Industry Development Roundtable Event
Last month, we held our first Industry Development Roundtable Event, at The Ian Potter Centre for Performing Arts at Monash University. This event was a part of our Industry Development Initiative, which is a cross-sector project designed to address the chronic shortage of technical staff across all venues.
The event brought together stakeholders from across the sector, including technicians, venue managers, peak-body leaders, suppliers, and government representatives. The gathering included presentations that contextualised the issue, spoke on training and succession planning, job security & pay, wellbeing support, greater engagement in the education sector, and research findings from our recent creative production workers survey. The attendees heard from Paul Grabowsky, the Executive Director of Monash University Performing Arts Centres, who opened the event, Patrick McCarthy, the Executive Director of VAPAC, Michelle Bingham, Venue Coordinator of The Drum Theatre and Chair of the Technical Managers Network, Emily O’Brien from Elucidate Consulting, Micah Johnson, Co-Director of Studio Entertech, Murray Johnstone, Senior Manager of technical training & development at Arts Centre Melbourne and Shay Minster, Director of workplace relations at Live Performance Australia. All attendees engaged in discussion and shared ideas on how to tackle the staff shortages moving forward, and this dialogue will now inform our advocacy work.
We would like to thank everyone who attended and joined in on this discussion. We will be developing a position paper on this issue over the coming months and will keep members informed of our progress.
Click the link below to learn more about our Industry Development Initiative.
