An Introduction to the Creative Industries Sector - The Skills ...

On the whole these figures are quite comparable. There are however, notablediscrepancies in the Music & visual & performing arts, Video, film & photography andAdvertising sub sectors in terms of number of employeesIn terms of number of employers the data are more closely comparable with only onenotable exception being the Software (incl leisure) & computer services sub sector.This may be due to on the one hand the ABI using an estimate for small businessesand on the other hand the Business Link data may not be quite up to date for smallbusinesses.Table 6 shows company size in terms of the number of employees and as is generallyreflected across all industrial sectors in the country the majority fall in the 5 or lessemployee size band. When comparing this with ABI data (which at this level isconfidential and therefore cannot be published) the data is comparable but with threenotable exceptions. Firstly the Art/antique trade (a lot less recorded in the ABI data),secondly the Video film and photography (a lot less recorded in the ABI data) andfinally the Software (incl leisure) & computer services (a lot more recorded in the ABIdata).Table 6 Company size in the creative industry sector in GloucestershireSub sectorCompany size band based on number of employees5 or less 6 - 10 11-20 21-50 51-100 101-200 200+ TotalAdvertising 98 6 3 1 108Architecture 107 17 5 5 134Art/antique trade 174 5 4 1 184Designer fashion 111 5 4 2 1 123Video, film & photography 169 10 5 3 1 188Music & visual & performing arts 246 5 5 3 259Publishing 84 12 10 11 5 1 123Software (incl leisure) & computer services 279 55 26 12 5 7 1 385Radio & TV 8 2 1 2 13Total 1,276 117 63 40 12 7 2 1,517Proportion 84.1 7.7 4.2 2.6 0.8 0.5 0.1 100Source: Business Link Client Management database, Dec 2003As explained earlier some of these sectors are not straightforward to measure in termsof the SIC classification, in addition to the nature of employment ie freelance and selfemployed and trying to update something of the order of 24,000 companies over 70%of which fall into the under 5 employee category.An example of some of the larger companies (21 and over) in Gloucestershire isprovided in Appendix 15.14