BOUNDLESS CAREERS

Boundless Careers

Helping organisations strengthen how creative careers are developed and sustained over time.

The Gap This Work Addresses

Creative careers are rich, demanding, and meaningful.
They are also structurally unstable.

Most creative careers rarely unfold in neat or predictable ways. They are shaped by portfolio work, funding cycles, variable income, pauses, returns, and repeated adaptation over time.

Much of the support available to creatives draws on models developed for more stable or linear employment contexts. While the sector invests significantly in training and skills development, less attention is given to how people are prepared for, and sustained within, the realities of creative working lives.

This creates a gap between how creative work actually unfolds and how careers are currently supported. That gap has consequences for individuals, organisations, and the wider cultural ecology.

What Boundless is

Boundless Careers is a practice focused on career development infrastructure in the creative and cultural sector.

The work sits at the intersection of career development theory, research, and lived creative practice. It supports organisations to think more clearly about how creative careers are shaped, supported, and sustained under conditions of uncertainty.

This is not a programme, a set of off-the-shelf workshops or a coaching service. It is a way of working upstream with organisations to strengthen long-term career thinking.

How this work approaches career difficulty

• Career difficulty is treated as a systemic condition, not an individual failure.
• Creative careers are understood as non-linear and cumulative over time, shaped by repeated transitions, constraints & adaptations rather than steady progression.
• Research and theory are used to ground decisions, not justify them.
• Short-term interventions are placed within longer-term career frameworks.
• This work complements existing support rather than replacing it.

How the practice works with organisations

Boundless Careers works through a small number of formats, shaped by context rather than predetermined products.

• Embedded partnerships and advisory roles
• Collaborative development of career frameworks and approaches
• Selective facilitated work where shared reflection is useful

The emphasis is on continuity, coherence, and long-term thinking rather than one-off delivery.The practice is shaped by a small number of core principles:

How this practice has been shaped

The thinking behind Boundless Careers has been developed over time through direct work with creatives and organisations across the creative and cultural sector.

This has included individual career coaching, facilitated workshops, and collaborative projects with organisations such as Cultural and Creative Industries Skillnet, Minding Creative Minds, Freelancers Make Theatre Work & Wellbeing In The Arts(UK), University College Cork, Munster Technological University, RTÉ and BIMM Institute Dublin.

Working closely with creatives at different career stages, and alongside organisations supporting them, has informed the questions this practice now holds upstream: not only how careers are supported in moments of need, but how they are understood and sustained over time.

Stewardship

Boundless Careers is stewarded by Andrew Macklin, a career development practitioner and facilitator working across the creative and cultural sector.

The practice has been shaped through sustained work with individual creatives and organisations, including career coaching, group facilitation, and sector-facing development work across the UK and Ireland.

Andrew’s role within Boundless is to hold the research, frameworks, and reflective space that allow organisations to think more clearly about how creative careers are supported and sustained over time.

Starting a conversation

This work usually begins with conversation rather than commissioning.

If your organisation is exploring how creative careers are supported, retained, or developed over time, you’re welcome to get in touch.