Effective talent management: A panacea to self-sustainable career and vocation in the performing arts and culture industry in Nigeria

Abstract

The performing arts is a professional discipline with immense career and vocational opportunities and potentialities. These opportunities span both paid-employment and self-employment ventures that can be optimized by performing arts scholars and practitioners. Ironically, there exists an alarming rate of employment and entrepreneurial instability in the sector in that most performing artists and artistes do not seem to be able to sustain gainful engagement over a lifetime or at least over a reasonable long haul without them either veering into other seemingly more lucrative and sustainable means of livelihood, or completely fading into oblivion This situation is often due to lack of deliberate attention to effective talent management, which incidentally is a critical success factor in the more conventional industries, be it an entrepreneurial pursuit or a gainful employment. This paper examines talent management as an effective intervention in the quest for enduring and sustainable vocation or career in the performing arts and culture industry, against the background of the persisting doubts over the economic and commercial viability of the sector. In-depth one-on-one interviews, focused group discussions and library research methods, are relied on, and data collected subjected to content analysis. The paper concludes that there is a habitual lack of concerted and consistent attention to effective talent management by both artist employees and artist self-employees in the Nigerian performing arts and culture sector, as against the practice in the conventional industries, and that, more than any other factor, this is largely contributory to the perennial self-sustaining career and vocational deficiencies faced by performing artistes and artists in Nigeria.