What is the Encore Project?

The Encore Project is a research and industry intervention initiative by RMIT University, in partnership with the VMDO (Victorian Music Development Office), APRA AMCOS (the Australasian Performing Right Association and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society) and the AMC (Australian Music Centre), with funding from the Australian Government's National Careers Institute. It aims to help women and gender non-conforming music industry workers restart their careers after a career break. Through focus groups and interviews with 56 music industry workers from Victoria, Australia, the project team developed the Encore Training Package and delivered a pilot trial of the training in March 2023. The Encore Training Package has been made freely available to the Australian music industry through its industry partners, helping women and gender non-conforming people to plan their career breaks with confidence and community support.

What Did the Project Find?

We first reached out to women and gender diverse people working in Melbourne, its suburbs, and regional Victorian towns. These participants were at different stages of their career break journeys, lending a breadth of perspectives to the research. They spoke with researchers about the circumstances around their career break, forms of support they found, challenges they faced, strategies they enacted, and what additional support would be or was useful to get back into work. Our researchers looked for patterns in individual experiences to identify meaningful interventions to support workers at all stages of their career break. The Encore Project made the following findings:

• Exclusion and Discrimination: Decisions to take career breaks and difficulties encountered re-entering music work are impacted by many forms of discrimination, such as ageism, sexism, ableism and sexual harassment.

• Mental Health: Many career breaks coincided with mental health challenges. Accessing support from the music community was valuable for weathering change.

• Motherhood and Parenting: Childcare and maternity leave are often seen as incompatible with employer’s work expectations, leading some workers to plan to exit the industry.

• Staying Connected: Re-building connections and networks in the music industry after a career break was central to being able to restart careers, especially since COVID-19.

• Training: Many find it difficult to access training and mentorships to guide them in their journeys and help them to gain valuable skills for their re-entry into industry.

• Financial Hardship: Seeking work outside the music industry is often needed for financial stability and complicates career breaks.

• Sole Traders: A career break may mean small- and micro-business owners must abandon their clientele, making a return to the industry seem more challenging.

• Musicians: Musicians often sought out more inclusive (“safe”) performance spaces, ways to connect to the industry while on a break, and advice for using technologies for promotion and career advancement.

• Employees: For employees, leave provisions (such as maternity leave) are not equally available and accessible across the sector, but depend on the values and culture of specific businesses. Inadequate leave provisions were sometimes a reason that employees moved on from a business when returning to work.

What Did We Do?

The Encore team co-designed a training package to help women and gender non-conforming people get back into the music industry after a career break. This package includes workshop facilitation resources, workbooks, career development resources for attendees, a project website for storing project information, social media accounts for managing public communications and project objectives, and information for maintaining and developing the training package into the future. These tools have been made freely available to the music industry through the cooperation of our industry partners. Encore workshops address the challenges faced when taking a career break, when on a career break, and when returning to the industry, and have been designed to be able to be flexibility delivered to cater to the experiences of training group participants. Encore training sessions place a focus on understanding common career challenges, accessing resources and information to navigate a career break, and building communities and networks to share experiences and re-establish yourself in the music industry. A pilot of the Encore training model was run in March 2023 through a series of workshops, held in Melbourne, Geelong and online.

What Are The Next Steps?

Although the Encore training program is a step forward, it depends on industry partners to deliver the training in the future. To continue to support women and gender non-conforming music industry workers, we need to:

• Expand the Encore Training Sessions to states and territories beyond Victoria, Australia, which will require updated information packages that are more relevant to these new geographical contexts

• Continue to finance ground-level training and support for women and gender non-conforming people on a career break

• Encourage cultural and structural change in the music industries to support sustainable careers for women and gender non-conforming people

• Invest in ongoing research into career development for women and gender non-conforming people at critical career transitions, such as career breaks, re-skilling and exit from industry, to improve outcomes

• Research the needs of music industry employers to develop training packages, and best practice policies, to guide them to best support workers return from a break.