and the networks of practitioners discussing these topics.
The choice of platforms matters significantly. As Next Atlas team notes, “Experience has taught us that no single platform holds all the answers. The real predictive advantage comes from the intersection and layering of diverse data sources. Each one reveals a different stage of the creative evolution.”
The team monitors a carefully balanced ecosystem of sources. Behance serves as an anchor for finished creative work, showcasing what the global creative community produces. Instagram and X capture the raw voice of creators – their daily struggles, the new software they’re testing, and what they aspire to learn. YouTube and Reddit function as classrooms, where tutorials and advice-seeking reveal which skills are spiking in demand before they hit the mainstream.
Even LinkedIn, often dismissed as showing only established roles, provides valuable signals. There is a misconception, Bae and Cappellini note, that once a role appears on a job board, it’s “too late” or already mainstream. But the team can actually look for variation within those posts, when an unexpected skill suddenly appears as a requirement for an already well-defined role, that is a strong signal that a new profession is incubating.
The researchers are also careful to acknowledge that social platforms are not static environments. They evolve continuously through algorithmic changes, shifts in user behavior, or broader cultural dynamics. This is why working with a balanced pool of sources is essential, when one platform becomes less representative or experiences a major shift, the others help maintain continuity and reliability, ensuring that understanding of emerging practices doesn’t depend on the bias or volatility of a single environment.
Pattern recognition: Machine learning identifies clusters of related skills and competencies that appear together in discussions. For instance, when creative professionals discuss “interactive narratives”, what other skills appear in those same conversations? Spatial design? Programming? Audience research?
Persona development: These skill clusters are synthesized into coherent professional personas – archetypes representing emerging roles. Each persona includes not just a job title but a detailed skill profile, typical deliverables, and the cross-disciplinary competencies required.
Backcasting career paths: This is where the methodology becomes particularly practical. For each future persona, the team maps multiple possible career trajectories from existing professions. These aren’t hypothetical, they’re based on the actual career transitions visible in professional communities. “We combined these future visions with real-world data on current job roles to build practical career trajectories,” the Next Atlas team notes. “The key insight is that the path to future professions isn’t a leap, it’s a guided series of skill pivots and strategic upskilling.”
This four-stage process, from signal detection through platform monitoring to pattern recognition and ultimately backcasting, transforms scattered online conversations into structured career intelligence. It reveals not just what roles are emerging, but how professionals can realistically navigate toward them. The methodology answers the “how do we know?” question that often undermines workforce foresight efforts: we know because practitioners are already telling us, in real-time, across the digital spaces where they work, learn, and collaborate.
So we can detect these roles early and understand how they emerge. But what does that actually look like in practice? What are the specific career pathways, and what systemic support do they require? Most importantly, what can policymakers, educators, and practitioners do with this intelligence? In Part 2 , we’ll explore in more detail the emerging roles, focusing on the case study of the Interactive Storyteller. We will map the concrete steps from today’s professions to tomorrow’s opportunities, and identify the building blocks needed to support these transitions.