Tag: Training

Student View: Get That Essential Work Experience

Having secured a place on a competitive university course, unfortunately it doesn’t stop there. According to the graduate market in 2013, 47% of leading UK graduate employers would be unlikely to offer a position within their company to an applicant with no work experience.

With competition for jobs in the media industries particularly fierce, there are a number of ways in which undergraduates can become more appealing to employers during the course of a degree.

Here’s five ways undergraduates can make themselves more employable over the duration of their degree:

Read More

No Freelance Training For You, Unless It’s Multi-Platform

No Freelance Training For You, Unless It’s Multi-Platform

Multimedia platforms have been around for a substantial time now, yet finding freelancers with the skills needed to produce and deliver this content, can be hard. Skillset are clearly responding to this, so is it ultimatum time for those freelancers who are resistant to change?

There has been a massive shift in the training available for freelancers this season. From now on, Skillset’s Television Freelance Fund, which subsidises up to 60% of the costs of training courses for TV freelancers, will be put into courses which add to your skills in entrepreneurialism, multiplatform production or new-media management.

If you want financial support with traditional linear television production training, then you will need to wait at least until this recession is well and truly over. And maybe much longer. Broadcasters and independent producers make a voluntary contribution to the Television Training Fund which pays for freelancers’ courses, but they have been paying less in lately having been hit by a witches brew of business recession.

Read More

No Train Without Gain

No Train Without Gain

As the government works hard to promote its Train to Gain initiative, what relevance (if any), does this hold to the TV and Film world? If training is so important why isn’t it regarded so amongst employers? This week I expose the misconceptions and ask: is it worth it?

There are two perceptions among programme-makers which seem to be at odds with reality. The first is that there isn’t much training available, and when it is available, the freelancer bears the cost of it. The second is that if you could get the right training it would give you that essential advantage when applying for the next job.

If you have ever worked within the BBC, you will know that it can be training course heaven (or purgatory, depending on your frame of mind). The corporation provides a vast range of the best television training available to anyone in the world, and often seems to place its employees on arrays of courses as a way of filling time in between production jobs. If you want a lot of training, then try to work at the BBC.

Read More