STEP

Context

Professional dancers across Europe face a highly specific and frequently invisible form of career precarity. Their working lives are characterized by intense physical demands, short career lifespans, and frequent injuries. Consequently, many are forced to retire at a relatively young age or continue working under conditions of profound insecurity regarding their future.

Data from our sector research highlights the urgency of this issue:

• Widespread Insecurity: 86.7% of the professional dancers surveyed express strong uncertainty about the lifespan of their careers.
• Early Retirement: 73.6% expect to stop dancing before the age of 40.
• Economic Instability: 93.4% experience serious difficulties finding sustainable and continuous employment within the dance sector, describing their work as unstable or very unstable.
• Lack of Protections: Over 40% work freelance or part-time, and dance is not their sole source of income. Despite facing physical risks comparable to miners or metalworkers, dancers receive significantly lower structured support and fewer early retirement options in most European countries.

Throughout their active years, dancers develop excellent transversal competences (including resilience, discipline, creative thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork). However, because these skills are gained in informal contexts, they are rarely acknowledged or formalized by traditional education and employment systems.

Current adult learning and career guidance systems are not equipped to meet these realities. Over 70% of dancers report having received insufficient or no formal help with career transition. This barrier is even more pronounced for women with caregiving responsibilities, individuals from lower-income or migrant backgrounds, and those without academic qualifications beyond vocational dance training (with 46% of respondents reporting no education past secondary school or vocational training).

Scope

The STEP (Support Transition & Empower Performers) project was created to close this systemic gap, offering tailored and inclusive career guidance for dancers and, by extension, other adult learners in physically intensive, precarious occupations.

Co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme, the project directly addresses Topic 5: “Improving career guidance to support adults’ participation in training”. Through a cross-sectoral partnership linking adult education providers, dance organizations, and universities, STEP aims to achieve four specific objectives over a 30-month period:

• Objective 1: Support dancers in recognizing and valuing their formal and informal skills (specifically Personal, Social and Learning to Learn – PSL competences), boosting their autonomy and motivation to make informed choices.
• Objective 2: Expand transition and lifelong learning opportunities, encouraging professionals to begin preparation while still active in their dance careers to prevent abrupt, difficult shifts after retirement.
• Objective 3: Strengthen the capacity of career guidance professionals, equipping mentors and educators with hybrid methods (digital/AI tools + in-person counselling) to better serve niche and precarious learner profiles.
• Objective 4: Create policy recommendations for national and EU-level decision-makers to advocate for the recognition of dance as a physically arduous profession and its inclusion in adult learning and welfare systems.

Target

The STEP project engages a multi-level ecosystem of key beneficiaries and stakeholders:

• Professional Dancers and Performers: Freelancers, independent artists, choreographers, and cultural workers, with a targeted focus on those facing intersecting structural barriers (gender, caregiving duties, migrant backgrounds, or lack of formal academic degrees).
• Dance Companies and Cultural Organizations (including SMEs): Entities seeking to adopt more sustainable and responsible workforce practices, embedding transition planning within their organizational structures.
• Career Guidance Professionals, Counselors, and Mentors: Adult education practitioners who will receive specialist toolkits to handle career transitions tied to physical and artistic identity.
• Institutions, Policymakers, and Public Authorities: Ministries of Education, Culture, and Labour at national and European levels, engaged to foster structural reforms and policy recognition.

Impact

The impact of STEP is designed to drive long-term structural and cultural change across multiple levels:

Individual Level (Dancers)

In the short term, participants gain immediate access to personalized self-assessment tools and career coaching. In the medium to long term, this translates into marketable transversal skills (digital, pedagogical, entrepreneurial), reinforcing the mindset that retiring from performance does not mean becoming obsolete, but rather entering a natural career evolution backed by highly transferable skills.

Organizational Level (Companies & Institutions)

Performing arts institutions and companies will implement transition mentoring and internal learning opportunities, fostering an organizational culture of shared responsibility that enhances staff well-being, loyalty, and resilience.

Systemic and European Level

The project will foster a more inclusive, flexible European adult education landscape. By testing models across a transnational partnership with varying levels of infrastructure, STEP will generate a European knowledge base on career guidance for niche adult learners, easily adaptable to other physically intensive sectors like circus arts, sports, or care work.

Results

All key outputs of the STEP project will be openly published as Open Educational Resources, clearly acknowledging Erasmus+ co-funding, and will include:

• Professional Dancer Transition Framework: The foundational conceptual backbone, informed by ESCO competence classifications, mapping out the precise transition needs of dancers.
• 5 Modular Training Courses: Flexible, blended (online and in-person) training modules focusing on the transversal skills demanded by the broader labour market.
• Digital Learning Platform: An innovative online space housing self-assessment tools, learning resources, and personalized coaching pathways.
• Mentorship Programme and Toolkit: A structured training initiative to equip at least 20 guidance professionals and dance company representatives with tools to manage the emotional and technical aspects of artistic career shifts.
• Dancer Career Development Alliance (DCDA) in Italy: A pilot multi-stakeholder national alliance bridging cultural institutions, education providers, and public authorities to sustain support mechanisms beyond the project lifespan.
• Guidelines for Dance Companies and Policy Recommendation Package: A multilingual strategic document targeting EU and national ministries to promote systemic support, lifelong learning integration, and the recognition of dance as an arduous profession.

Updates from the consortim

Kick off meeting in Athens – 16th and 17th June 2026

Today’s meeting in Athens is the foundational step toward bridging the gap between the cultural sector and adult education systems. By working together with education providers, dance organizations, and public authorities, we aim to ensure that a dancer’s unique expertise is never lost, but rather reinvested into the wider economy.