UK ARTS, CULTURE & HERITAGE INDUSTRY CONFERENCE
CultureSet X is the first recruitment, talent and workforce conference designed solely for arts, culture and heritage organisations. Book your place today to get access to early bird pricing, have your say on the programme and be the first to hear when speakers are announced.
DATE
VENUE
FORMAT
28 January 2027
Brixton House, London
One day, in person
A sector this big shouldn't have to borrow a room.
The arts, culture and heritage sectors employ around 900,000 people across the UK. We have conferences for programming, for fundraising, for audiences, for digital, for absolutely everything except the thing that makes all of it possible — the people who do the work.
So we've spent years borrowing. A workforce session bolted onto someone else's agenda. A case study from a tech firm with a recruitment budget the size of our annual turnover. Advice built for organisations that don't run on grant cycles, freelance rosters, or a team of one holding the entire people function together. It hasn't worked, because it was never built for us. So we built our own.
SIX GENERATIONS. ONE WORKFORCE. THREE YEARS TO GET READY. WILL YOU BE?
The Silent Generation still on the volunteer rota. Boomers working past 67, because the pension age moved. Gen X holding most of the senior posts, while Millennials quietly wait in line for those same posts to open up. Gen Z making up the bulk of new entrants, plus the first cohort of Gen Alpha turning up on work experience and apprenticeships.
That's more than sixty years of birthdays under one roof, and six quite different sets of assumptions ideas about what a job should look like, how feedback ought to land and what a career is actually for. Throw in the fact that some of the jobs our organisations will be hiring for in three years' time don't all exist yet and a heavily weighted freelance workforce who sit outside most workforce strategies, our sector is likely to feel the complexities of this sooner and harder than most.
This is the road we're on either way. The only question is whether we're walking it deliberately.
THIS ISN'T JUST FOR HR & RECRUITMENT PEOPLE
Building a workforce ready for the future is about more than just “fairer” hiring. If your role shapes who wants in, who gets in, who stays, or how any of it gets funded, CultureSet X was made for you.
To build the future-ready workforce the sector needs (and audiences deserve), we need to join the dots between access, inclusion, progression and funding models.
Sounds obvious, right? And yet, hardly anybody seems to be doing it. Access lives with outreach. Inclusion lives somewhere between HR or the lone EDI hero (or heroine) supposed to mend the whole organisation’s diversity woes. Progression lives in a framework nobody's opened since it was signed off, and funding lives with the money makers who are usually found trapped in the grant cycle hamster wheel.
If you want a workforce that's going to survives what's coming, it means getting deliberate and strategic, and doing it before the next funding round makes the decision for you.
THE PROGRAMME
The programme for the event will be released in the weeks prior to the conference and is being built around the following four themes:
Access and Participation
Our sector is generally good at giving young people access to opportunities and experiences which show them what's possible in our sector. What we're not to great it is what happens next. We'll look at how outreach, work experience and entry routes connect to actual jobs — and how to make sure a foot in the door leads to a seat at the table.
Inclusive Recruitment
Building a future-ready workforce that truly reflects our audiences takes more than checkboxes and a well-meant line about welcoming applications from all backgrounds. We'll explore what it takes to build equity into how roles are designed, advertised, shortlisted and decided, and how to prove that it's actually working.
Progressive Pathways
Equity doesn't stop at the point of hire. It matters just as much in who gets developed, promoted and trusted with the top jobs, and the make-up of our sector's most senior roles suggests we still have a long way to go. We'll explore how to build progression that's deliberate and transparent, so that getting on doesn't depend on having the right person in your corner.
Future-Proofed Funding
Every workforce ambition eventually meets the budget. When roles are fixed-term because the grant is, and progression stalls because there's no money for the next rung, even the best people strategy has a shelf life. We'll explore the business models and income approaches that make it possible to build a workforce around what your organisation needs, not what this year's settlement allows.
Apply to speak
The expertise the sector needs is already in it — with the people doing the work rather than writing about it. We don't mind what your job title is, how big your organisation is, or how many followers you have.
What matters is whether you've got something colleagues can take back and use. A method, a lesson, a mistake worth learning from.
You can't pay to play.
We're veeerrry picky about who we let loose on our delegates, so speaking slots aren't tied to sponsorship packages and never will be. Speakers are chosen for their expertise, not their budget.
Become a partner
CultureSet X puts you in a room with the people who make workforce decisions across arts, culture and heritage — the ones who choose the platforms, the training, the recruitment tools and the advisers their organisations use.
It's a first-of-its-kind event, which means first-of-its-kind visibility. We keep partner numbers deliberately low so the organisations in the room get properly seen rather than lost in an exhibition hall.
Find out about becoming a partner