Media Graduate Experiences of Education, Industry and Their Pathways into Media Work

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which recent media graduates from a media production degree programme negotiated education, industry and policy determinants in order to cultivate and develop media careers and form new identities as media workers. It examines the issues they have regarding their employment, how they feel negotiating this new industry, how the industry reacts to them and how their education prepared them, or not, for entry into media work. In doing so, the pathways into media work are explored through the graduates’ experience, which is often characterised by precariousness and uncertainty, where graduates’ trajectories are highly contingent and continually negotiated. The chapter further demonstrates how graduates display an awareness of the competing and potentially over-whelming demands of the industry. In particular, graduates encounter and must deal with: recalibrating their expectations of media work following graduation; acknowledging the fact that the industry has both poor quantity and quality of jobs, that industry and policy defined media work poorly, which graduates responded to in their career development; managing portfolio working and availing of further training to strengthen their employability. While the challenges faced by graduates are noted throughout the book, this chapter explores their outlook and perspective on education, the industry, their employers, the organisations they worked within and the further training schemes of which they availed. The chapter examines how the perspectives of employers, media educators and policy explored in previous chapters apply, relate to or contradict graduate perspectives on their education, the industry and further training supports that facilitate them finding a pathway into media work.