Employers in Scotland's creative and cultural industries have been urged to help create 50,000 jobs over the next 1,000 days as part of a UK-wide campaign.
Building a Creative Nation, led by skills body Creative and Cultural Skills, is calling on the UK's 106,700 creative firms to recruit a young person to help reach the target.
The Scottish leg of the campaign was launched at Edinburgh's National Galleries of Scotland with Youth Employment Minister Angela Constance and Pauline Tambling, joint chief executive of Creative and Cultural Skills.
A key aim of the campaign is to encourage employers in fashion, art, film and music to sign up to the fair access principle in order to make the creative industries more accessible and to show commitment to fair and sustainable recruitment practice.
It will work with businesses and further education colleges such as Glasgow Kelvin College and City of Glasgow College.
Ms Tambling said: "We are passionate about making jobs in our sector accessible to all and we believe that by achieving this, we can maximise the potential of the country's creative and cultural industries.
"We're looking to build upon the work that our supporters have been doing to help young people into work across the creative industries, which has already achieved so much.
Doug Richard, chair of the Building a Creative Nation campaign, said: "A huge part of this campaign is about providing young people with fair opportunities.
"As author of the government-commissioned Richard Review of Apprenticeships, I firmly believe that no single way of learning suits everyone. Our young people are best prepared by learning on the job, a process that also provides employers with unparalleled access to talent."
Commenting after the launch, Ms Constance said: "Creative and Cultural Skills are absolutely right to put young people at the centre of their plans for the future of the cultural sector workforce.
"The Scottish Government is working with various partners including employers, training providers and third sector organisations to support young people into employment and we fully support the aims of Building a Creative Nation in finding young people exciting career opportunities.
"Our action so far has resulted in significant improvements to Scotland's rate of youth employment and campaigns such as this will help build on the progress made.
"I wish Pauline and everyone else connected with the campaign well over the next 1,000 days and look forward to following its progress."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article