3 Years Old
Well, we’re officially halfway through 2023 and it’s come to that time of year again where I celebrate my company’s birthday and this year it’s my 3rd birthday!
I can’t believe it’s been 3 years since I set up Media Career Advice. It does feel like I’ve become well established now and I couldn’t imagine not running my courses and career advice sessions, but it also feels like it’s gone by really quickly. I am still so passionate about supporting individuals to improve their knowledge and skills in the industry and support them in their careers, whether that’s getting their first role in the industry or progressing up the career ladder.
So what’s happened in the past 12 months? I took on the most important job of my life in July 2022, which was becoming a mum to my beautiful girl Lily. I took 5 months off in total, including a month just before Lily was born, although most of that was spent in the hospital. I really embraced my maternity leave which was taken up mainly taken up by feeds, nappy changes and very little sleep! I ran a handful of ScreenSkills short courses in December and then started back properly in January 2023. After about a month or so of catching up from not working for 5 months, I started back with my external courses from February.
Despite only working 7 months since my birthday last June and working part-time, I still managed to run 32 courses and trained a total of 421 individuals. This past year saw me break the 1,000 trainees mark, as I’ve now trained over 1,100 individuals! I’d never have believed you if you’d have told me that I’d achieve that amount during the third year of running my business. Plus, I also managed to fit in 7 one to one sessions around my training commitments.
May 2023 saw us come to the end of running the ScreenSkills Production Coordinator training programme for unscripted TV. This was our first ever scheme we were responsible for running and was huge in scale. We trained 92 individuals in person across 7 cities in the UK – Cardiff, Bristol, London, Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds & Belfast. We sourced up to 12-months worth of placements for 85 trainees, matched them with 67 industry mentors and 77 trainees graduated the programme. The scheme has been hugely successful at filling the unscripted production skills gaps and we’re so proud of being able to help the trainees on their career path in production management.
A huge thanks again to everyone who has supported me this year, whether it was attending a course, a one to one session, or just liking and sharing posts. I wouldn’t be here without your support.
My fourth year in business is going to be an incredibly exciting one. Since I started my company, I’ve wanted to be able to not just offer my courses on production, but to bring on board other trainers who can provide courses on other subjects within the TV & Film industry and I’m hoping this will become a reality later in the year. I’d like to offer a few others focusing on different roles and will hopefully be putting these into place in 2024, so keep an eye out for more to be announced.
I’ve not forgotten about all of the other courses I’d like to develop focused around the production management role and they are still on my list to complete. I’d also like to run another programme similar to the ScreenSkills Production Co-ordinator scheme as it’s incredibly rewarding to not just offer training, but to get the trainees into placements and supported by industry mentors. Although, I am trying to stick to my part-time hours which is between 2 – 3 working days per week, so do bear with me!
It’s been an incredibly exciting and rewarding journey so far and I’m really looking forward to expanding the courses we can deliver. Thanks for coming on the journey with me and thank you again for all of your support!