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.

I used to manage that fund 15 years ago, when it was the Independent Production Training Fund, and it was worth £1 million a year even then. Two years ago, the Television Training Fund had £1.5 million to spend on training, and now it has only around £745,000. At a time when companies are under massive financial pressure, training is among the first things to go, along with taxis and hospitality.

Skillset is the government’s own Sector Skills Council for creative media, and the government has expressly said that it is looking at the UK’s creative industries to power us out of recession. Skillset also audits the TV industry more thoroughly than anyone else, and it is due to publish next month the results of its most recent survey, ‘From Recession To Recovery In The Creative Media Industries’.

The title alone tells you all you need to know about Skillset’s strategic goal. Early results from that report confirm that TV employers don’t think they’ve got enough workers sufficiently trained in multi-platform with the flexibility and versatility that they believe is essential for the TV industry to thrive.

We should be clear what is meant by ‘multi-platform’ creatives. It doesn’t mean the website developers and coders with Maths PhDs who are fluent in a range of arcane software languages. Instead, it means the producers, directors, writers, camera operators, editors and researchers who have taken their screen production skills to more interactive media, and adapted their production skills across the web, mobile phones and digital ‘red button’ TV.

There are three major multi-platform schemes already underway for the year ahead, all sponsored by Skillset. Two schemes are for newcomers to the industry.

The Cascade scheme is run by Middlesex University and Top TV Academy, and will provide up to 40 people with work placements, mentoring and job training in new media over six months.

The seven-month Crossover Scheme for will give 38 graduates a grounding in multi-platform production, in which they will design their own multi-media project and at the end of the scheme will pitch it to TV commissioning editors.

A third scheme, funded to the tune of £200,000, is the Cultivating Creatives In TV Programme, run by DV Talent with support from Adsum Consulting. PACT, NESTA and a range of other industry organisations are also throwing their weight into this one, which is clearly a flagship project. It will take on 25 senior TV creatives for a year, and fast-track them into leading multi-platform production for the future.

But Skillset is throwing the net wider, and telling other trainers that if they want their funding then multi-platform is the only way to go. For beginners, courses will have to focus on both multi-platform and social media.

For existing freelancers, courses must cover managing, shooting, developing and pitching multi-media production, and re-purposing TV content for other media. They should also look at IP rights and making money out of new media content, legal and compliance issues.

For more senior trainees, courses should cover running cross-disciplinary teams, communicating and influencing, managing performance and recruitment.

What all of this should say to you is that your existing skills are completely transferable, but that you must prepare to work across multi-platform productions in the future. If you don’t, you may find yourself out in the cold within one, three or five years.