What Education to Prepare for Industry Employment?

[Mark Suszko]

I agree that there are many possible roads and each one takes you someplace good, depending on the person and how hard they apply themselves.

That said, I tend to not favor purely vocational type tech schools. While some are quite good, I feel their grads tend to get pigeon-holed into just one job and it may get difficult to branch out from that and advance a true career, versus a string of one-note jobs.

Stats show that today’s kids will grow to have an average of four or five different careers in their working lifetime. Not jobs, CAREERS. So locking in to one career too deeply, too early, may create a case of overspecialization that makes it hard for you to adapt later.

I suggest that to get some of that hands-on experience early, he should definitely try one of the many short 1 to 6 week production workshops offered around the country, but then in the fall, take a standard 4-year liberal arts & sciences curriculum at whatever university he can afford, (state or private), with a major in Communications and a minor in something like Business.

This I feel produces an educated, thinking, reasoning, and adaptable person who is well-rounded, and the business minor will be useful as well, inside a media production career or outside of it. It sure would have helped ME in retrospect. The early but brief hands-on before college starts will give him a head start against his classmates, but I think a summer’s worth of that is good enough for him and you to see if this is truly where he wants to go. Beats flaking around on vacation or working a dead-end Mcjob. He should also check into his local comunity access Tv station right away and get into productions there no matter what else. Its essentially free, very hands-on, and teaches you to work in a team. A summer of that and he can teach the “lab” part of freshman production class.

He will want to apply for every internship and practicum program the university’s com department has, also see if the sports teams need any cameramen and editors for games and practices. Some of these com arts internships are restricted to upperclassmen while the newer students get their background training and critical thinking/appreciation skills. You might want to pick the schools to apply towards by the strength of their com departments and what ties they have to the local production and advertising communities for their internships. The contacts made alone can open many doors. (But only if you back up that near-blank first resume with some actual skills and a demo reel).

While all this is going on, the kid should search his soul regarding what he likes to do for fun and what aspects of the trade he enjoys the most, after having sampled as many various positions as possible in things like the student radio station and Tv studio. Find a niche he can exploit and market, be it skate or surf videos, animals, aerials, sports, underwater, high-speed, time-lapse, animation, tabletop, or anything related to some particular sport or hobby. Everybody can shoot news; but the list of experts in say dive videos, golf, etc. is considerably smaller, thus you can make a better living with less competition if you can find a niche to exploit.

If he decides for example that compositing is his talent, he should be working away on independant study and practice with that on his own time, every weekend and holiday, using whatever resources he can afford to make demo material. The objective there would be to create samples for a reel and a web site, and build up general skills without getting too tied down to any one platform (though you can never go wrong learning the hell out of photoshop and aftereffects). By the time he’s a junior, he should be getting small time gigs on weekends working his magic for local bands and the like, and entering pieces in competitions. By senior year then, he’ll be using the university program to network his job and career searches from.

As others have said, the schooling is more than a reciept of dues paid: you don’t automatically fall into a dream job the day after senior graduation. You have to fight for it every step of the way; squeeze your teachers and professors like a bunch of grapes to get all their knowledge, apply and test what you’re learning in active self-directed experimentation, most of which will suck and never be shown to anyone but mom and dad.

What comes out of that process is somebody who can become a success at whatever they turn their hand to.