The Project
An engine to reshape
European innovation
ekip is a collaborative platform co-funded by the European Commission, designed to strengthen innovation capacity across Europe and connect the Cultural & Creative Industries with policy experimentation and open innovation.
The project brings together 17 partner organisations — universities, consultancies, creative networks, and cities — to redesign how Europe starts innovation, with creatives at the core.
Nextatlas joined the ekip consortium as the intelligence layer: building and running a live Social Media Observatory dedicated to the European CCI community, ensuring the voices of thousands of creators, designers, architects, and cultural workers actually shaped the policy agenda.
Learn more about the full ekip projectOur Contribution
10,000+ European creative professionals monitored across Instagram, YouTube, X, Reddit, and Behance, combining AI trend detection with human editorial intelligence.
Why This Matters
The future workforce
is already emerging
The pace at which new professional roles emerge has outrun the tools we use to track them. Job titles are evolving, competencies are shifting, and the skills that define a successful career in 2030 are already visible. But only if you know where to look.
This is especially urgent for educational institutions designing curricula, HR teams building talent strategies, and public bodies shaping labour market policy. They all need the same thing: early, evidence-based intelligence on where professional identities are heading.
When we built the CCI Social Media Observatory for ekip, our goal was to inform EU policy. But we discovered something more: listening deeply to how a professional community talks about its work, aspirations, and frustrations produces a remarkably detailed map of tomorrow's jobs.
"An observatory built to orient policy turns out to provide exactly the signals needed to orient the future of work. The same intelligence that informs institutions can now guide individuals, educators, and employers."
What We Found
10 creative personas defining
tomorrow's workforce
From 10K+ social profiles monitored over two years, we identified 10 distinct archetypes representing the most relevant emerging roles across Europe's Cultural & Creative Industries.
Deep Dive
Meet three of
tomorrow's creative professionals
Each persona reflects real skills, behaviours, and needs observed in the field, built from hundreds of thousands of social posts.
"We're entering wild new territory where AI can create amazing things. My job is to help artists and tech folks think through the big questions: Who owns what? How do we avoid bias? It's about making sure this creative revolution is a fair one."
Highly specialised AI ethics expertise, ability to work across artists, technologists, and legal experts, access to the latest research and regulatory developments.
Navigating conflicting stakeholder interests while operating in a legal landscape that is still catching up with AI.
"I don't just tell stories; I build playgrounds for them. My job is to craft experiences where the audience becomes a participant, shaping the narrative and discovering their own path through the tale."
UX/UI knowledge, proficiency with game engines and interactive tools, versatility across media platforms, formats, and narrative structures.
Lack of standardised tools and workflows for interactive storytelling, and difficulty securing funding for experimental formats.
"My job is like being a translator, but for ideas and ways of working. I help artists from different backgrounds truly connect and create something amazing together, without anyone feeling lost in translation."
Deep intercultural understanding, facilitation and mediation abilities, skills in bridging divergent working methodologies across disciplines and geographies.
Bridging divergent professional norms and securing joint funding across industries and countries with vastly different priorities.
The Methodology
From today's roles to tomorrow's personas
We applied backcasting: starting with a desirable future role and working backward to identify the milestones, skill pivots, and career strategies needed to reach it.
Combined with real-world job data from LinkedIn, we built practical career trajectories, mapping how a single role evolves step by step through new competencies, tools, and mindsets until it becomes a wholly new professional identity.
Graphic Designer
Establishes mastery over visual communication, composition, and aesthetics. The role is focused on producing high-quality visual content and ensuring attention to detail, providing the fundamental visual literacy.
Beyond ekip
This approach works
for any sector
What we built for Europe's creative industries, we can build for your organisation, sector, or community, wherever professional roles are in motion.
Universities & Research Institutes
Understand where your disciplines are heading and redesign curricula around the competencies that will actually matter, grounded in real professional community signals, not assumptions.
Companies & HR Teams
Build future-ready talent strategies and job architectures based on where professional roles are actually evolving, not on yesterday's job descriptions or generic market reports.
Public Institutions & Policy Makers
Ground labour market policies and training programmes in real evidence. Know which professional roles need support, investment, or transition pathways before the official data arrives.
Industry Associations
Track how professional roles are evolving across your sector. Give your members the intelligence they need to stay ahead and position your association as the authority on the future of the profession.
Cultural & Creative Organizations
Position your institution at the forefront of creative workforce development with evidence-based intelligence on where your sector's professionals, and the roles they'll need to fill, are heading.
Work with us
Your sector has its own
future workforce.
We can help you see it.
Whether you're running a university, building HR strategy, shaping public policy, or leading a creative organisation: the signals are already out there. Let's build your intelligence layer together.
