Media Graduates at Work: Irish Narratives on Policy, Education and Industry (Creative Working Lives) 303066032X, 9783030660321

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Authors
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction
Data Collection
Key Arguments
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Media Policy in the Irish Creative Industries
Introduction
CCI Policy, Education and Work
Media Education: A Complex Landscape
Audiovisual Policy and the Devaluing of Education
The Demand for Alignment Between Education and Industry
What Skills Matter?
Worker Precarity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Media Education and Their Perspective on Aspirant Media Workers
Media Education: Competing Narratives of its Worth to Students
Methodology
The Value of a Media Education
The Value of the Liberal Education
Industry Engagement and Employability
Precarity and Exploitation
Graduate Skills
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 4: University Graduates from the Perspective of Creative Industries Employers
Introduction
Methodology
Employers See Graduates as Skilled
Storytelling Skills
Research Skills
Broad Thinking Skills
Technical Skills
Employers Valued ‘Taking Initiative’
Recruiting Graduates
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Media Graduate Experiences of Education, Industry and Their Pathways into Media Work
Introduction
Creative Graduates and Aspirations of Media Work
Methodology
Graduate Experiences of Education and Industry
Valuing Media Education in Transitions to Media Work – How Graduates Viewed Their Education
Adapting Expectations on Leaving University – How Graduates Viewed and Responded to the Industry
Portfolio Working Careers – How Graduates Adapted to the Industry
Further Training – How Graduates Were Supported by the Industry
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Conclusion: Media Work After COVID-19
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Media Graduates at Work Irish Narratives on Policy, Education and Industry Anne O’Brien Sarah Arnold Páraic Kerrigan

Creative Working Lives

Series Editors Susan Luckman University of South Australia Adelaide, SA, Australia Stephanie Taylor Faculty of Social Sciences The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

This series explores worker experience and working lives in the global sector of the cultural and creative industries. There are rising numbers of aspirants to creative work and rising numbers of graduates and trainees, yet the available employment is increasingly precarious and complex. To address this complexity, the Creative Working Lives series presents original research from across multiple disciplines, including media and cultural studies, gender studies, social psychology and sociology, politics, labour studies, cultural policy studies, anthropology, art and design, and interdisciplinary research. The series provides insights on urgent global and national issues around contemporary cultural and creative working lives, addressing academics, practitioners, students, policy-makers and general readers with an interest in cultural and creative worker experience in a changing world. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16401

Anne O’Brien • Sarah Arnold  Páraic Kerrigan

Media Graduates at Work Irish Narratives on Policy, Education and Industry

Anne O’Brien Department of Media Studies National University of Ireland Maynooth Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland

Sarah Arnold Media Studies National University of Ireland Maynooth Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland

Páraic Kerrigan School of Information and Communications University College Dublin Dublin 4, Ireland

ISSN 2662-415X     ISSN 2662-4168 (electronic) Creative Working Lives ISBN 978-3-030-66032-1    ISBN 978-3-030-66033-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66033-8 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Thanks go to the students, graduates, educators and employers who gave so freely of their time to help us with this research. In particular, thank you to research assistant Jasmin Leech for her work on the project.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Media Policy in the Irish Creative Industries  7 3 Media Education and Their Perspective on Aspirant Media Workers 29 4 University Graduates from the Perspective of Creative Industries Employers 55 5 Media Graduate Experiences of Education, Industry and Their Pathways into Media Work 77 6 Conclusion: Media Work After COVID-19103 Index109

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About the Authors

Anne  O’Brien  is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University. She has also published a number of articles on the representation of women in radio and television, and on women workers in creative industries, and examined why women leave careers in screen production. Sarah  Arnold is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University. She is the author of the forthcoming book Gender and Early Television. Her previous books include Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood (2013) and the co-authored Film Handbook (2013). Páraic  Kerrigan  is a Teaching Fellow with the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. His research pertains to the dynamics of diversity in media industries, specifically centred around Ireland’s LGBT community.

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Abbreviations

CCI CPD HEI IBEC IFB SI SSI STI

Creative and Cultural Industries Continuing Professional Development Higher Education Institutions Irish Business and Employers Confederation Irish Film Board Screen Ireland Screen Skills Ireland Screen Training Ireland

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  This chapter introduces the key aims of the book, which is to systematically examine the various factors that shape media work, which include the state and its policies, industrial and organisational practices and cultures of media education. In particular, the chapter notes how the book does not take a typical political economic or even media industries perspective in this exploration. Rather, it innovatively traces how these forces are operationalised to shape media for the graduates who directly experience the outcomes of policy, education and industry cultures. The analysis examines the impact that policy, education and industry have in defining, redefining and shaping media work and what that means for recently graduated media workers. The chapter further explores the method deployed throughout the study, all the while defining creative work. Keywords  Creative Labour • Graduates • Media Education • Media Policy • Media Work This book aims to systematically examine various factors that shape media work, which include the state and its policies, industrial and organisational practices and cultures of media education. However, the book does not take a typical political economic or even media industries approach to this exploration. Rather, it innovatively traces how these forces are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. O’Brien et al., Media Graduates at Work, Creative Working Lives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66033-8_1

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operationalised to shape media for the graduates who directly experience the outcomes of policy, education and industry cultures. The book examines the impact that policy, education and industry have in defining, redefining and shaping media work and what that means for recently graduated media workers. The book offers a new account of how media graduates interpret and negotiate changing understandings and expectations of them as media workers in media and non-media organisations and companies and how they see that those changes have been articulated within and across a number of social arenas. This book makes a valid and unique contribution to the fields of Production Studies and Media Education Studies scholarship because it demonstrates the extent to which there is an interrelation between policies, industry norms and educational practice for the worker. The book offers insights on state policies that affect media education, on industrial and organisational practices within which media graduates are shaped and understood and on the ways in which education creates graduates who must negotiate entry into the industry. In this study we make sense of the broader contemporary media industries, the well-mapped patterns of media change and more localised trends by examining them through the lens of media work and the factors that shape it. In attempting to explore these factors we pay attention to the narratives of media graduates, media employers and educators all of whom play a role in shaping media work in Ireland. We also consider the media policy landscape in Ireland and see that as playing a key role in steering media education which, in turn, impacts on media graduates and the routes they take into media education. Throughout the book, we demonstrate the complexities of the sometimes-fraught relationship between the various actors involved in shaping media work. We note, for example, the tensions between educators and industry, the ambivalence that media graduates have about media education, and the sometimes-­poor alignment between each. In considering how media work is shaped in Ireland, the book scrutinises the effects of systems of regulation, media education, media organisations and their associated cultures on becoming a media worker. Further, we explore the opportunities and barriers around different pathways into media work. The book is a new departure, not only because its central focus is on the factors that create and shape graduates’ working worlds; it is also innovative in its focus on a small nation case study. The majority of media work research focuses on political economic analysis in the Anglophone contexts of the US, the UK, Australia and Canada. This book argues that

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these conclusions cannot simply be extended to other contexts like Ireland, because of some unique features of that case. Ireland’s small nation status, its particular experience of and recovery from the 2008 global financial crisis and its dependency on foreign direct investment in its media sectors all shape the Irish media industries and consequently the nature of work for graduates within these industries. This book offers a localised perspective on Irish media work in a case study, which is in some ways unique but which also offers some generalisable findings that can assist other small nations to better understand how policy, educational practices and industry cultures and exigencies all combine to shape what it means to do media work in Ireland.

Data Collection The data for the book has been gathered through a mixed-methods approach that attempts to examine the ways in which the relationship between higher education, its media graduates and media industries has evolved. The research uses a case study of employers, discourse analysis of policy, qualitative interviews with employers, third-level media educators as well as interviews with media graduates to understand the ways in which graduates are discursively produced and shaped for work in the media industry. Given the small nation status of Ireland’s media landscape, there are particular structural challenges which condition the labour market in Ireland. Further, given the small nation status, the sample presented here provides an exploration and analysis of the ways in which media education policy and industry shapes media graduates for work specifically within a regionally based media industry. Despite the large body of research on media industries over the last two decades, few studies have examined how these macro-level mechanisms of state policy, educational practices and industry values shape the graduates’ experience and definition of media work. It is to that gap in the literature that this book is addressed. In conducting our mixed-methods research for this book we were concerned with identifying and analysing some of the key shapers of media work and with developing an understanding of how they shape such work. We take as our object of study the Irish ecology of media work as constituted through policy, education, industry and graduates. We began this research by undertaking a series of interviews with graduates of media programmes that had sought work in the media industries. Our sample consisted of media graduates who were in the early stages of media careers

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and we used institutional alumni contacts and, from there, snowball sampling to connect with other media graduates. Twenty semi-structured interviews took place across 2018 and 2019, which enabled us to develop an understanding of the factors that impacted on media workers as they navigated from media education to media work. Our findings, discussed in Chap. 5, pointed to the three factors of policy, education and industry as key shapers of media work and of graduates’ experiences of media work. Following this discovery, we were interested to understand how each of these factors were interrelated. Since graduates reported ambivalence about their preparedness for media work, we sought to examine the role that media education played in producing media workers. Following a review of third-level media programmes in Ireland, we conducted interviews with 23 educators and programme coordinators. This helped us understand media educators’ perceptions of the interrelation between media education and media work. Alongside this we conducted interviews with 13 media employers, again, with a focus on the expectations they had of media graduates and the role they saw media education and industry play in preparing media graduates for media work. Finally, we interviewed a small number of people involved in policy implementation and conducted an analysis of media policy to develop a broader sense of the role that policy plays in defining media work, of prioritising certain types of media work and in tasking media education with producing certain types of media workers. Collectively, this enabled us to understand how media work is negotiated, defined and practised through a number of different fields including policy, education and industry.

Key Arguments In the chapters that follow we assess the interrelationship between policy, education and industry and consider the ways in which each of these shapes and complements each other or sit in tension with each other and, ultimately, how this affects the journey of students from education and into work. In Chap. 2, we discuss the ‘education for industry’ discourse that has emerged in cultural and media policy over the past 20 years. We discuss the ways that industry policies, in particular, have followed the human capital narrative of skills development and assess the discourses about media education and media graduates that subsequently emerged. Using the case of Irish audiovisual policy since the 1990s and, particularly following the national policy framework Culture 2025 (2018) we identify how labour

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market concerns and ambitions have guided policy and framed the role of education in the audiovisual industry. Chapter 3 considers this same interrelationship from a different perspective – that of media educators – and assesses the value and purpose of media education and its relationship to industry from the point of view of providers of education programmes. Drawing from interviews with 23 media educators, we examine attitudes towards graduate employability and note the concerns that educators have about education-industry alignment, the instability of media industries and the potential precarity of media workers. Chapter 4 shifts perspective again to explore how media industries in Ireland view graduates of third-level education provision within the sector. The chapter gathers general attitudes towards media graduates amongst traditional, new and emerging media companies and platforms. What is valued or dismissed by these agencies in terms of the key knowledge, skills and learning outcomes of graduates is captured in this engagement. The perspectives of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media employers on a number of key issues are documented, which include: how they understand the idea of media education and graduate profiles; how they see their companies further shaping the skills, training and education of new entrants; how they see new graduates in terms of the sustainability of media work and where they see the career futures of graduates in light of the changing nature of media work. Chapter 5 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 and that the industry and policy poorly defined media work, 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

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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 to find a pathway into media work. Ultimately, we identify a number of issues that need to be addressed in order for a more coherent synthesis between media policy, education, industry and work. Media and cultural policy need to work with a broader definition of media work, which is not merely technical and craft, but rather, recognise some of the skills developed in university. The media industry in addition needs to move away from tool-centred expectations to recognise more transferable skills, among which include the capacity of the graduate to undertake lifelong learning. Media educators need to be clearer to students and graduates about the graduate attributes and skills that are developed on their programmes. Collectively, policy-makers, industry employers and educators need to develop more understanding and to manage their expectations of each other. The concluding chapter summarises the findings on policy, education experiences and industry attitudes and offers an analysis that will help to guide interested parties in the complex, ever-evolving dynamics of media education.

Bibliography Creative Ireland. (2019). Creative Industries Roadmap. Available at: https:// www.creativeireland.gov.ie/en/blog/creative-­industries-­roadmap/ Curran, D., & van Egeraat, C. (2010). Defining and Valuing Dublin’s Creative Industries (NIRSA Working Papers Series, No. 57). [Online] Available at: https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/sites/default/files/assets/document/ WP57_Dublins_Creative_Industries_0_0.pdf. Accessed 6 July 2021. Department of An Taoiseach. (2008). Building Ireland’s Smart Economy: A Framework for Sustainable Economic Renewal. Dublin: Government of Ireland. Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. (2018). Culture 2025: A National Cultural Policy Framework to 2025. Government of Ireland. [Online] Available at: https://www.chg.gov.ie/app/uploads/2020/01/culture-­2025. pdf. Accessed 1 July 2020. Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2011). Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Media Policy in the Irish Creative Industries

Abstract  In this chapter, we discuss the ‘education for industry’ discourse that has emerged in cultural and media policy over the past 20 years. We discuss the ways that industry policies, in particular, have followed the human capital narrative of skills development and assess the discourses about media education and media graduates that subsequently emerged. Using the case of Irish audiovisual policy since the 1990s and, particularly following the national policy framework Culture 2025 (2018) we identify how labour market concerns and ambitions have guided policy and framed the role of education in the audiovisual industry. Keywords  Audiovisual policy • Skills Development • Education • Media Workers

Introduction In this chapter, we explore Irish cultural and creative industries policy – specifically audiovisual policy – and how it shapes education, training and media work. The past three decades have seen the emergence of strategies aimed at developing the audiovisual sector and increasing employment. Although intended to boost the audiovisual sector, we find contradiction at the heart of such policies, in which a narrative of failure and insufficiency has developed to describe audiovisual education, training and skills © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. O’Brien et al., Media Graduates at Work, Creative Working Lives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66033-8_2

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development in policy discourses. Audiovisual policy has come to blame perceived labour market shortages on poor education and training and a lack of worker skills. Without fully engaging with educators or workers, audiovisual policy has called for education to align with the needs of industry and has charged education with responsibility for responding to skills shortages. But these skills shortages remain obscure, poorly defined and poorly evidenced, partly because of the lack of available data on work and working conditions in the audiovisual industries. The audiovisual policies that make demands on educators and workers to develop more skills do not take into account the nature of employment in the sector and, in particular, the precariousness of media work. Such policies evidence little concern with the generation of sustainable employment and the promotion of ‘good work’ (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011). Ultimately, the demands for skills development being made in policy, such as the Audiovisual Action Plan (2018), are reactive to macro-­economic- and sectoral-level technical changes and are aimed at sustaining production companies and the industry more broadly rather than sustaining work. In sum, Irish audiovisual policy misrepresents the precarious nature of media work, fails to engage effectively with the higher education sector and simultaneously charges media educators and workers with failing to meet the needs of industry. As this chapter argues, Irish audiovisual policies task workers and educators with taking on the responsibility and risk of training and skills development without clearly identifying or promoting sustainable and ‘good’ work. Thus, audiovisual policy forms one part of an overall misalignment between policy, education, industry and work that make media work in Ireland a challenge.

CCI Policy, Education and Work Critical literature on CCI policies has pointed to problematic omissions of sustained engagements with, and reflections on, working conditions and entry routes into media work (Hesmondhalgh & Pratt, 2005; Comunian et al., 2012; Comunian & O’Conor, 2017). Such literature calls for more attention to what Mark Banks calls the politics of cultural work (2007). Contradictory perspectives on cultural work more broadly have been identified both in Ireland and in other national CCIs, where such work is both celebrated and championed for its economic contribution but also understood as ‘bad work’ that is associated with underemployment and poor conditions (Comunian & O’Conor, 2017). In Ireland, media work reflects this contradiction. Media work can be understood as cultural work that is

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productive since it can be defined as ‘the act of labour within the industrialized process of cultural production’ (Banks, 2007: 3). Such work is also politicised in Irish audiovisual policy that contributes to how media work is ‘constructed, managed and performed’ (Banks, 2007: 3) in ways that exacerbate its precariousness and perpetuate worker risk. CCIs individualise risk for cultural workers, which often results in bad work, low pay or underemployment (Comunian & O’Conor, 2017). This has been amplified in Ireland by a myriad of issues ranging from poor audiovisual policy, sporadic production patterns, and economic crises such as the 2008 recession and the 2020/2021 pandemic. This trend of precarious work has been partly nurtured by CCI policy, which has not sought to regulate and manage these working conditions and instead focused on industry needs (2017). Banks and Hesmondhalgh note how UK policy documents evidence a neglect of any discussion of working conditions and focus on ‘ensuring that individuals are sufficiently flexible to respond to the fluctuating and changeable demands of employers’ (italics in original, 2009: 422). Cultural workers, consequently, take on the responsibility and cost of education, training and skills development, and cultural policy simultaneously delegates responsibility for these to educators, graduates and cultural workers rather than to industry. In Ireland, media education is increasingly treated as a key route into media and cultural work, despite the lack of guarantee that media and cultural work will follow media education. Comunian et al. point out that, ultimately, for many, taking on this risk does not result in the reward of secure employment and cultural workers frequently remain precariously employed (2012). Policy-makers have however reframed this risk by defining it in terms of enterprise and entrepreneurialism (Ross, 2007). Thus, cultural and creative industry policy paints a misleading picture of the employment prospects available to those seeking cultural work (Comunian et al., 2012). Cultural and creative policy has been instrumental in tasking education to align with the labour and skills demands of the cultural and creative industries (Banks & Hesmondhalgh, 2009). This is apparent in the case of Ireland, too. Ireland mirrors the situation elsewhere whereby the emergence of a narrow skills agenda has repositioned and, indeed, revised the role and value of higher education (Banks & Hesmondhalgh, 2009). This emphasis on the needs of industry and employers reduces the ‘diverse creative energies’ associated with education according to some researchers as well as Irish educators (see Chap. 3) (2009: 427–8). Education is instead called upon to produce skilled subjects that are resilient, flexible

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and mobile (Allen et al., 2013). CCI policy, in Ireland as elsewhere, thus positions education and training as economic resources which provide human capital that possess the required skills the industry needs at any given time. However, given the rapidly changing nature of the cultural and creative industries – particularly in the wake of the 2008 recession and the most recent 2020/2021 pandemic – and of ever-changing policies and initiatives aimed at developing the creative industries (Collini, 2011; Benneworth & Dauncey, 2016), the demands placed on Irish educators, graduates and media workers can be significant, and at times, incoherent and reactive. More recent cultural and creative policy directives in Ireland have been for workers to gain more technical skills, entrepreneurial skills, and business skills, and to be adaptable to industry change which reflects trends identified in the US, Australia and elsewhere (Ramsey & White, 2015). This is evidenced in the Irish audiovisual policies that will be discussed in this chapter. However, the evidence base for the requirement of skills is not rationalised clearly in policy, nor is there a convincing case made for the benefit to media workers of gaining skills nor to educators to deliver programmes that focus on the development of technical, entrepreneurial, business or adaptability skills. This contradiction forms the crux of this chapter’s central claim, which is that Irish audiovisual policy essentially disregards the reality of media work and fails to understand the function of the higher education sector. Instead, policy-makers produce reports on industry demands that charge media workers and educators with reacting to changing and poorly defined industry skills shortages and needs. The following section explains the context of Irish media education before following with a review of audiovisual policy development in Ireland from the 1980s to 2020. It undertakes an analysis of the framing of skills development, education and training needs, as well as labour market needs in national audiovisual policies and reports, which centre on two key moments that broadly correlate with the pre- and post-Celtic Tiger periods. We examine the STATCOM report of 1995 and the Final Report of the Film Industry Strategic Review Group (1999), both of which urgently called for skills development that would meet market demands for labour, and both of which charged education and training with failing to fulfil audiovisual market needs. This discourse of human capital requirements evident in the reports neglected to engage with the question of the sustainability of employment in the sector and, instead, implicated education and training in servicing industry needs that were never quite rationalised nor proven as viable in the long term. This situation has amplified in recent years, following the economic crash of 2008. Since then, Irish audiovisual

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policy has accelerated the drive for specialised and niche skills development that requires workers as well as education and training providers to rapidly respond to emerging skills agendas and constantly changing requirements in the sector. However, as we note later in this book, neither educators nor employers are convinced by this policy case for specialised skills development and, indeed, it is questionable whether this focus on narrowly defined skills actually serves workers or employers. We now provide an overview of Irish media education before turning to an assessment of the skills development and education and training discourses contained in policy and position papers, which are framed below through four key themes: the emergence of audiovisual policy critiques of education; the demand for alignment between education and perceived industry needs; the absence of a coherent articulation of skills needs and labour market shortages; and the absence of consideration of the precarious working conditions of media workers in the audiovisual sector.

Media Education: A Complex Landscape The media education that is referenced in Irish audiovisual is complex and ever-changing. The Irish primary and secondary educational systems contain very little media education. There are, for example, no formal secondary-­level media-related examination subjects. The closest subjects are Art; Design and Communication; and English. Instead, media education exists mainly at the post-secondary-level and beyond, with QQI-­ accredited levels 5 and 6 media programmes offered through further education and training institutes. These typically take the form of one-year certificate or diploma programmes, which act as either stepping stones to higher education or as stand-alone programmes for students to gain some practical media skills. There are a great many such programmes offered in various colleges and institutions across the country. Alongside this are a smaller number of more industry-facing accredited and non-accredited media traineeships and apprenticeships offered in training centres and often in conjunction with training and work agencies such as Screen Skills Ireland, Screen Skillnet or Animation Skillnet.1 In the higher education 1  Examples include the City & Guilds Digital Media Production Programme offered at Kerry Training Centre and which is focused on employability. The Media Production Assistant Traineeship was developed through the Galway Roscommon Education and Training Board and Screen Skills Ireland and is delivered in the Irish language, with Galway having a strong culture of Irish language media production.

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landscape universities generally lean towards more academically oriented media programmes but are increasingly offering some practical education, whereas institutes of technology (IoTs) tend towards more vocationally oriented programmes which offer a range of practical and technical education.2 However, this is more a generalisation than a hard and fast rule. Many of the providers try to offer programmes that help students develop as wide a range of skills as possible, including professional, technical, practical, critical, generic and transferable skills. In addition, media educators and trainers are required to play a careful balancing act between delivering coherent and relevant programmes, meeting the demands of QA, students, industry and the state, and negotiating an environment of low funding and high expectations. This state of affairs is often absent from audiovisual policy which defines education in economically instrumentalist terms where HEIs provide human capital for CCIs. Given the centrality of the human capital narrative in contemporary Irish education and the mythologising of the cultural and creative industries as ‘cool, creative and egalitarian,’ (Gill, 2002) media education remains a popular choice with students, which, in turn, incentivises providers to develop more programmes. There are, according to the 2017 Crowe Howarth report Final Report in Respect of a Strategy for the Development of Skills in the Audiovisual Industry in Ireland, over 200 programmes across 50 providers, which is a large number given the small size of the Irish nation and its audiovisual industries which, according to a 2017 Olsberg/SPI report, employed only around 7000 people directly. Nonetheless, audiovisual policy continues to present a narrative of skill shortages and implicates HEIs in generating more programmes and graduates for employment in the CCIs despite the limited funding available for artistic and creative practice and the vulnerability of the sector and the economy more generally.

Audiovisual Policy and the Devaluing of Education Employability and labour market growth have been priorities in the development of the audiovisual sector and audiovisual policy in Ireland since the 1980s. Concomitant with the emergence of narratives about employment opportunities was a narrative of employment challenges: a key one 2  This difference between universities and IoTs is somewhat similar to the UK’s traditional universities and post-1992 universities.

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being labour market shortages resulting from perceived deficiencies in audiovisual education and training. This narrative of the threat of labour market shortages, which materialised throughout the 1990s, was productive of a differentiation between education and training as well as one between academic and vocationally oriented programmes. This differentiation in turn helped establish a case for ‘good (hard) skills’ that the industry was said to require and ‘bad (theoretical) skills’ that were indulgent legacies of academically oriented education. The differentiation between good and bad skills then supported the case made by policy-­ makers for more alignment between education and industry and a call for a more responsive education and training system that could adapt to industry labour requirements. This narrative became more established as audiovisual policy activity accelerated through the 1990s. During this time, audiovisual policy aimed to stimulate film and television production in Ireland, which in turn drew attention to the need for indigenous labour and talent.3 In his examination of state aid for film in Ireland, Roddie Flynn identifies the role that policy played in growing the audiovisual industry in Ireland, particularly since the 1990s (Flynn, 2018). As state aid became available through the Irish Film Board (IFB) (which was re-established in 1993, following a hiatus), and tax incentives encouraged production in Ireland, ‘a series of lobby group reports [promoted] the employment potential of the audiovisual sector’ (Flynn, 2018: 543). The Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC), in 1995, began annual reporting on the audiovisual industry and its contribution to the economy in order to lobby for more investment. Alongside this a range of consultation and policy reports and papers identified the opportunities for and challenges of developing and sustaining an audiovisual industry in Ireland.4 Among the challenges identified was the lack of sufficient education and training which was perceived as neither responsive enough to meet the needs of the emergent industry nor specialised enough to 3  A number of reports were produced in the early 1990s: Coopers & Lybrand. 1992. Report on Indigenous Audiovisual Production Industry. Dublin: Irish Film Centre; Special Working Group on the Film Production Industry. Report to the Taoiseach, Mr. Albert Reynolds, T.D. 24 Nollaig. 1992. The Film Production Industry in Ireland. Dublin Stationary Office. 4  A Strategy for Success Based on Economic Realities: The Next Stage of Development for the Film Industry in Ireland (1995); Active or passive? Broadcasting in the future tense (1995); The Independent Film and Television Production Sector in Ireland: Training needs to 2000 (1995); Planning for the Film and Television Industry (1996).

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provide the exact skills necessary for audiovisual production. If there were labour market gaps, in other words, this was the responsibility of educators, trainers, students and trainees, rather than the remit of industry. For example, in 1995, STATCOM, a statutory committee tasked with national reporting on the audiovisual industry in Ireland, accused the educational system of failing to provide the audiovisual industry with labour and creative talent. While it pointed to the need for industry and the state to provide training and continuous professional development opportunities, it launched an attack on third-level education in particular for not responding to perceived and anticipated industry labour market needs. This committee  – a collaboration between the IFB and the Government  – was aimed at ‘tackling all remaining obstacles to the full development of the industry over time’ (Erika King Associates, 1997: 14). Education was identified as one of the key obstacles to growth, and therefore success, in the audiovisual industry. Academically oriented education was especially dismissed as being insufficient in fulfilling audiovisual labour market requirements. One of the more crucial ‘findings’ was that media education – academically oriented education in particular – was of little value if it didn’t meet the needs and expectations of industry. This approach to education effectively ignored the ‘non-market private and social benefits’ (McMahon, 2009: xi) of media education, failed to see the multitude of ways in which media graduates entered and sustained careers in the media industries, and didn’t even articulate what these apparent industry needs were. The STATCOM report stated, for example, that ‘there is a dissatisfaction with current media education provision because it is primarily focused on educational objectives. There is a widespread view that current third-level media education does not prepare people adequately to work in film and television’ (STATCOM, 1995: xii). This attitude to education was echoed elsewhere, evidencing a wider scepticism with higher education in particular. In his 1997 review of European cinema, producer and ‘international film expert’ (Screen Skills Ireland, 2018), Angus Finney was equally critical of the emergence of Media Studies in higher education, which he saw as simply too academic (Finney, 1997). Referencing the STATCOM report, he stated that on such Media Studies programmes ‘the educational aspect has often overshadowed the practical use of such training schemes’ (Finney, 1997: 43). In this sense, education was academic and training was practical. This produced a binary opposition between the theoretical orientation of academic programmes that was not valuable and the ‘hard

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skills’ focus of practical programmes that was valuable. According to Finney and some of the policy reports and position papers to emerge during this time, academic education was not sufficient preparation for work in the audiovisual industries. Such a view was echoed in the recommendations of The Strategic Development of the Irish Film and Television Industry 2000–2010: Final Report of the Film Industry Strategic Review Group of 1999 which reinforced the message of the STATCOM report in favouring vocational over academic education. The Review Group stated that their evaluation of education and training programmes necessitated a distinction be made ‘between conceptual/theoretical inputs and practical/operational inputs’ (1999: 59). In other words, conceptual thinking about film and television had no relation to the practice of film and television. Although the Review Group recognised the ‘explosion’ of more practice-oriented programmes, it noted that ‘many education programmes are highly theoretical and lack practical/vocational relevance within an industry where skills are honed experientially’ (1999: 58). The Review Group advocated for a national centre of excellence that would be vocationally oriented, focus on film production and marketing and ‘deliver the highest level of practical training for this industry’ (1999: 59). While a formal national centre of excellence never materialised,5 the focus on aligning education with industry has sustained in the years since.

The Demand for Alignment Between Education and Industry The critique of media education resulted in calls to align education and industry more closely so that education could respond to industry needs as appropriate. According to this approach, the industry was the main stakeholder or ‘client’ of education, and education had been failing to address the needs of the client. Training was represented as a necessity because education had not been adequately preparing graduates for the industry. Consequently, education and training came to be positioned in 5  While a national centre for film excellence was not established as a direct result of this recommendation, the one sole educational representative on the Review Group, the Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design (now the Institute of Art, Design and Technology) did go on to form a Steering Committee in 2001 to establish a film school at the institute, resulting in the National Film School being set up in 2003.

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tension with each other rather than being seen as coexistent and complementary. This was apparent in the separating out of education and training initiatives. One of the outcomes of the STATCOM report, for example, was the establishment of the National Training Committee for Film and Television which took on the responsibility for identifying training needs and skills shortages and developing training programmes that responded to them. From this came the newly established agency Screen Training Ireland (STI),6 which operated under the national training authority, FÁS. STI concentrated on providing upskilling courses for semi-professionals, CPD courses, short courses and technical and professional traineeships in the audiovisual industry. On the one hand, this emphasis on training acknowledged that industry labour demands needed to be fulfilled by industry training initiatives, work-based learning opportunities and short skills-­ based courses. However, the narrative to emerge from some of the reports, industry reviews and position papers was that training was required, not because the audiovisual industry was creating new labour needs, but because those educational institutions already providing media programmes were failing to provide sufficiently skilled labour. This was echoed in the Final Report of the Film Industry Strategic Review Group of 1999, which was composed of numerous industry and state representatives, with only one representative from a higher education institution, and at that the institution that was most closely aligned with the potential national training centre (Róisín Hogan, director of Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology). Like the STATCOM report before it, the Final report’s attitude to formal and higher education was quite negative. Among its recommendations was that a task force be established to align education with the needs of industry (1999). The report was not just asking for the development of more vocational programmes and training schemes. It was also claiming that existing educational provision should be redesigned to meet the needs of the industry. It made this case very explicitly: ‘The Government must establish an interdepartmental task force involving representatives from the industry and educational institutions; this Task Force must secure a better alignment between educational provision and the career structures and expectations 6  Screen Training Ireland was established in 1995 and slowly increased its training activities over the next few years, as per report The Strategic Development of the Irish Film and Television Industry 2000–2010 (1999).

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within the industry’ (1999: 18). However, the report itself showed little engagement with educators outside of a handful of submissions from colleges and a sole university (1999: 97–98). Although its voice went unheard, education was presumed to be inadequate and ill-prepared to launch graduates into the world of work. ‘With notable exceptions there is, within the industry, a widely perceived mismatch between educational programmes and student career expectations on the one hand and the reality and requirements of the industry on the other’ (1999: 33). Without much input or representation from educators, then, the Review Group insisted that the problem of labour market shortages was one of (inadequate) supply and not of (unreasonable and changeable) demand. In more recent years, audiovisual policy has continued to pursue closer alignment between education and industry using the language of ‘skills’ as a way of identifying industry needs and clarifying industry’s demands of educators. Numerous reports and policies represent this approach including 2011’s Creative Capital: Building Ireland’s Audiovisual Creative Economy; the Creative Ireland Programme of 2016; the 2017 Olsberg/SPI report Economic Analysis of the Audiovisual Sector in the Republic of Ireland; the 2017 Crowe Howarth report Final Report in Respect of a Strategy for the Development of Skills in the Audiovisual Industry in Ireland; and culminating in the Audiovisual Action Plan of 2018. The Creative Capital report was more assertive in demanding that industry determine the relationship between education and employment, the skills needs and the preferred graduate profiles. Here, the ‘third-level sector’ was perceived as not providing enough graduate skill specialisation through centres of excellence. Neither was it providing access routes for graduates to industry (2011: 12). Education was represented as in need of a guiding hand, and educational providers were called upon to engage more with industry so that industry could be provided with the skills it required. The agency that would act as this guide was to be the IFB, and the skills development agenda proposed in the report would be enacted through STI. In fact, the IFB Chair at the time, James Morris, was a member of the Strategic Review Steering Group that produced the report. The IFB, it was proposed, could coordinate the relationship between HEIs and the industry to ensure that the graduate talent and creativity required by industry could be developed within the HEIs (2011: 10). This suggested a far more industry-led intervention into education, which put economic needs at the heart of higher education. According to this approach, students, graduates and workers were valuable only insofar as they could

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develop and demonstrate a series of skills and competencies that fulfilled industry needs (Holborow, 2012). At that time, it was suggested they were not meeting those needs. Such reports, therefore, painted a damning picture of education, graduates and workers. This is perhaps no surprise given the frequent lack of representation from graduates, new entrants to the audiovisual industry, or educators themselves on such steering committees and boards. For example, the lack of ‘suitably qualified new entrants,’ of sufficiently skilled workers and of educational provision in the Irish audiovisual industry was reiterated in the 2017 report Final Report in Respect of a Strategy for the Development of Skills in the Audiovisual Industry in Ireland. Commissioned by the IFB and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI), the report detailed a series of issues with the current provision of education and training in Ireland and made recommendations for the implementation of a skills development plan that would support the development and growth of the audiovisual industry. It was, according to the report, the responsibility of educators and trainers to fill the skills gaps in the audiovisual industry. There are, however, a number of problems with the case made within the Final Report … Its critique of third-level education, in particular, demonstrated a lack of understanding about the needs of the learner, the wider remit of education to develop lifelong learning capacities, and the multiple potential applications of an education beyond direct employability, or more accurately beyond particular jobs in a particular sector. There was little representation from educators in the report, with only three third-level institutes of technology consulted and no universities. In addition, the report relied on perceptions of industry professionals and stakeholders in making assessments about educational providers, learners and graduates rather than on tangible evidence or large scale and objective data. The attitude to and discourse about Irish workers, talent and creatives that emerges from the audiovisual policy of the past few years and as evidenced in the various skills development agendas, is worth exploring here in more detail. In particular, skills development has been a key feature of the various policies and reports relating to the audiovisual industry in Ireland since 2015. The national policy framework Culture 2025 was announced in 2016, out of which the 2016 Creative Ireland Programme emerged. This latter programme had a number of Pillars or themes, with Pillar 4 titled ‘Ireland as a Centre of Excellence in Audiovisual Production.’ This objective was to be enacted through the Audiovisual Action Plan of

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2018, which, at the time of writing, is currently being implemented and has undergone one formal review. The Audiovisual Action Plan was heavily influenced by two reports: the Olsberg/SPI and Nordicity report Economic Analysis of the Audiovisual Sector in the Republic of Ireland of 2017; and the Crowe Howarth 2017 report Final Report in Respect of a Strategy for the Development of Skills in the Audiovisual Industry in Ireland. Collectively, these reports and policies situate skills development as a key concern and agenda item in the development of the audiovisual industry. At the same time, the emphasis on skills development and, in particular, the persistent references to the need for quality training and education, suggest that the industry has a fairly coherent set of skills requirements that graduates and new entrants simply need to develop. However, as demonstrated below, what these skills shortages are and what constitutes a good, skilled graduate and worker is never quite articulated in these reports and policies.

What Skills Matter? Although the skills agenda has dominated audiovisual policy and activity in recent years, there is an absence of clarity about what the precise skills demands are and what role media education more broadly can play in the education/training/work ecosystem. While continuous reference is made to the need for education to align with industry, there is little sense of what exactly this means. Education is, instead, blamed for failing to fulfil an abstract and poorly defined need. For example, the lack of ‘suitably qualified new entrants’ and of sufficiently skilled workers in the Irish audiovisual industry was one of the central themes of the 2017 report Final Report.... However, the precise skills that were needed in the audiovisual industry were never really identified and, alongside that, an inconsistent narrative of industry growth was offered. The report claimed, for example, that ‘development of third-level courses should be in line with national and regional strategic priorities for the screen industry, for higher education, and for skills development’ (Crowe Horwath, 2017: iv) and that ‘the future skills needs of the audiovisual industry should influence the development and design of education and training courses’ (2017: 39). According to this view, the primary role of education was to support the audiovisual industry and to be aligned with the

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current needs of the industry. Education, in this sense, is responsible to the industry and not to the learner. The Final Report…, in addition, evidenced little cognisance of the profile of young learners that educators were addressing nor of the responsibility that educators have not to industry but to learners themselves and the development of their critical, creative and professional skills. Instead, the existing provision of education was said to be fragmented and there was a need for more coordination among providers to address this and to reduce duplication. The audiovisual industry was also suggested to have a larger role to play in curricula development. Current educational provision did ‘not appear to meet any defined need’ and there was a ‘lack of strategic vision across the higher education sector regarding the needs of the industry (which, of course, are not themselves clear)’ (italics added 2017: 34). According to this logic, education was at fault for not meeting the needs of industry, even though industry had not articulated nor indeed even had any sense of what those needs were. This contradictory position was also evident in the acknowledgement of a lack of data on employment and work in the industry (2017: 9). Although the Final Report … identified a need for more skilled workers, it could not identify what kind of workers, nor what skills were required. Instead, the report noted that there was a need to understand the current and future demand for skills in the industry. It noted that there was no quantitative data on current industry employment that would help establish what the demand might be (2017: 20). However, it did recognise that the ‘nature of screen content production … lends itself to serial short-term contract employment rather than permanent jobs within companies’ (2017: 21) and that ‘many in the sector operate as self-employed freelancers’ (2017: 22). Therefore, the report placed a number of expectations on graduates and educators to provide skills that were never named and for which there was no evidence of demand. The report, ultimately, failed to provide robust data on the precise skills that graduates and workers needed to have, nor evidence for the industry demand for such skills. In the place of evidence, the report drew from anecdotal reports from stakeholders who ‘felt’ that graduates lacked ‘the necessary skills and competences required by employers in the sector’ (2017: 37). Despite a lack of evidence about educational providers, about the skills required of graduates and workers, and of the demand for skills within the industry, the report made a number of firm recommendations about educational provision. Educational provision should, according to the report,

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be rationalised (including funding rationalisation), the most relevant courses should be identified, third-level education should be developed and aligned with industry needs, and a national agency such as STI should coordinate the skills development plans. STI was, for its part, praised for its provision of training and the role it played in skills development. Few recommendations of the report pertained to the measurement and assessment of jobs and roles in the industry in order to make a case for particular labour shortages nor with evidencing the sustainability of employment in the industry. This pattern has persisted in recent reporting of the 2018 Audiovisual Action Plan which emphasised the skills development agenda without assessing or reflecting on conditions and employment prospects in the sector. While a number of training schemes and initiatives were launched, there was little recognition of the unevenness and sporadic nature of employment in the audiovisual industry. The Audiovisual Action Plan continued to stress the ‘alignment of [the] education sector to the needs of industry’ (Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, 2018: 28). In particular, the recommendation that STI become a coordinating force for skills development was implemented. By 2018 a rebranding and reorganisation of the IFB resulted in it being renamed Screen Ireland (SI). STI was rebranded Screen Skills Ireland (SSI), reflecting its wider remit of promoting and facilitating skills development more generally. SSI was tasked with enacting many of the skills development recommendations of the Final Report in Respect of a Strategy for the Development of Skills in the Audiovisual Industry in Ireland. Much of the Audiovisual Action Plan reiterated the recommendations of the Final Report... and concentrated more on the need to identify skills development in the training and education sectors rather than with mapping the actual employment prospects in the industry. Instead, the same optimistic narrative of ‘potential growth’ led the skills development agenda. The First Progress Report on Implementation of the Audiovisual Action Plan (2019) offered an overview of the main skills development activities that emerged from the Audiovisual Action Plan. SSI, in particular, had taken a number of steps to promote skills development via education and training, including the development of specialised postgraduate programmes in conjunction with HEIs. It had also undertaken a ‘skills needs analysis’ to identify skills gaps in the industry and which addressed some of the shortcomings of previous reports that had merely speculated about skills shortages. In late 2019, SSI published its Skills Needs Analysis Survey

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2019–2020 (2019) which identified a number of specific skills and roles shortages that were reported by industry professionals and employers. The report identified a number of skills needs that included soft skills and hard skills that were related to a variety of roles ranging from technical, production to accountancy and business. The report especially focused on shortages in specific jobs roles and, coupled with the Careers in Screen website (also produced by SSI), a somewhat clearer picture of the relationship between job roles and associated skills began to emerge. Absent from this, however, was any reporting on the experiences of employment or underemployment nor with any consideration of the intersection between poor working conditions identified in the sector (Murphy, 2019) and skills shortages.

Worker Precarity Attention to working conditions and employment sustainability has been intermittent in the various audiovisual policies since the 1990s. Instead, the industry itself is presented as being vulnerable to perceived future skills shortages that should be addressed by education and training. The STATCOM report, for example, acknowledged that the audiovisual industry was composed of rising numbers of freelance workers and that there was a lack of full-time work opportunities for new entrants (1995: 17). Nonetheless, it advocated for more skills development and training based on speculations about future job growth rather than actual job trends at the time (1995: 21). This narrative of industry precarity preceded the 2008 crash and has continued since. Already in 2003, for example, a Government review of the Section 481 audiovisual industry tax incentive laid the groundwork for policy rationale that tasked the audiovisual industry with earning its keep and proving its economic worth (O’Brien, 2019: 271). In the wake of the 2008 crash, the broader cultural sector was viewed, on the one hand, as excessive and costly and, on the other, as a route to economic recovery (O’Brien, 2019: 277). The IFB and the audiovisual industry, under close scrutiny, had to make the case that they were in the latter camp. The strategic response of the audiovisual industry has been to provide an almost exclusively economic rationale for audiovisual production in Ireland. This has required an assertive effort to compete at an international level, to service increasingly non-Irish and temporary productions, and to make the case that the Irish workforce is adaptable and skilled enough to respond to changing industry needs. This

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leaves media graduates and new entrants increasingly vulnerable to market forces, since their skills can become redundant at any given time and they are, therefore, required to engage in perpetual upskilling and professional development to stay employable. In addition, and more generally, the reports and policy documents examined here place demands on media education to provide graduates for speculative or emerging roles that are often ill-defined, particularly in terms of career entry and progression. Graduates, in the sense, are expected to take on the risk of entering into roles or careers that are predicted or anticipated rather than existing. Media students are tasked with developing skills that are rarely clearly articulated or defined,7 but may be vaguely situated in the fields of business, production and creativity. This, in turn, leaves the responsibility of ‘work-readiness’ with educators and graduates rather than with the industry that creates this demand. This shift of responsibility for work-readiness from industry to the graduate and education is reflective of the employability discourse in which the worker is expected to quickly adapt to market demands (Moore, 2009). Education, according to this logic, is tasked with supplying graduates with ‘narrower and specifically job-related skills in preference to capacity-building education and the acquisition of social and cultural capital’ (Boden & Nedeva, 2010). This is nowhere more evident than in the advocacy for and advancement of audiovisual policy that has consistently, over the past 10 years, suggested that education should service industry rather than the student or graduate. This industry-focused approach to skills development exposes the extent to which there is little responsibility to workers themselves who are supported only insofar as they can meet the demands of the industry. The responsibility of the industry to learners, graduates and workers barely features in the Audiovisual Action Plan and the work of SSI (although SSI does identify ‘Improving Screen Industry Culture’ as one of its action plans). This issue came to the fore in 2018 where unions, workers’ organisations and agencies voiced their concerns about the conditions faced by workers in the Irish audiovisual industry. The report of their concerns pointed to the paradoxical situation in the Irish audiovisual industry whereby individuals were tasked with developing skills to meet industry

7  Screen Skills Ireland’s Careers in Screen website has made some inroads into identifying various pathways into the audiovisual industries; however, there is a need for more data on precise skills, roles and pathways that are in demand.

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needs on the one hand, and were faced with underemployment and poor working conditions, particularly for trainees, on the other. For example, in the 2018 Government report on the Development and Working Conditions in the Irish Film Industry by the Joint Committee on Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, the audiovisual industry was criticised for not supporting workers and not providing career progression opportunities. This ran counter to the previous report Strategy for the Development of Skills in the Audiovisual Industry in Ireland which had praised the training provision in the industry. The Development and Working Conditions report called attention to the short contracts that workers had to undertake, to the lack of permanent employment and the lack of monitoring of training. In addition, some submissions reported that the nature of the short contracts as well as the way that Section 481 training schemes operated meant that workers were caught in perpetual cycles of training. There was a collective feeling from the submissions that there was poor coordination of training and no real oversight of how training was developed and delivered and how a trainee progressed and professionalised in various crafts. This suggested that the Audiovisual Action Plan was possibly contributing to an environment where workers’ access to and progression through the audiovisual industry was made difficult by some of the policies and practices the plan was enacting, particularly Section 481. In addition, the Government report suggested that the acquisition of skills was no guarantee of work. Instead, those who attempted to acquire skills through training exposed themselves to poor training practice and governance. These competing narratives of skills demand and supply evidence the extent to which audiovisual policy should be approached with caution, although caution makes audiovisual policy no less problematic since it proves so powerful in shaping the narrative about industry and education as well as influencing the allocation of resources for education and training.

Conclusion Industry policy has charged education and training providers, graduates and workers with providing the skills necessary to grow and sustain the audiovisual industry. However, the skills demanded by the audiovisual industry are changeable and rarely identified clearly. While much demand is made of graduates, very few clear access and progression routes are provided for them from education into industry. This reflects the trend in the

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creative industries more generally, whereby workers take on the responsibilities of education, training, upskilling and engaging in lifelong learning in order to be flexible and adaptable enough to these changing demands. Accordingly, workers must navigate their route through education and industry in order to fulfil their economic function as bearers of skills that they may or may not be able to bring to an audiovisual industry that makes few commitments to them. Policy, in this way, focuses on industry and not worker precarity and vulnerability. As this chapter has demonstrated, this picture emerges from the industry policies that charge graduates and new entrants with responding to the changing needs of industry. The skills agenda of audiovisual industry policies that have reiterated the need to align education and industry have impacted on the education and training landscape. In the next chapter, we assess that landscape and consider the role that education and training play in shaping learners and graduates. We consider the range of skills and attributes that media education aims to provide. We assess the role that employability plays in the design and delivery of media education, and the attitudes to industry among media educators. We also reflect on the ways in which media educators approach the issues of precarity and employment in the media industries.

Bibliography Allen, K., Quinn, J., Hollingworth, S., & Rose, A. (2013). Becoming Employable Students and ‘Ideal’ Creative Workers: Exclusion and Inequality in Higher Education Work Placements. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34(3), 431–452. Banks, M. (2007). The Politics of Cultural Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Banks, M., & Hesmondhalgh, D. (2009). Looking for Work in Creative Industries Policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15(4), 415–430. Benneworth, P., & Dauncey, H. (2016). Cultural Policy, Creative Clusters and the Complexity of Higher Education: Notes from the Case of Enjmin in Angoulême, France. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22(1), 80–99. Boden, R., & Nedeva, M. (2010). Employing Discourse: Universities and Graduate ‘Employability’. Journal of Education Policy, 25(1), 37–54. Collini, S. (2011). What Are Universities For? London: Penguin. Comunian, R., Faggian, A., & Jewell, S. (2012). Winning and Losing in the Creative Industries: An Analysis of Creative Graduates’ Career Opportunities Across Creative Disciplines. Cultural Trends, 20(3–4), 291–308.

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Comunian, R., & O’Conor, B. (2017). Making Cultural Work Visible in Cultural Policy. In V. Durrer, T. Miller, & D. O’Brien (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy (pp. 265–280). Abingdon: Routledge. Crowe Horwath. (2017). Final Report in Respect of a Strategy for the Development of Skills in the Audiovisual Industry in Ireland. Irish Film Board and Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. [Online] Available at: https://www.screenireland.ie/ images/uploads/general/AV_Skills_Strategy_Report.pdf. Accessed 6 July 2020. Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. (1999). The Strategic Development of the Irish Film and Television Industry 2000–2010, Final Report of the Film Industry Strategic Review Group. Dublin: The Stationery Office. Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. (2016). Culture 2025  – A Framework Policy to 2025. Draft Document. [Online] Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20170424204256/http://www. ahrrga.gov.ie/app/uploads/2016/07/culture_2025_framework_policy_document.pdf. Accessed 8 July 2020. Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. (2016). Creative Ireland Programme. [Online] Available at: https://www.creativeireland.gov.ie/en/ about/. Accessed 6 July 2020. Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. (2019). First Progress Report on Implementation of the Audiovisual Action Plan. [Online] Available at: https://www.creativeireland.gov.ie/app/uploads/2019/12/first-­progress-­ report-­on-­implementation-­of-­the-­audio-­visual-­action-­plan.pdf. Accessed 8 July 2020. Erika King Associates. (1997). Film in Ireland. Arts Council Ireland. Film Industry Strategic Review Group. (1999). The Strategic Development of the Irish Film and Television Industry 2000–2010. Dublin: Stationary Office. Finney, A. (1997). The State of European Cinema: A New Dose of Reality. London: Continuum. Flynn, R. (2018). An Irish Film Industry or a Film Industry in Ireland? The Paradoxes of State Aid. In P. Murschetz, R. Teichmann, & M. Karmasin (Eds.), Handbook of State Aid for Film. Media Business and Innovation. Cham: Springer. Gill, R. (2002). Cool, Creative and Egalitarian?: Exploring Gender in Projectbased New Media Work in Europe. Information, Communication and Society, 5(1), 70–89. Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2011). Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries. London: Routledge. Hesmondhalgh, D., & Pratt, A. (2005). Cultural Industries and Cultural Policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11(1), 1–13. Holborow, M. (2012). Neoliberalism, Human Capital and the Skills Agenda in Higher Education  – The Irish Case. Journal for Critical Educational Policy Studies, 10(1), 93–111.

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Joint Committee on Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. (2018). Development and Working Conditions in the Irish Film Industry. [Online] Available at: https://www.sinnfein.ie/files/2018/RepFilm_Industry-­JCCHG__v_Final_ July_2018.pdf. Accessed 8 July 2020. McMahon, W. W. (2009). Higher Learning, Greater Good: The Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education (p. xi). Baltimore: John Hopkins University. Moore, P. (2009). UK Education, Employability, and Everyday Life. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 7(1), 243–274. Murphy, D. (2019). Fear, Loathing (and Industrial Relations) in the Irish Film Industry. Estudios Irlandeses, 14(1), 321–324. O’Brien, M. (2019). A Political Economy of Tax Expenditures for the Audiovisual Industries in Ireland: A Cultural Policy Research Perspective on Section 481. Unpublished PhD thesis, Dublin City University, Dublin. Olsberg/SPI with Nordicity. (2017). Economic Analysis of the Audiovisual Sector in the Republic of Ireland. [Online] Available at: https://www.chg.gov.ie/ app/uploads/2018/06/economic-­analysis-­of-­the-­audiovisual-­sector-­in-­the-­ republic-­of-­ireland.pdf. Accessed 6 July 2020. PricewaterhouseCooper. (2011). Creative Capital: Building Ireland’s Audiovisual Creative Economy. [Online] Available at: https://www.screenireland.ie/ images/uploads/general/Creative_Capital_Web.pdf. Accessed 6 July 2020. Ramsey, P., & White, A. (2015). Art for Art’s Sake? A Critique of the Instrumentalist Turn in the Teaching of Media and Communications in UK Universities. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21(1), 78–96. Ross, A. (2007). Nice Work if You Can Get It: The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries Policy. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 1(1), 13–30. Screen Skills Ireland. (2018). Profile: Angus Finney. [Online] Available at: https:// www.screenskillsireland.ie/tutors/angus-­finney/. Accessed 2 July 2020. Screen Skills Ireland. (2019). Skills Needs Analysis Report for the Screen Sector in Ireland 2019–2020. [Online] Available at: https://www.screenskillsireland.ie/ wp-­content/uploads/2020/02/Screen_Skills_Ireland_2019_Report_vG.pdf. Accessed 8 July 2020. STATCOM. (1995). The Independent Film and Television Production Sector in Ireland: Training Needs to 2000 (p. xii). Training and Employment Authority.

CHAPTER 3

Media Education and Their Perspective on Aspirant Media Workers

Abstract  This chapter considers the education for industry discourse from a different perspective – that of media educators – and assesses the value and purpose of media education and its relationship to industry from the point of view of providers of education programmes. Drawing from interviews with 23 media educators, we examine attitudes towards graduate employability and note the concerns that educators have about education-­industry alignment, the instability of media industries and the potential precarity of media workers. The chapter notes how educators saw media education as fulfilling a broader role which included personal development of graduates, the acquisition of critical thinking skills and the opening of minds, as well as subject-specific knowledge and skills development. Keywords  Media Education • Media Industry • Media Work • Media Students • Media Graduates Media education offers means through which aspiring workers can position themselves for careers in the competitive Irish industries. Although educational attainment at further and higher levels is not a prerequisite for media work, nor is professional accreditation or training, nonetheless the role of further and higher education has grown over the past two decades. That growth is in line with wider national policy aimed at increasing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. O’Brien et al., Media Graduates at Work, Creative Working Lives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66033-8_3

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participation in higher education (Hunt Report, 2011: 33). Further and higher education programmes in media education have graduated as many as 1100 people in recent years (HEA, 2018). Indeed, the complexity of the post-secondary educational system means that there are many options available to students who hope to become media workers. These programmes vary greatly in their curricula, depending on whether they are homed in IoTs, universities, technological universities or further education and training colleges. With so many students undertaking media education and such variety of programmes on offer, it would seem that this diversity would advantage students. However, the following chapter presents a number of challenges associated with delivering the type of media education that might optimally prepare students for life as media graduates. The challenges identified in this chapter are interrelated with the issues raised in other chapters inasmuch as national media policies, employability directives, and industry expectations effect the nature of media education. These challenges include: uncertainty about the exact remit and value of media education; a lack of consensus about the core function of higher education more generally; interconnected to this is concern about the relationship between media and industry as well as concern about the type of work available; and difficulties in identifying a core set of media skills that are of value for graduates. Interviews with 23 people involved in media education and training reveal different and sometimes contesting levels of alignment between media education and employment. This often reflected the differences between institutional type, with university-based academically oriented1 programmes aligning their programmes more within the tradition of a liberal education, while vocationally oriented2 newer universities and IoT programmes have historically placed more emphasis on graduate employability. Indeed, curricula development and design in the latter institutions are required to be responsive to industry. Other forms of education and training outside of the higher education sector have different motivations again, with some of our interviewees using media education and training as a way of developing local communities or nurturing 1  By academically oriented, we mean programmes that are more concerned with the ‘study of’ media than the practice of and which are primarily centred on theorising, analysing and critiquing media. 2  By vocationally oriented, we refer to programmes that are more concerned with the ‘making of’ media and which contain a higher ratio of practical and technical teaching than theoretical.

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regional and local talent. For most of our interviewees, though, employability and skills development are key concerns and, whether or not they agree with this agenda, educators feel they have to rationalise their programmes in relation to graduate employability. This makes some of the educators interviewed wary of the role that industry played in education and they resist attempts at the relationship becoming too intimate. They worry about the balance of power in such relationships. Other educators are very conscious of the vulnerability of graduates to exploitative employers and the precarity of the industry more generally. Educators are keen, therefore, to support graduates in the attainment of a wide set of personal and professional skills that will help them in lots of different walks in life. Ultimately, the interviews reveal that media educators aspire to help, and are supportive of graduates’ entry into media work, but stop short of developing too close a relationship with media industries because they are perceived as too volatile and unstable, with not enough work for such a large number of graduates. Media work is, therefore, positioned as only one possible – and not guaranteed – avenue for graduates to explore.

Media Education: Competing Narratives of its Worth to Students Media education’s reputation and place in the higher education landscape are often contested and subject to a certain amount of scepticism and scrutiny that take the form of two competing narratives (Beacham, 2000; Thornham & O’Sullivan, 2004; Rowe, 2004). According to these narratives, media education lacks the academic credentials that would earn its place in higher education, particularly in the Irish context. At the same time, media education does not provide the exact skills required of graduates by industry. Media education is both not academic enough and not vocational enough. Some scholars make the case that media education should adopt a more proactive response to the needs of industry and graduates and work harder to facilitate graduate employability. Wilmore and Willison, for example, point to the financial and personal investments made by students in their education and the need for educators to respect this by helping students to understand the skills they have acquired and the value of them (2016: 2–3). Educators are also criticised for lacking formal relationships with industry that would aid students’ entry into work (Haukka, 2011: 59). Berger et  al. advocate for work

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placements – rare in Irish media education – as a crucial pedagogic tool that allows students the space to critically reflect on learning (2013). However, others are critical of the extent to which education  – higher education, in particular – services the economy. Oakley, for example, notes the extent to which a changing fees and policy regime in the UK has resulted in a more instrumentalist education that comes at the cost of incubating creative talent (2013). She points to how experiential learning initiatives employed to address wider participation and diversity in the creative industries fail to engage in critical reflection about how and why the lack of diversity persists (Oakley, 2013). Oakley, Bell (2004), and Banks and Hesmondhalgh (2009) in various ways point to the erosion of experimentation and creativity that has occurred alongside the increasing role of creative economy discourses in educational policy and practice. Noonan and Ashton caution about the ‘government policy interventions and employer-led demands for “industry-ready talent”’ that have impacted on higher education, including creative and media education (2011: 2). Industry, according to Hesmondhalgh, is attracted to graduates since they have a range of higher order skills developed through their education (2018: 353). However, as more and more graduates emerge from creative education, they are faced with competition for jobs from their peers. McRobbie implies that universities may have a case to answer in this, since they respond to government directives to develop human capital and effectively train students and graduates to be precarious workers (2018: 5–6). The relationship between media education and industry is, therefore, contested with some seeing education’s role as producing employable graduates and other scholars problematising the close alignment between education and industry. This is reflected in our interviews with Irish media educators who represent a broad spectrum of attitudes towards media education. These range from emphasising the liberal education tradition and a less direct relationship with employment to more vocationally oriented educators who see their role solely as creating employees. Employment and employability remain central to Irish debates on media education and are key concerns for students who face uncertain career prospects (particularly in the wake of COVID-19) (Bridgstock & Cunningham, 2016; Pollard, 2013). For Thornham and O’Sullivan (2004), employability has always constituted part of the university agenda. For them, traditional academically oriented university education was implicitly understood to create employable graduates since employers

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knew graduates would have critical and analytical skill and cultural capital simply by fact of having a degree. According to this narrative, traditional universities were attended by the privileged few, which was itself an indication of the distinctiveness of the graduate. Added to this were the social class of the graduate, the reputation of the institute, the expectation of deep and critical learning that would take place and the networks of peers that would be formed. Collectively, these created an employable graduate without any given programme having to actively participate in employability initiatives. However, in more recent years and as a consequence of the vocational turn in higher education, graduates are expected (according to policy, industry and students themselves) to have demonstrable skills and training (Thornham & O’Sullivan, 2004: 721–722). Here again we find competing debates about the extent to which employability concerns and industry-­led skills agendas should inform media education. This debate is situated in a concern about media work as precarious and risky. For some, media education is implicated in the shift towards precarious work since media programmes may contain little critique of media industries and perpetuate a romanticised view of the individualisation of risk in media careers (Brienza, 2016; McRobbie, 2018). On the other hand, for Bridgstock and Cunningham, media education must work to prepare students for and support them in entering into precarious work in the media industries and give them tools and skills to manage their careers. They argue that ‘universities, through curriculum reform and rigorous, up-to-date, and research-­ based information about creative careers, need to assume some degree of responsibility for the risk taken on by their creative graduates’ (2016: 21). This idea of risk is significant since it has come to define one of the key problems faced by media graduates entering media work. Because media work is perceived to be risky (Ross, 2003; Deuze, 2007; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011; Gill, 2002) the responsibility for mitigating this risk is, in part, passed on to educators. Despite this risk being associated with an unstable and changing job market, a changing media sector and a shift towards more precarious working conditions, media education positions itself as an antidote to risky work. The Irish media educators we interviewed were cognisant of the interrelation between education and employability, demonstrated concern about, and often grappled with, the recognised riskiness of media work. They also evidenced efforts to mitigate risk and produce employable graduates by providing them with a

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range of skills that would aid graduate employability, although there was sometimes a lack of confidence about success in doing so. Indeed, the literature shows that many students have come to expect that media education will help them develop a suite of skills that will aid their entry into media work (Pollard, 2013). Ashton’s research on media students evidenced that they used their media education to explore professional skills and develop professional identities (2011). In the context of Irish creative education, creative graduates more generally report that their education has insufficiently prepared them in key employment skills (like industry, practice and organisational skills) (O’Brien & Kerrigan, 2020). O’Brien and Kerrigan point to a sense of dissatisfaction among media graduates with the critical and practical skills honed in media education (2020). They suggest that graduates lack an understanding of how skills map onto work. However, Thornham and O’Sullivan caution about the extent to which practical and professionalising skills encroach upon the space once afforded to the development of critical skills (2004). Their research found that, while graduates were more forthcoming in how their practical and creative skills were deployed in work contexts and saw production skills as concomitant with employability, graduates were able to identify relevant soft skills that they developed and were surprised by how valuable their critical skills were to employers (2004: 725–726). This is echoed by Wilmore and Willison who, in their discussion of research skills development in media education, make the case that educators should focus on both immediately obvious as well as less obvious skills that are valuable to graduates. In making their case for the development of ‘a more enduring skill set’ that supports graduates in uncertain employment landscapes they note that some skills are useful and relevant immediately after graduation whereas others become so in the future ‘when increased autonomy and critical thinking are vital for success in different media careers’ (2020: 11). This position is evident in our own research of graduates’ experience of education and employment whereby those who were longer graduated referred to a wider set of skills that they used than those who more recently graduated. Therefore, while immediate demand from industry and from students may be for immediately deployable skills, other skills may not be as obvious or may take more time to nurture. The challenge of developing an ‘enduring set of skills’ is particularly significant for media educators who often aim to develop a broad spectrum of skills including technical, practical, creative, critical,

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communication and interpersonal, and problem solving among others. While it is perhaps futile to attempt to develop the ‘perfect’ set of skills for all graduate eventualities (Bridgstock, 2011), media educators nonetheless grapple with the various skills demands placed on them. At times, media educators are required to be pragmatic and to focus on those skills that they have the means to develop. In Ireland, the underfunding of education more generally means that many media educators interviewed have had to make compromises about or struggled with their media curricula as a result of resource shortages (including staff, facilities and equipment). In addition, tensions often emerge between academic and vocational skills, theory and practice and hard and soft skills (Beacham, 2000; Rowe, 2004; Bell, 2004). In part this evidences the complex origins of media education, coming as it did from a multitude of disciplines including ‘English studies, sociology and vocational media training’ (Thornham & O’Sullivan, 2004: 719). This, in turn, has provided a rich tradition of skills development, but at the same time has often resulted in an uncomfortable alliance between different educators on the same programme vying for the development of different skills. For some media educators interviewed, the pursuit of knowledge about and critical approach to the study of media have an intrinsic value and should not bend to the will of employers (Rowe, 2004: 50; Nussbaum, 2016). For others media education is ideally placed to develop the critical and practical capacities of future media makers. In both cases, the development of useful and meaningful skills is paramount but the extent to which an interrelation between such skills emerges is perhaps less clear. This is evident in the different responses we received from our interviewees on the question of the value and purpose of media education. Time and again, the theme of skills and employability emerged and sometimes competing ideas surfaced around what skills should be developed and what students gained from media education. Discussed in the following section are those concerns which pertain to: questions and concerns about what the role of media education should be; concern about the relationship between industry and education and the ultimate effect this had on students and graduates; cautiousness towards but equally pressure on educators to engage with employability narratives; and ambivalence about the role of educators in routing graduates into precarious work.

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Methodology For this research we carried out 23 interviews3 with a range of people involved in various forms of theory-practice media education including broadcasting, film, photography, games and animation. This included eight representatives from the university sector (five from traditional universities, two from new universities), five from institutes of technology, three from further education and training providers, three involved in local or community media training schemes, and four involved in industry-led education and training schemes. The interviewees’ institutions represented the spectrum of post-secondary education in Ireland and represented the geographical spread of media education across Ireland.4 Those interviewed were mainly programme coordinators although the sample also included tutors, trainers and programme/course developers across various different kinds of programmes. The semi-structured interviews centred on how the respondents defined the education they provided, how and why they developed media curricula, what they saw as the role of media education and education more broadly, how they perceived media students, how they saw the relationship between education and employability, and what they saw as the main challenges in delivering media education. A number of themes and concerns emerged from the interviews, particularly in regard to the relationship between providers and employability. More generally, there was variation in how providers saw this relationship. Although it might be assumed that IoTs were more vocationally oriented and employability-focused, most interviewees were concerned about graduate employability and recognised the precarity of media work, the vulnerability of graduates and the potential for employers and industry to exploit them. However, a number of interviewees were also concerned about the capacity of students to focus on learning and develop not just as economic subjects but as citizens. The Newmanist approach to education was not necessarily a rejection of employability but it did suggest a tension between 3  Twenty-one interviews took the form of phone or video calls. Two were electronic responses. 4  The sample included three representatives from the south-west of Ireland, two from the south-east, four from the west, one from the mid-west, one from the midlands, one from the north-east and the remainder, eleven, based in county Dublin. The concentration of interviewees based in Dublin is representative of the large number of education and training providers in the county and city.

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the expectations of educators, students, the state and employers. Interviewees cited a range of pressures that impacted on their capacity to deliver media education. Many felt pressured by students and by industry to produce work-ready graduates who could evidence a range of skills and competencies. University providers, in particular, struggled to negotiate these demands. These various themes and concerns are addressed in the following section.

The Value of a Media Education Different forms of value were identified as core to a media education. Responses reflected the differing attitudes identified in the literature discussed, with some educators following Haukka (2011) and Wilmore and Willison (2016) in seeing educators as responsible for students’ employability and others lamenting such an instrumentalist approach as discussed by Oakley (2013) and Ashton and Noonan (2011). The question of ‘what a media education is for’ provoked interviewees into defining and, in some sense, justifying their programmes. This was not always an easy task for interviewees since it was clear that many grappled with competing pressures and were concerned with programme branding and identity. As might be imagined, more academically oriented programmes cited critical appreciation of media, intellectual skills development and immersion in media culture among the valued characteristics of a media education. In these responses, educators explained that their students were frequently tasked with engaging in higher order thinking about media platforms, industry and content. The value of this lay in students’ ability to bring this knowledge and this particular way of seeing into the world. In some cases, media education was represented as a means of becoming more socially, politically and culturally aware. In other words, the development of knowledge about media was seen as a means of developing cultural capital. Students would become versed in the language of media and develop analytical and critical skills that would give them deeper insight into how media communicated and how society operated. This was seen as an enriching, exciting and rewarding prospect for students. Respondent M represented this position when they noted that: we want to educate, we want to empower students who are engaged citizens, … we want them to interact with the world differently, because they’ve done this course, you know, and media and film is perfect for that, for

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c­ hallenging … hierarchies and politics and capitalism and consumerism. It’s such a good subject for changing your worldview. (Respondent M)

Media education was also seen as a means through which students developed their critical and political awareness, with one respondent noting that it was important for media education: To foster an awareness of the structures of representation that establish and maintain the status quo and to open the mind to the responsibilities of citizenship in the digital age. To ground this in a sense of history and precedent that shows we have been here before. (Respondent F)

This positioned media education as having a societal value and saw the development and application of knowledge in society as a key attribute of the programme in question. This was echoed elsewhere in responses that saw students’ understanding of media as a valuable and exciting achievement in and of itself. Respondent G also framed the value in terms of viewing the world differently when they noted that students were: really excited about … the tools and the skills, and what a difference it makes to their own kind of personal lives, what it means to be able to … go to the cinema with friends and deconstruct a film, what it means to be able to look at CNN or Fox News and see the difference in kinds of coverage of particular events. (Respondent G)

As well as providing individually beneficial skills, the same respondent cited the way in which media education supported learning about ‘inequalities, injustices social issues, race, class, gender’ that related to media work, media representation and society more generally (Respondent G). Some of the responses emphasised the value of critical, analytical, and communication skills in media education. These responses often came from university-­based providers which, in the context of Irish higher education, have had less requirement to be industry-focused and to demonstrate skills development that aligned with specific industry needs. Vocationally oriented programmes concentrated more on practical, technical and professional skills development, although a number of respondents did stress the societal values of a vocational education too.

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Vocationally oriented respondents reflected the position of Wilmore and Willison (2016) and Haukka (2011) in seeing a direct relationship between education, specific sectoral work, employability and professionalism. One respondent referred to the commercial focus of their programme that helped to steer students towards media work and develop their professional and career identities (Respondent A). For another respondent a vocational degree from a highly rated practice programme was valued by industry. ‘I mean, just having the degree itself is a useful passport into a section of the Irish media industry’ (Respondent E). Media education was seen as a useful way of developing a network for later years (Respondent C). In addition, one respondent was direct in stating that ‘there’s no point delivering this course unless it aligns with the industry and what they want from graduates’ (Respondent K). This relationship between education and industry is discussed elsewhere in this chapter but it is worth noting here the beneficiary of media education in this response – the thing that extracts value from the education – is not students, graduates or society, but industry. Other respondents, in contrast, found value in the societal contribution that graduates could make. This was especially the case where programmes were tied to regional development or to the development of Irish language media production. Here, the value offered by media education was in equal measures individual, economic and societal. One respondent listed key objectives and values of their programme as: societal, linguistic, academic and technical (Respondent D). Other respondents noted the importance of promoting and sustaining a culture of storytelling that was local in terms of talent, production and content (Respondent I; Respondent V). These collective responses demonstrate the diversity of media education provision, a diversity not recognised within the policies discussed in the previous chapter. For example, media education was, in some cases, seen as central to the development of selfhood, citizenship, creativity and community and was valuable insofar as it offered students and graduates a means to express themselves and contribute to society (Leung, 2003; Nussbaum, 2016; Leung & Bentley, 2017). This was important, in particular, for marginalised populations such as those with poor educational outcomes, displaced populations, people with disabilities or underrepresented groups. For respondents engaged in community media education and training, media education was valued for its capacity to give ‘people a platform to use their voice’ (Respondent R). Advocacy, community development and

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engagement and networking were nurtured and sustained through the training programmes which led to lasting connections between people and organisations (Respondent T). Respondent R stressed that the development of production skills was a means through which to achieve other, more altruistic goals such as offering learners agency, a social outlet and community. Respondents R and T also pointed to the value of a formal qualification and certificate of learning for such groups for whom it was important, was part of their self-identity and for which they could be proud (Respondent R; Respondent T). While such education and training were available to those who wished to enter into the media industries, this was not cited as the purpose of such education. For those coming to education with low education outcomes or those returning to education, the capacity to engage in formal production practice and creative practice helped students to explore their professional and creative identities. One respondent noted the maturing effect the engagement in ‘preproduction, production and postproduction’ had on learners. ‘Some of our students would come in to us with very poor Leaving Certs and with very little experience of writing … I suppose that when you see students come through and work on projects from beginning to end and feel a sense of accomplishment doing that – good!’ (Respondent O). The same respondent offered an anecdote of a person who, following redundancy from his profession, returned to undertake a media programme, excelled at it, found that it ‘opened up a side to his life. You know, now he takes photographs all the time. He makes videos all the time’ (Respondent O). These collective responses point to the various ways in which a media education can be valued and used: for industry, for personal fulfilment, for creative expression and for society. Media education, therefore, is not steered or directed by one overall aim and does not aim to respond to a narrow set of objectives. However, in the context of higher education in particular, concerns were raised about the erosion of certain values and the intrusion of other values from outside, particularly from industry.

The Value of the Liberal Education This concern about changing values was interrelated with advocacy for a liberal education. Those who advocated for this type of education felt that certain types of knowledge and understanding (critical, political, intellectual) prepared media graduates well for working life. More vocationally oriented media education was, at times, perceived to interfere

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with the pursuit of a liberal education. Although this perspective emerged mainly in interviews with university educators, it was referred to in interviews with other higher education providers too. Liberal education was held up as an ideal, was associated with a more intellectual education or life, with a mature and worldly student body and with more abstract ideas of virtue and engagement with philosophical and creative pursuits. This education was referred to as ‘transcendent and liberating’ (Respondent M), as functioning to open minds (Respondent F) and as provoking and promoting social and political participation and activism (Respondent D; Respondent G). One passionate response was that the liberal education: educates the individual and changes them and makes their life different to what it would have been had they not gone to university, and gives them the idea that they should be reading and discussing and debating and totally deconstructing everything they thought they knew about the world before they came in all their biases and their background … all of that should be you know, on the table for discussion and pulling apart. And that’s kind of part of the process, especially at undergraduate level, I think … it should be. (Respondent M)

However, liberal education was perceived to be under threat from a number of directions. Student expectations about more practice-centred programmes, the sudden impact of COVID-19 on teaching and learning and the turn towards media-industry-facing education were all cited as frustrations for these same media educators. A few respondents, for example, pointed to the need for more engagement with debate and cited this as a central feature of university life (Respondent D; Respondent G; Respondent M). The decreasing influence of debating societies and the extra-curricular opportunities of political and social participation were perceived to have had a detrimental impact on higher education. There was a perception that less emphasis was placed by institutions, students and educators on ‘the nourishing of intellectual life’ (Axelrod, 2002: 3) and the decline of this was understood as limiting students’ capacity to develop their cultural and intellectual lives, to network and form important academic and social relationships and to interact with a diverse body of people, all of which were understood to be valuable secondary contributions to the media industries (Respondent D; Respondent C). In other words, the media industries would benefit from having a pool of critically and politically

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aware media graduates. Concern was also raised about the turn to remote or off-campus educational delivery which would limit these experiences further (Respondent B). These responses held to the Newmanist tradition that aimed to separate the function of a university education and the demands of industry. This aspiration towards a liberal education often sat uncomfortably with the reality that students faced a volatile jobs market and, perhaps, were not quite convinced that such an education best served their employment needs, as our interviews with graduates reveal and in which they articulate frustration with media education for not providing them with the practical skills they perceived as necessary for employment (see Chap. 5). Instead, students were perceived to be less interested in a liberal education or less capable of critically engaging with ideas and beliefs or of questioning and reflecting upon their own positions. Students were seen as resistant to efforts to engage them in this form of learning. ‘There’s a sort of an impatience with that kind of thing. And, you know, “what’s the point of all this?” And it’s really hard to convince them otherwise’ (Respondent M). This same respondent continued: they’ve been in a very regimented school system … yeah, the notion of, of a more abstract notion of learning that has another function in terms of, you know, expanding your knowledge or understanding of the world. That’s way beyond them. For many of them that’s just too far out there. (Respondent M)

Students were perceived to be more instrumental in their demands on education and less open to the experimentation and testing of ideas associated with a liberal education. This was associated with the marketisation of higher education and the commodification of degrees, which was, in turn, seen as partly responsible or as concomitant with the decline of a liberal education (Respondent M; Respondent C). Equally, industry professionals were perceived to be dismissive of this form of education (Respondent F). It is, perhaps, no surprise that there was correlation between high-­ performing institutes with students from higher social classes and the liberal education model. As Thornham and O’Sullivan suggest, employability was at one time implicitly facilitated by fact of a students’ attendance on such programmes at such prestigious institutions (2004). However, with the reality of greater higher education participation, coupled with the insecure labour market typical of the media industries, employability

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concerns had become more explicit, even in the more prestigious institutions leading to more demand for vocational and professional skills development. Therefore, the ‘pursuit of an intellectual life’ may seem somewhat elitist unless it sits alongside an employability agenda embedded in media programmes. Most educators interviewed acknowledged that there needed to be some association between their programme outcomes and employability. However, there were differing attitudes to industry engagement in education and with employability. These are explored in the following section.

Industry Engagement and Employability Industry engagement and employability were of concern to the interviewees and most acknowledged, following Bridgstock and Cunningham (2016), the extent to which employability was a concern for students, parents, institutions, the state and industry. For many, education was a branch of employment in the sense that education should mimic as much as possible the conditions and features of workplaces and roles. Interviewees also articulated what they thought an employable graduate should be, discussed how their programme helped develop this graduate and showed some concern for the career opportunities made available through study on the programme. However, there was concern about the extent to which employability agendas informed curriculum design and impacted on the learning environment of a campus. Employability was sometimes stressed as one among many outcomes of media education. In these narratives employability was something that the graduate had autonomy over or was seen as a positive externality of a media education. Those more vocationally oriented programmes had employability initiatives embedded in curriculum design and, indeed, this is a feature of IoTs in Ireland where industry representatives sit on programmatic reviews. Training programmes, although often perceived to be more concerned with employability, were not necessarily so. Some programmes, for example, were developed with diversity concerns, community engagement or local talent development as main objectives (Respondent W; Respondent T; Respondent R; Respondent V). On others, employability was an overt goal of programmes or was, at the very least, on the mind of other programme coordinators, particularly in higher education. However, as will be discussed further below, while programmes were often designed with employability in mind and while efforts were made to

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produce industry-connected curricula, there were concerns, echoing that of Oakley (2013) and Rowe (2004) about the extent to which employability, industry or individual companies should play a role in education. In addition, an emphasis on employability was often perceived to come at the expense of the educational experience. More generally, the interviewees all seemed to define education as something separate to training and separate to industry in terms of its role and remit, even with those who sought out more alignment with industry. Among the latter, there was a concern about the risks associated with this, since there was a perception that the media industries change rapidly, thus potentially jeopardising the employment prospects of graduates. Traditional university providers were also concerned with too much alignment with industry, but were more inclined to distance themselves from graduate employability, taking a Newmanist approach to the role of higher education. Across most providers interviewed, nonetheless, there was some effort to include employability-related teaching and learning in curriculum development and design. This included the engagement of industry and the solicitation of letters of industry support on programmatic reviews (Respondent B), the employment of industry panels to act as programme advisors (Respondent H), the regular interviewing of employers and graduates to ensure industry relevance of programmes (Respondent A), having industry practitioners teach on programmes or to review graduate work (Respondent K; Respondent E), and developing industry-facing modules that were closely aligned with specialist industry skills development or business skills development (Respondent K; (Respondent A; Respondent N). The rationale for having industry-facing curricula was reflect in comments such as: we try and have modules that will enable students to be self-starters. So we have entrepreneurship … We also have like a freelancing module to explain how to be a freelancer in film and television. So, again, yeah, we’re trying to equip them to be better off for when they go out into the, into the world, you know. (Respondent K) In recent years, we very explicitly added content … specifically because of the kind of skills market, I suppose, within Dublin in particular, because of the tech companies and the stuff that they’re looking for in terms of media production. (Respondent E)

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Among further and higher educators, a small number provided formal work placements or internships. Other providers had more informal and ad hoc arrangements with companies or would operate as a go-between for companies seeking students and students seeking work. There was, echoing the findings of Berger et al. (2013), an awareness of and concern with the logistical difficulties associated with providing more formalised work-based learning and some providers did not have the time or resources to develop or sustain these. In other institutes, work placements were a central feature of programmes and were an important element of the programme brand. The placement or internship was seen as beneficial not just for the programme but, more crucially, to the personal and professional development of the student. One respondent stressed the value of a work placement for those seeking a career in the audiovisual sector (Respondent K). He stated that it was an ‘essential component’ to any programme since real-life working conditions of production could simply not be replicated in the classroom. ‘There’s no substitute for being actually in the location or in the film set or studio or whatever, you know’ (Respondent K). Work-based learning was said to produce a ‘sea-change’ in the students which helped them mature and embody a professional identity (Respondent D). There was also a recognition of the employment opportunities afforded by placements and internships and these were incentives for programme coordinators to sustain industry connections (Respondent E). Respondent K noted that ‘A lot of our guys do get work as a result of the work placement. It’s a big, big advantage’. Thus, the placements and internships both helped with acclimatising students to the world of work and in providing actual employment either during studies or following graduation. However, a number of practical issues were identified in the coordination of work placements, internships or work opportunities facilitated through programmes. The lack of oversight of some employers resulted in poor student experiences in some cases (Respondent A; Respondent E). Respondent A became more wary of connecting students with employers as a result of a student’s bad experience with an employer. In addition, one coordinator of a university-based and industry collaborative programme noted the long working hours and competing responsibilities that students faced (Respondent D). In this sense, there was a risk of disadvantaging the student who might be unable to meet the academic or industry requirements of the programme due to overwork. However, one of the main concerns was practical: internships and placements were cited as

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incredibly difficult to manage without a fully resourced office to support them (Respondent C; Respondent E; Respondent M), with Respondent E noting: So you need such a massive resource [to support internships and placements] … and not just those internships and then supervising them and recheck from year to year and make sure like, it’s, I don’t think it’s worth to, like you also need the time in the degree program.

Issues around GDPR were also cited as a concern from the industry-­ side and one respondent noted that a major work-based learning provider had ceased to provide such opportunities as a result of this (Respondent K). While work-based learning was generally viewed positively, if not difficult to manage, there was far more caution about the role industry needs and demands should play in media education. Those from more academically oriented programmes were particularly anxious about how prominent employability featured on the curriculum, in educational life more generally and in the student voice. Elsewhere, providers felt that industry was hostile to education, did not fully understand it, was not sympathetic to its role and remit and was not really clear about what it wanted either. One respondent pointed to poor industry attitudes to media education and students. ‘There’s a certain hostility to third level. As though it’s somehow removed from life and that somehow comes through in the idea that students are meant to have the skills for employment’ (Respondent H). This attitude was also noted by a respondent who pointed to the hypocrisy of employers who criticised media graduates as unemployable yet went on to employ them. And also, employers like to complain, especially about media graduates, that’s a big thing in media … but actually they do want those graduates, you know, and they do admire third-level education, especially, you know, a liberal arts education or, or anything with a degree in arts at the end of it, and is still on a pedestal. So it’s very worth having. (Respondent C)

As demonstrated in our chapter on industry, however, media employers often had a realistic sense of what skills a media graduate would have. They valued the development of soft skills and employers were prepared to invest time and training in the development of harder or role-specific skills.

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Nonetheless, educators were ambivalent about the relationship between education and industry. Although there was a recognition that there was a responsibility to support students in their career journeys and to help prepare them for working life, there was a distinct wariness about how proximate industry was to education, what kinds of demands industry made of education and how students engaged with employability efforts. As one respondent put it, ‘You can end up bending over backwards to facilitate what industry wants’ (Respondent N). Among more vocationally oriented programmes, there was worry that over-specialisation for particular careers and roles would backfire on students and programmes, especially if such roles became redundant or evolved (Respondent E; Respondent N). One respondent lamented the level of industry-directed curricula materialising in their institution and was very hesitant to do the same on their programme. ‘I’ve seen [within their institution] examples where that [industry-­led curriculum design] has been taken to ludicrous extremes, to which undergrad programmes are basically specific training programmes’ (Respondent E). This respondent believed that this was detrimental to students since it was ‘probably harming people’s chances because they’re so dependent on one certain subset of jobs that it was designed for’ (Respondent E). In addition, industry was said to have too many demands, changing demands (Respondent N) or, as one respondent said, ‘not even employers are sure about what they want either’ (Respondent B). The wariness of industry was, perhaps, more pronounced among those with a background in industry. Their dual status as educators and media industry professionals meant that they could recognise industry needs but did not wish to bow to them as their responsibilities lay with students first (Ashton, 2011). For some providers, efforts to develop an employable cohort of students were impeded by the students themselves. One respondent noted students’ resistance to business-centred and professionalisation modules (Respondent A). Conversely another respondent lamented that students did want business-centred and entrepreneurial subjects but on fashionable topics only, stating that ‘a high percentage of current secondary school students think courses on how to become an influencer should be taught. That made me sad’ (Respondent F). Students were also perceived to be disinterested in industry-facing initiatives. ‘They’ll sit in the editing lab working on their own stuff, instead of walking a few steps over to the auditorium to listen to someone who’s just been funded by, you know, Screen Ireland’ (Respondent M). Linking industry with education and

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facilitating graduate employability was a constant challenge for most  – even among those providers who had developed quite robust and industry-­ facing programmes  – with some noting the personal and professional sacrifices that had to be made and the extensive effort that had to be put into creating programmes that helped create employable graduates (Respondent E; Respondent N; Respondent J).

Precarity and Exploitation Brienza (2016) and McRobbie (2018) suggest that media educators implicate themselves in the facilitation of precarious media work by producing large numbers of graduates for a small number of jobs. In our interviews with educators, many media educators were indeed concerned about the prospects for students and the challenges of establishing creative careers. Even among those educators who could evidence good track records in graduate employment in the media industries, much effort was required to best prepare students for what was recognised as a changing media industry and a volatile jobs market more generally. Different approaches were taken, with some looking to support students into non-­ media organisations and industries (perhaps doing media work) and other providers trying to give students the broadest set of skills ‘so that when they graduate they can apply to different areas’ (Respondent K). This approach recognised the applications of a media education beyond the media industries, echoing Stuart Cunningham’s argument that creativity and the skills associated with it can occupy multiple locations (2014: 26). Other educators saw specialisation as the best route to employability, where curriculum centred on the development of specific technical skills. However, one respondent reflected on the problems associated with this move. ‘Then the larger question is “are we producing employees that are going working on service-side production or are we working on content creation?”’ ‘Largely speaking the Irish [media-specific] sector is servicing’ (Respondent N). While such graduates were employable, the respondent noted that they would not be content creators or directors since the programme lacked the critical, analytical and soft skills associated with those who create. The respondent noted that Irish-educated workers effectively serviced foreign-made content at the cost of indigenous IP (Respondent N). This created a workforce highly dependent on foreign production and ‘the drug of tax breaks’ (Respondent N). Even among those ‘successful’

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programmes employability was not understood as a given and concerns remained about the career opportunities available to graduates. Many media educators, echoing the critical scholarship on creative work and precarity (Deuze, 2007; Gill & Pratt, 2008; Ross, 2009), were worried about the lack of job opportunities available to graduates and recognised the media industries as a place of insecure employment and poor financial reward. Some blamed the industry for this. ‘Many years ago “media studies” was a pathway into a new kind of communications job. Not anymore’ (Respondent F). Another respondent blamed the new media technology companies for asking too much of graduates: ‘they’re not as willing as media production companies might have been in the past to take them on and do lots of training … They’re looking for them [graduates] exactly ready’ (Respondent E). Others viewed lack of employment as simply an inherent feature of the media industries. ‘With [the programme] a lot of [students] want to be writers and … they’re not going to be’ (Respondent H). Another respondent saw the challenge of getting media work as almost insurmountable ‘And I do really worry about the precarity of employment in the industry as well. It’s really hard. It’s really difficult to get ongoing work’ (Respondent M). Many educators saw it as their duty to prepare students for this during their time in education and referred to ‘warning’ students about the challenges that lay ahead, reflecting Noonan’s argument for the need ‘to balance this enthusiasm for the future with an understanding of some of the uncomfortable realities of the industry’ (2013: 148). In some cases, students were told outright about the lack of careers in media. ‘From first year … we really do spell out the reality of the industry … We make it clear to them that not everybody is going to get work out of it’ (Respondent K). ‘When it comes to the likes of open days and stuff, I’m brutally honest with people that come in …’ (Respondent A). One respondent acknowledged that this message was not always heard by students. ‘One of the things we find difficult is to convince them [students] that they need to have a Plan B’ (Respondent H). Educators had a heightened awareness of the exploitative nature of the media industries and media work and, as Oakley outlined in her discussion of experiential learning, recognised the potential for exploitation to be facilitated by educators (2013: 33). They recognised when and how exploitation was happening either to students, to graduates and more widely in the industries. Some were very alert to attempts to use students as free workers and were careful to protect students from such

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exploitation. One respondent noted some cases where companies had sought out students for work and expected professional work for no pay (Respondent A). Another programme coordinator said that such requests were very common so much so that students and other teaching staff were warned about the exploitative nature of them. The respondent had a system for managing such requests, which included reminding requesters of the illegality of some of their requests (Respondent E). In addition, the industry was noted for its low pay and poor working conditions which impacted on graduates in particular. ‘It seems to be a lot of people taking advantage with very low paid and rubbish internships’ (Respondent E). One respondent noted that creative workers were often self-employed and this placed them – and especially women – at a distinct disadvantage in Irish society and resulted in really poor outcomes for many: We have a lot of work to do in this country really. And I think in terms of how we value our creatives, and looking at the situation right now [in response to COVID-19] … some people are really, really drowning. And I think we’ve … a problem in this country in [that] we don’t value anyone that’s self-employed. You know, if you’re self-employed in Ireland, you can’t have a baby, can’t get sick, and you can’t do anything … I know really, really brilliant people that are very, very poor, that are making absolutely incredible work and they’re very well known, and they’re very poor, and their mental health and everything is suffering. (Respondent A)

This placed educators in a paradoxical position: both warning students and graduates about ‘bad work’ (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011) while at the same time steering graduates towards that same industry (McRobbie, 2018). Given this perception of the industry as difficult to enter, to sustain a career in and to earn money in, educators, therefore, saw their role as giving students the best set of skills that would best help them in their graduate lives. However, what skills best served graduates were not agreed, upon as evident in the next and final section.

Graduate Skills Although some educators took an approach of specialisation, most programmes saw that a broad range of skills was necessary to negotiate graduate life. It was largely felt that a combination of critical, analytical, creative, technical and professional skills would support students in graduate life.

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While most respondents referred to the skills useful for graduate careers, some were keen to stress that skills development was useful for the person, citizen and society and not just for graduate careers. This was especially the case among respondents representing more academically oriented programmes who were focused on how the development of the student-as-­ citizen was a goal in-and-of-itself. Even with these cases, it was important that educators were able to articulate and identify the knowledge and abilities that students should gain throughout their period of study. Thus, despite the variations in programmes – ranging from general to specialised and sitting across a spectrum of practice and theory – there was a consistent sense that graduates should have confidence that they have enough of a ‘suite’ of skills and enough of a grounding in a particular discipline to prepare them for ‘adult life’. This was especially important, given the educators’ perception of the media industries as unstable (particularly since the research interviews were undertaken as the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the economy and media production). Because the industry was in constant flux, there was an overall sense that media educators should not totally align curricula with industry. In addition, media educators were often not able to keep up with technical changes in the sectors. Therefore, the skills and qualities that graduates were thought to benefit from most related to: ability to research, critical thinking, analytical thinking, understanding of professionalism, communication and interpersonal skills, problem solving, social and political awareness, practical and technical abilities. This wide variation in skills was recognised as a challenge to deliver since Irish media education is typically underfunded and understaffed (Respondent K; Respondent M; Respondent K). Most educators emphasised some skills more than others – particularly in regard to the balance of practice and theory  – and aimed to, at the least, develop a baseline of general, transferable and subject-specific skills. While the needs of industry were certainly on the minds of these educators, it was understood that the industry was a separate entity to education and that its demands, while important for educators to understand and consider, did not dictate even the most vocational of programmes. Ultimately, what was clear was the responsibility of the educator towards the student and graduate. In this sense, educators perceived their ‘contract’ to be primarily with the student even when there was also a perceived commitment to society and industry. The skills developed by students, according to respondents, should benefit and aid them in their graduate lives more generally and

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support them in their personal endeavours as well as their careers and regardless of whether they did media work or non-media work. One respondent stated that graduates themselves saw this as the value of media education: But what a lot of them have come back and said is, even though some of them haven’t ended up in whatever traditional [media] job, is, that they’ve used … all of their skills. And they all say that, that they recognise their ability to research, their ability to come up with an idea, put a project together, and use different platforms, all of that. They recognise that they got that from their time studying. And they’ve been able to put that into different areas of their life and their professional lives. (Respondent A)

Ultimately, media education sees skills development as part of a wider development of the graduate and, while many educators are concerned with supporting graduates in seeking out media work, few see this as their only goal. This is, of course, somewhat at odds with perception of media education held in media policy and by media graduates, who expect a closer alignment between media education and media work.

Conclusion This research suggests, then, that media education does not offer a clear route to media work. This does not necessarily represent a failure of media education, rather that media education serves more purposes than preparing graduates for media work. Graduates of media education can pursue careers in a wide number of sectors beyond the media industries. In addition, media work itself is subject to the ebbs and flows of the media industries in Ireland. The past 15 years have seen two major economic upheavals which have both impacted on the structure and employment opportunities in the media industries in Ireland. Not only has this changed the volume of work available but also labour conditions. Media educators, recognising this, take a pragmatic approach to media education by developing curricula that promote skills valuable in personal and professional life and by helping students to become adaptable, resilient and confident. However, this can pose a challenge since students typically value those skills most recognisable as ‘media skills’ and resist the very skills that prepare them for a challenging work life. In addition, the holistic approach to education taken by some media educators is not always rationalised or

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justified to students and graduates who often enter into media education with the expectation of subsequently attaining work specifically in the media industries (O’Brien & Kerrigan, 2020). This is reflective, then, of a continued discordance between education, policy, industry and workers.

Bibliography Ashton, D. (2011). Industry Practitioners in Higher Education: Values, Identities and Cultural Work. In D.  Ashton & C.  Noonan (Eds.), Cultural Work and Higher Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ashton, D., & Noonan, C. (Eds.). (2011). Cultural Work and Higher Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Axelrod, P. (2002). Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace and the Trials of Liberal Education. London: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Banks, M., & Hesmondhalgh, D. (2009). Looking for Work in Creative Industries Policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15(4), 415–430. Beacham, J. (2000). The Value of Theory/Practice Media Degrees. Journal of Media Practice, 1(2), 85–97. Bell, D. (2004). Practice Makes Perfect? Film and Media Studies and the Challenge of Creative Practice. Media, Culture & Society, 26(5), 737–749. Berger, R., Wardle, J., & Zezulkova, M. (2013). No Longer Just Making the Tea: Media Work Placements and Work-Based Learning in Higher Education. In D.  Ashton & C.  Noonan (Eds.), Cultural Work and Higher Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bridgstock, R. (2011). Skills for Creative Industries Graduate Success. Education + Training, 53(1), 9–25. Bridgstock, R., & Cunningham, S. (2016). Creative Labour and Graduate Outcomes: Implications for Higher Education and Cultural Policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22(1), 10–26. Brienza, C. (2016). Degrees of (Self-)Exploitation: Learning to Labour in the Neoliberal University. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1), 92–111. Cunningham, S. (2014). Creative Labour and Its Discontents: A Reappraisal. In G. Hearn, R. Bridgstock, B. Goldsmith, & J. Rodgers (Eds.), Creative Work Beyond the Creative Industries: Innovation, Employment and Education. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Deuze, M. (2007). Media Work. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gill, R. (2002). Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-­ Based New Media Work in Euro. Information, Communication & Society, 5(1), 70–89. Gill, R., & Pratt, A. (2008). In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness, and Cultural Work. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(7–8), 1–30. Haukka, S. (2011). Education-to-Work Transitions of Aspiring Creatives. Cultural Trends, 20(1), 41–64.

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Hesmondhalgh, D. (2018). The Cultural Industries (4th ed.). London: SAGE. Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2011). Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries. London: Routledge. Higher Education Authority. (2018). All Graduates by Level and Field of Study 2017. [Online] Available at: https://hea.ie/statistics-­archive/. Accessed 26 July 2020. Hunt, C. (2011). National Strategy for Higher Education 2030. Higher Education Authority. [Online] Available at: https://hea.ie/assets/uploads/2017/06/ National-­Strategy-­for-­Higher-­Education-­2030.pdf. Accessed 28 June 2020. Leung, L. (2003). Experience Design: Practising What We Preach When Negotiating Technological and Educational Interdisciplinarity. E-Learning for the Creative Industries: Create.ed 2003 Conference Proceedings. [Online] Available at: https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/7493/1/ 2003001633.pdf. Accessed 26 July 2020. Leung, L., & Bentley, N. (2017). Producing Leisured Laborers: Developing Higher Education Courses for the Digital Creative Industries. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 47(2), 148–160. McRobbie, A. (2018). Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Oxford: Polity Press. Noonan, C. (2013). Smashing Childlike Wonder? The Early Journey into Higher Education. In D.  Ashton & C.  Noonan (Eds.), Cultural Work and Higher Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Nussbaum, M. (2016). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Oakley, K. (2013). Making Workers: Higher Education and the Cultural Industries Workplace. In D.  Ashton & C.  Noonan (Eds.), Cultural Work and Higher Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Oakley, K. (2013). Making Workers: Higher Education and the Cultural Industries Workplace. In D.  Ashton & C.  Noonan (Eds.), Cultural Work and Higher Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave. O’Brien, A., & Kerrigan, P. (2020). Work Story: New Entrants’ Narrations of Their Aspirations and Experiences of Media Production Work. In Taylor S. & Luckman S. (Eds.), Pathways into Creative Working Lives. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ross, A. (2003). The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ross, A. (2009). Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York: New York University Press. Rowe, D. (2004). Contemporary Media Education: Ideas for Overcoming the Perils of Popularity and the Theory-Practice Split. Journal of Media Practice, 5(1), 43–58. Thornham, S., & O’Sullivan, T. (2004). Chasing the Real: ‘Employability’ and the Media Studies Curriculum. Media, Culture & Society, 26(5), 717–736. Wilmore, M., & Willison, J. (2016). Graduates’ Attitudes to Research Skill Development in Undergraduate Media Education. Asia Pacific Media Educator, 26(1), 113–128.

CHAPTER 4

University Graduates from the Perspective of Creative Industries Employers

Abstract  This chapter explores how media industries in Ireland view graduates of third-level education provision within the sector. The chapter gathers general attitudes towards media graduates amongst traditional, new and emerging media companies and platforms. What is valued or dismissed by these agencies in terms of the key knowledge, skills and learning outcomes of graduates is captured in this engagement. The perspectives of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ media employers on a number of key issues are documented, which include: how they understand the idea of media education and graduate profiles; how they see their companies further shaping the skills, training and education of new entrants; how they see new graduates in terms of the sustainability of media work and where they see the career futures of graduates in light of the changing nature of media work. Keywords  Media Employers • Creative Industries • Third-Level Education • Emerging Skills

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. O’Brien et al., Media Graduates at Work, Creative Working Lives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66033-8_4

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Introduction While policy and educational agendas seem to be somewhat at odds, as outlined in the preceding chapters, there is moreover a dearth of research on the nature of the engagement between higher education and industry when it comes to media work. While there is an extensive and growing international literature on graduate entrants, it mainly reports the perspective and concerns of the graduates rather than their employers (Bridgestock, 2011; Haukka, 2010; Aston & Noonan, 2013). There is a gap in research that explores how industry or employers view graduates of higher education programmes focused on media work. This chapter addresses that question by exploring how employers in audiovisual and digital communications companies currently see higher education graduates and the relevancy of the skills typically gained in an undergraduate media or communications degree programme.

Methodology This analysis of interviews with 13 employers across television, film, digital media and NGO communications organisations elaborate the skills that such employers value in graduate employees. Representatives with responsibility for recruitment from each of the three national broadcasters were interviewed as well as from two independent film and television production companies and three digital content production companies were included. A further three organisations worked in the advocacy, non-­ government or civil voluntary organisation communications sphere. Two public sector organisations were included through representatives from their communications offices. All of the employers were approached because they were some of the most significant or larger-sized organisations in the media sector. Employers were told that the researchers were employed by a university, were engaged in curriculum design and were particularly interested to capture the perspective of graduate employers on higher education in media-related disciplines in Ireland. As mentioned in the introduction we approach the idea of media work quite broadly. There is a strong emphasis on audiovisually oriented work, but the employers are not only from film and television production, instead other organisations that seek audiovisually adept graduates to work in digital content production for communications organisations are also included. Most innovatively we include responses from organisations that are not traditional

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media companies at all but which over the course of the last 10 years have recognised a need to employ media graduates with strong communications competencies to work in content creation. Some organisations were selected for interview because of their salient position in creative industries, that is in broadcasting, film, digital production or communications work more broadly. Some organisations were very large with over 2000 employees and some were SMEs with less than 10 employees. This is reflective of the reality of media work where a broad range of businesses are included in the definition of the sector. All interviews were semi-structured, and questions ranged from exploring what kinds of skills employers valued, to the weight they put on experience, to discussions of perceived gaps in graduates’ learning and the role of internships in graduate entry to industry. All interviews were recorded and transcribed, data was coded and key themes emerged across all of the cases. These themes were analysed and are presented below as the main findings from the engagement with employers. In sum the employers did see and appreciate that graduates have valuable work-relevant skills, named ‘initiative’ as an important graduate attribute and underscored a commitment specifically to recruiting graduates, most commonly those with a 2.1 degree result, which was often seen as a basic entry requirement for work in the creative industries. Each of these findings is outlined in detail below.

Employers See Graduates as Skilled As was noted in Chap. 3, skills acquisition has become one of the key means of assessing the usefulness of an education and of a worker, by determining what skills have been gained and what skills graduates can demonstrate and use. This means that educators and educational agencies like QQI and the HEA can provide a fairly systematic way of identifying and measuring skills that are available also to industry. However there seems to be a tendency for industry not to engage with higher education in this way. Interviewees did not claim to have any close formal relationship with education and did not see themselves as particularly proximate to or influential of higher education institutions. Nonetheless employers had a clear sense of the attributes that they valued in graduates. The skills that employers named as important for graduates included core production skills such as storytelling and research. They also saw more general or ‘soft’ skills as important and named teamwork and broad thinking skills as important for media workers. With regard to technical skills, employers

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were not overly preoccupied for the most part with specific technical capacities that met their needs. In contradiction of the SSI agenda and the ambition of some institutes of technology who were concerned primarily with technical skills, employers instead recognised that a broader approach to learning general technical competencies would better serve graduates who could specialise further and continue to learn throughout their careers. Storytelling Skills With regard to storytelling skills, both broadcast and digital content producers named this as key. There was a sense that while social media offered new avenues for articulating this capacity, nonetheless the fundamental ability to recognise and shape a story was still a core requirement and one in which graduates should be adept. The ability to find or recognise a good story and to research and source the best participants to tell the story was named by all broadcasters as vital to their work. ‘The two big things for us would be people who were good at recognising what a good story is … and research, finding good people, and having the ability to get the best out of people’ (B). That ‘traditional’ skill of telling a story clearly was valued equally in the NGO communications sector. As one charity employer commented ‘you’re still looking for people who have those traditional skills which are  – able to write, put together statements, press releases, articles, and can do that quickly and … communicate it in simple language that people will understand’ (I). Even in digital content agencies storytelling ability was still highly prized. As one content production company that worked exclusively in digital platforms observed, ‘How to craft a narrative doesn’t change … The media have shifted, but the clear content, the targeted audience, the delivery methods really haven’t shifted … you have to be able to figure out the beginning, middle and end of a message and make it relevant to the audience that you’re giving it to’ (H). Employers were clear that (younger) graduates were perceived to be particularly well placed to adapt their storytelling capacities to the requirements of social media platforms. This was explicitly presented by employers as an area in which current graduates could excel and where they held an advantage over more senior employees ‘because an awful lot of us who have been in here a long time don’t have skills in that area’ (A). Consequently, for broadcasters ‘as a young person coming into this industry, a sense of data and digital and online and all of that space … if you

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have a good knowledge of that and a good ability to be able to delve into it and simplify it, then you’re really on a very strong footing’ (A). Advocacy and NGO communications offices similarly saw understanding numerous dimensions of social media as an advantage to graduates, who they argued should have content creation skills but also platform management and engagement skills. One charity employer saw that video, visual and written content were needed in greater proportions than ever before to feed ‘multiple social pages, websites, newsletters … and probably three or four direct mail appeals every year’ (I). In this way desirable ‘storytelling skills incorporated a technical capacity to appropriately execute the story. Equally charities were clear that graduates needed to have ‘quite technical knowledge of how to run the back end of Facebook … almost like a digital marketing role … the search engine optimisation tricks … knowing how to actually get (the message) to the right audiences’ (I). Here technical skills are meaningful because they are aligned with storytelling skills, one doesn’t entirely make sense without the other. The importance of storytelling for social was echoed strongly by exclusively digital content producers who saw these skills as vital for new entrants but also ‘very normal now’ employers were clear that ‘people should have knowledge of how to operate on the different platforms’ (G) and understand ‘best practice (and) adapt to whatever environment they’re in’ (H). Here the digital employers were clear that storytelling for social needed additional skill or understanding of how the digital experience can be delivered. As one digital employer described, ‘in digital you are dealing with a very distracted audience. So, an understanding of what makes storytelling work when your audience is essentially not a captive audience … the user experience … I think the more and the deeper the understanding students get within college of that the better’ (F). In sum, storytelling was central both to good content and the technical capacity to communicate content, which in turn was also associated with research skills to support storytelling. The industry position was that there was a need for a holistic set of compatible skills as opposed to segmented specialisation that was foregrounded by policy and training agencies. Research Skills Alongside storytelling skills, research was similarly deemed a core competency by broadcasters, independent producers and digital content companies. For broadcasters the role of researcher was one of the main entry-level

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roles. But all content producers were clear that research was a key skill which was not done online but was instead highly relational. This meant that graduates should have the necessary communication skills to contact, meet and discuss issues and research topics with people who they cold-­ called. As one independent television producer described ‘we don’t Google, so we if we need legal advice, we find a lawyer. We talk to them. We ask them questions … we actually have to build relationships with people’ (C). This was a skill that she believed was not ‘focused on in the way that it should’ in undergraduate programmes (C). This ability to engage people in the research process was similarly valued in digital production ‘Really important is the ability to research … I mean find somebody to interview, not go to Google and Wikipedia … like we cold-call. We find people … the best person … to get the best product at the end’ (H). Even for more corporate digital producers research was seen as a central skill ‘even if you are a corporate you’re still talking to people …. a lot of people just think you’ve to be clever with words to communicate on a corporate level but that’s not the point. If people can’t understand what you’re talking about then there’s no point … we’re talking to people’ (G). Research was clearly linked to optimising programme content, and interview skills were seen as important in translating material into usable content. As one digital producer commented ‘how do I interview someone so that they feel heard and I also get the information that I need in an efficient, timely way, because I don’t have time to sift through an hour and a half of an interview that goes nowhere. Structuring the interview. Knowing the narrative … and yet the skill they lack is the research’ (H). In advocacy organisations that research skill of contacting people directly was also highly valued ‘to be comfortable cold-calling people … approaching someone and get the information you need to do the work that you have to do … that’s vital’ (J). However, while respondents were clear that research was a key skill necessary for the type of jobs they were recruiting for, some respondents did state that this skill could be delivered more effectively within undergraduate programmes. In particular some employers saw graduates’ ease with social media as a barrier to their engagement with people in the research and interviewing process. As one broadcaster put it ‘we do find that an awful lot of them are living on their phones and that it is impacting on their connections and capability to communicate with people and that is a very big negative for them … you really have to put the interviewee first and try and understand them to try and deliver a really good story’ (A).

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The overriding sense was that graduates were not adequately focused on core research and people skills and were overly inclined to rely on online sources as a default approach to production. This is a concern that needs to map into curriculum more explicitly at undergraduate level. Higher educators tend to interpret research skills in terms of their own practices of research, as an academic knowledge-generating skill, and this may need to shift and expand to incorporate a more industry-relevant parallel understanding of research as a practice of generating narrative and programme content, which is also generally produced at a difference pace. Moreover, the macro-level, policy-led focus on technical skills does not address this gap in research and storytelling skills, which because they do not sell well as ‘hard’ skills, tend to get ignored. This is duplicated by students themselves who value technical skills because they are tangible or identifiable rather than valuing other necessary ‘soft’ skills like research and narrative skills, which are not as readily identifiable or understood to be marketable. Broad Thinking Skills As well as storytelling and research skills, employers also named teamwork and thinking skills as important graduate attributes. For approximately one quarter of the respondents there was clear recognition and understanding that higher education institutions’ graduates had valuable thinking skills. As one respondent from a broadcast organisation articulated ‘I think the advantage of coming out of universities and ITs is people have broad thinking skills or just broader analytical skills’ (B). Digital production respondents similarly articulated the value of a capacity to think ‘it’s important to do a lot in terms of creative and critical thinking … What do we know about why we like things, (thinking) about what you’re doing or why something was so engaging or why something missed the mark? So that kind of critical piece helps people then create …’ (H). Independent film employers also cited an understanding of the industry as one of the benefits of a media degree. As one independent producer put it ‘understanding of the industry on the theory side … I don’t mean kind of very academic film studies. I mean more of the theory of how things get made, who does what, how do you get from when you come up with an idea to actually see a programme, the actual practice of making TV shows … a good understanding of those’ (D).

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A broad sociological perspective on digital practice was also named as an important aspect of graduates’ thinking abilities and key to their employability. Understanding digital transformation, digital disruption, digital innovation, an understanding of the type of things that led to the current digital landscape … and the impact that will have to change the markets going forward … That knowledge or holistic understanding of things will help people be prepared to apply for jobs in three years’ time that probably don’t exist today (F).

The fact that only one quarter of respondents were explicitly aware or cognisant of the capacity for critical reflection engendered in undergraduate programmes points to a possible deficit in how well universities are executing this learning outcome. It may also highlight the need for universities to better present key thinking skills as core outcomes of degrees and to engage more effectively with interested sectors to clarify that aspect of graduate outcomes. An ability to work within teams was valued by all employers across NGO communications, corporate, digital, independent and broadcast companies. For some respondents this was a singularly relevant skill for graduates to have mastered. As one broadcaster put it ‘I think the most important thing is the ability to work in teams’ (A). The reasons offered for teamwork being paramount included the most obvious one  – being able to deal with ‘different personalities and capabilities’ and yet meet a deadline and deliver a programme. Teamwork and communication skills were connected by employers to problem-solving abilities when productions became challenging. A key capacity was that graduates would know how to seek assistance and engage with team members to problem-solve. ‘Everyone is still figuring things out at some point. So, you have to be able to listen …. like be able to ask for help, like if they’re stuck, that they ask for help … that’s what we need to be teaching’ (H). One employer, who recruited a lot for live television production, connected people skills with a capacity for flexibility, which helped workers to adapt to the constantly changing requirements of live production. As she noted ‘it’s the personable skills (that matter) can they stay calm … can they meet a lot of people … how much can they adapt? How much can they think on their feet or be flexible whatever comes to be?’ (E).

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Other ways in which teamwork was seen as important spoke to the often freelance and heavily networked nature of television and film production in particular, where an ability to deal with people was key to ongoing recruitment across a range of productions. As one independent producer explained ‘We work in an industry that’s very people focused working with big teams of people … it’s also a very project-based industry. So, you get a gig and then the next week you’ll have a whole new team of people, or you may be hired based on how well you worked within a certain team in the previous production’ (D). Teamwork skills were also recognised by employers as widely transferable skills that were valuable beyond media production work. ‘I think that soft skills are very important because they underpin your success no matter what role you end up in … the soft skills to communicate and articulate a vision (and) to be able to bring that through the delivery chain or pipeline to get to realising your vision … that’s really valuable’ (F). When it came to how well employers thought graduates had adequate exposure to or understanding of teamwork there was some ambivalence evident. As two different employers stated ‘strong organisation skills, people skills, softer skills rather than your traditional technical skills. I feel those can be somewhat lacking’ (C). One employer questioned whether these skills were teachable ‘that whole soft skill thing … I don’t know how you teach it’ (E). This again points to the failure of educators to articulate exactly where soft skills are embedded in the practice work that students undertake in group or team situations. Indeed, this may need to be more clearly defined and articulated in policy and in educational qualification frameworks. The acquisition of soft skills could also be better presented both to undergraduate students themselves who sometimes ‘miss’ the point of group-based assignments and also to employers who don’t see where graduates have been exposed to team dynamics and soft skill acquisition within their degree programmes. While storytelling, research, teamwork and thinking skills were valued by employers as graduate attributes, many employers were preoccupied with discerning the type and range of technical skills that were useful to graduates on entering industry. Technical Skills Only one employer spoke of wanting graduates to have a high-level of training on a particular software that the company used, advising that higher education institutions should focus more on ‘technical skills, more

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in line with the systems that we use’ (E). All other employers took a much more nuanced and macro perspective on the question of what technical skills were valuable to graduates. However, because respondents came from radio, television, film, PR and digital production backgrounds, a very broad range of potential technical skills were mentioned. One broadcast employer summarised the relative importance of technical aptitudes across those various platforms. ‘Radio in particular, they would really be lost unless they really can do what they’re in to do … with radio you need to be able to broadcast … online, unless you can write then it’ll be very hard … with television … maybe not as much because an awful lot of it can be learnt on the job’ (A). However, broadcasters did not see technical skills as static but rather dynamic. A new concern was with short-form production ‘What’s becoming really important at the minute is the whole MoJo skills, being able to actually create pieces of content on their phones … whether they’re proposals, or a pitch, or part of a program, or little inserts within the program, or the whole promotional social media’ (B). Sometimes ‘technical’ skills were interpreted as not so much technology based but rather in the sense of ‘technical’ as key insider industry-­ relevant skills. Here technical knowledge that was seen as valuable included ‘the whole legal side of things … and funding, how to navigate funding opportunities … there’s a lot of practical things like IT skills …’. Another independent producer concurred, while placing stronger emphasis on broader life skills ‘Basic computer skills … driving a car … Microsoft Excel, they can’t use really basic admin stuff because I think they feel that’s not part of their function within the media world, but actually those abilities are really, really key and important’ (C). Another digital producer mentioned that while many graduates know how to use platforms, they did not necessarily appreciate copyright from a commercial, legal or business perspective. As she put it ‘knowing copyright and all that kind of thing when it comes to content creation. Just because it’s out there on the internet does not mean it’s yours to take, it’s one of those most valuable skills to learn’ (G). Another digital company saw production coordination as an important ‘technical’ skill for graduates to have ‘project coordination … knowing who is the main point of contact … who is doing what and when and what’s the implication of this item not getting done … What needs to be done in order to get to the next point?’ (G). These skills are implicit in many student projects, where students tend to become focused on more obvious or concrete skills, such as for instance

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learning ‘Avid’ or cameras, while missing the point that other ‘technical’ skills such as production coordination or copyright clearance are embedded in projects. There seems to be a need to make graduates explicitly aware of these ‘other’ technical skills that remain implicit in their understanding of their learning. Indeed, there may be a need to examine the use of language such as ‘technical’ to describe soft, or broad or non-technical skills. As is clear from this analysis these skills are as valued by industry as the more concrete operational type of technical skills. Interestingly, employers were on the whole slow to lay the burden of teaching all of these technical skills on higher education institutions. As one broadcaster put it ‘I’m not sure that rests with the courses in college to do that part of it. I think that’s somewhat transitionary when you like come out of college into jobs’ (B). Similarly, an independent producer was clear that students would not be ‘job ready’ in terms of technical ability until they were steeped in the practices of everyday work with those technologies. As she said ‘Whether it’s editing, camera, sound or whatever … You will never learn it as well as you will learn it when you’re practically doing it on the technical side. We get people who say I specialise in sound, but really we treat them as if they’re walking in off the street, that’s the reality of it …’ (D). Digital producers were similarly clear that technical skills were dynamic and that higher education institutions could not address the rapidly changing technologies that industry regularly adopted. ‘I think that technically being able to produce a project yourself isn’t just something you can complete in a degree course, because by the time you know how to do one thing there will be something slightly different out there’ (F). In short, there was a very realistic sense amongst respondents of how ‘technical’ a degree programme could get and employers were cognisant of their own responsibility to further train graduates, while at the same time naming clearly the technical skills that employers valued in potential employees. In sum, the skills that were named by industry respondents as important to graduates included abilities to tell and research stories, capacities to work as part of a team and engage critical and creative thinking effectively and to have some sense of relevant technologies as well as technical abilities across a range of relevant work practices. In addition to naming these skills as core, employers also highly valued ‘initiative’ as an aspect of graduate approaches to production work. This discourse contradicts much of what is alleged to be of value to employers within audiovisual policy documents.

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Employers Valued ‘Taking Initiative’ Almost all employers used some variation of ‘taking initiative’ as a key attribute of attractive potential employees. This was articulated in a number of ways, as a willingness to work hard, as a capacity to see opportunities to contribute and as a general positive attitude towards production work. The types of ‘initiative’ that were sought by employers didn’t necessarily require high levels of skill to execute but spoke more to the need for employees to be able to identify and act on opportunities to contribute to a production. For television production in particular, initiative was seen as a core requirement, ranked above any particular skill or ability by a couple of broadcast employers. As one commented about initiative ‘it’s critical … the whole businesses hangs on that … you know, shoulder to the wheel that they get stuck in ….’ (B). Another broadcaster concurred that what was most attractive in employees was ‘a real get up and go kind of person who shows from the very beginning that they want to try and deliver on something … somebody who’s very engaging and who is always ready to jump … or, you know, pre-empt maybe what’s required … That is the most important thing from my perspective in TV’ (B). An independent producer put it succinctly ‘A good attitude and a bit of cop on will go a really long way’ (C). However, attitude and initiative were also valued by digital companies, as one respondent put it ‘I don’t want a graduate who comes in and thinks they know everything … Like, if I was hiring somebody, I want can-do attitude, zero drama and (someone who is) organised and accountable’ (H). When asked to describe more what they meant by ‘initiative’ respondents elaborated in various ways. One broadcaster said ‘it’s that they have their antenna up, they realise that, you know, every second when you’re in the workplace is an opportunity and you can take it if you just open your eyes to see what needs to be done ….’ (B). Another broadcaster described ‘initiative’ as ‘attitude …. it’s the intuitive skills and how they’re presenting themselves (as doing) the hard work, it’s flexibility, because that’s the biggest thing we need. They have to have the mindset of I can do anything … I can plan and I can organise. … I can think on my feet. That’s such a requirement for us’ (E). An independent producer described ‘initiative’ as ‘a safe pair of hands, when you know when you ask somebody to do something and you know that it will be done. You don’t need to double check it’ (D). This was an attribute that was valued equally by the digital content production companies ‘their enthusiasm is really important to

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me … it’s really important that people will do more than is asked of them … you just want to find more people like that’ (G). Another digital producer described this initiative in terms of ‘common sense’, as she elaborated ‘I want somebody with a bit of common sense … if they get a push back (when cold-calling someone for research) that they tried another time … there’s no room for not having tried at least three times to get a result’ (H). Sometimes evidence of a capacity to take initiative appeared outside of candidates’ degree of activities. One broadcaster recounted recruiting a particular candidate because her initiative made her the top applicant for the job. ‘When we interviewed her, she showed that she was volunteering ….and improving the way that work was done in her volunteering role … She was working part time in like Spar as well. So, again hard working, that ethos you know, it screamed out to us …’ (E). An advocacy organisation had a similar approach when recruiting for its communications office ‘I more look at lifestyle than I look at skills … I like anyone who has chosen to do any sort of voluntary work or extracurricular projects or anything more creative or outside the box …. I actually find that’s a better indicator of the type of mindset you’ll have when they come in … in the last few hires that attitude has been the differentiator’ (K). There was some debate amongst respondents as to whether or not ‘initiative’ or ‘attitude’ were characteristics that could be ‘taught’ on degree programmes. As one independent producer put it ‘we would say that attitude and cop on are the two most undervalued things … but I’m not sure you can teach that in any course in the world.’ (D). Another similarly stated, ‘you can’t necessarily teach cop on, but you can reward it when you see it’ (C). Most educators however possibly don’t explicitly address initiative or attitude as an aspect of learning and so this seems to be a considerable gap between an industry-valued requirement and an explicit aim or objective incorporated into media production programmes. As well as higher education institutions missing a point by not addressing initiative, similarly there was a sense that graduates themselves did not always see the importance of taking initiative with work activities, rather than waiting to be asked to do particular tasks. As a broadcaster elaborated ‘there’s lots of opportunities around … and sometimes you just feel that they are not alert to it or something, that they don’t see the importance of pre-­empting and watching out for jobs that they could do to ease the situation for the people around them. But that initiative can also pay back for them in a big way if they’re seen to be doing that kind of thing’ (B).

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Here there is a gap in what higher education institutions perhaps articulate as important aspects of learning for students, broadly encompassed as creative and critical skills versus what employers valued, not just as a good attribute in employees, but as the most important attribute. This is perhaps a problem that emerges, in part, from the QQI-led emphasis on a defined suite of skills and competencies that are programmed throughout the learning cycle. The prescriptive nature of education doesn’t necessarily leave enough room for these kinds of skills. There is a need to bridge this gap with higher education institutions putting more explicit emphasis on teaching initiative and engagement to students or showing where it can be included as key outcomes of their learning. Despite the calls for such a wide range of skills and the expectations on educators to nurture them and graduates to attain them, there was nonetheless a sense in which graduates still had to prove themselves viable candidates for recruitment, through results classification, through their humility and by working for free.

Recruiting Graduates Employers were clear that they saw media degree qualification as a useful metric by which to judge potential new entrants to creative industries. Employers frequently saw a higher education, and a 2.1 result specifically, as a necessary requirement for entry to the sector. As one of the digital employers put it ‘we are looking at a third-level degree and a minimum of a 2:1 in a related field such as journalism, communications and multimedia communications’ (G). Another broadcaster similarly said ‘They have to have a 2:1 … the graduates that we’re looking for are the top talent, we’re looking for the high calibre, the students that constantly apply themselves’ (E). This base line of a third-level education was rarely questioned by employers as a dimension of their requirements for candidates. As one NGO respondent noted ‘It’s definitely important to have the academic framework … And like in terms of recruitment it would give someone the edge’ (I). However, employers were also conscious that most new entrants would actually start their creative careers via internships or runner positions. In both cases, employers believed that graduates often saw these entrant-level roles as somewhat ‘beneath’ them and noted that graduates often overestimated their skills and capabilities post-graduation. There was a need, identified by employers, for higher education institutions to ‘adjust’ graduates’ expectations of the value of their degrees; however, this raises challenges for higher education institutions to not simply pander to

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the tendency of some employers to normalise highly neoliberal practices of increasing casualisation, precarity and low pay in work in the creative sector. Despite employers using degree results as a metric of ability, attitude and training, nonetheless when it came to recruitment, entry routes to work were often very low down the production hierarchy. As one broadcaster described ‘they almost need to just take an opportunity that they might not really want to get their feet in, to kind of get to know people’ (E). These entry routes varied between runner positions and internships depending on the type of employer in question. For television it was most common to start work post-graduation as a runner. This was seen by employers as a way to ‘show potential’ (A) or to ‘build a relationship or trust within the company’ (B). However, employers had a sense that graduates themselves did not see runner positions as appropriate to their-level of training. As one broadcaster described, ‘graduates think … I have done a degree and a masters, so I am a director … but really they’re probably going to start off as the helper …’ (B). Another broadcaster made a similar point ‘the biggest thing with TV is most of the grads or the junior hires … they’re all very creative and a lot of them … want to be on air, or on camera or that kind of thing. Whereas really, you know, that’s not the reality of it … you almost feel like, you’re really kind of pulling the wind out from under them’ (E). This mismatch between graduates’ expectations about their ‘recruitibility’ and the reality of the roles on offer to them in television production resonated also with employers’ perceptions of graduates as over-valuing their abilities on entry to media work. As an independent producer noted ‘I sometimes feel that graduates come out thinking they know more than maybe they actually do … graduates now seem to have a higher expectation of their ability than maybe we would want’ (C). Another producer concurred ‘They just come in with this bucketful of confidence and “Do you know who I am?” … it needs to be managed’ (D). One broadcaster explained why a low-ranking entry position as a runner was nonetheless useful to graduates. ‘A lot of our hiring is done internally. So, 75 percent of my roles in TV, if not maybe 80 percent, would be hires of internal people already with us … they start as interns, as runners … for a few years. And then an opportunity would come up to be producer … And that’s kind of our hiring strategy’ (E). Another broadcaster concurred ‘if you go in as a runner and you show potential then that’s how you get into the TV side of things’ (A). The consistent overestimation by graduates of their skills level points to a need for universities to make it clearer to

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students that graduate qualifications still meant starting at the bottom of the hierarchy in television production, as this was where most recruitment into production roles was sourced. Equally, it calls for employers to develop clearer and more reasonable entry routes into work, where they are explicit about the skills that employers will help recruits to develop and where candidates are clear about what exactly is to be gained or can be expected from entry-level roles. Parallel to runner positions operating as a source pool for recruits to jobs in television, so too internships were named by digital, NGO and corporate employers as functioning in a similar manner. Many employers approached internships with a mind to giving significant commitment to further training as well as benefitting their organisation with new recruits. As one broadcaster said ‘there’s a huge value in internships … We are committed to at least four or five interns within the organisation each year … and it’s a one-year placement’ (B). In digital production there was a similar model of recruitment from amongst interns ‘we take on lot of interns and we take them on full time if it works out and there’s a job or a vacancy …’ (G). An independent producer similarly pointed out the value of internships and employers’ commitment to the process, despite the challenges posed by the short-term nature of creative production. As she noted ‘I think internships are worthwhile …. but our industry is very difficult … because a lot of the projects are short-term …. So, there’s probably only a handful of companies who would have a core staff on all the time … we tend to take interns into scripting or production departments so that they have continuity of experience. So, it works very well’ (C). As well as committing to substantial internships, many production companies were positive about the benefits that accrued from having graduates work on programmes. While runner or intern roles were acknowledged as being low on the hierarchy of production roles, this did not mean that the work of the interns or runners was discounted or devalued by employers. As one broadcaster commented about their interns ‘In terms of value to the organisation of internships, absolutely superb … a lot of the people who would come into the organisation would actually bring like an injection of energy and, you know, new ideas and different angles and actually bring something different to what’s already there. So, I think it works both ways. I hope the trainees get similar value’ (B). Another employer agreed ‘these are not low-cost junior hires. These are actual graduates who we need to develop and nurture … We’re investing so much time in them’ (E). Internships were perceived by employers as a

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realistic basis for further employment. As an independent producer noted ‘the ones who’ve been good we’ve literally said to them after their year-­ long post “keep an eye out when we advertise … there’s a job for you if you’re interested” (and) we have hired them back as an employee because we’ve got a really good sense of their ability and their aptitude because we have them for a good long spell’ (D). However, this positive orientation on the part of employers to internship as an integral aspect of recruitment is not to suggest that appointments of employees as runners or interns was an unproblematic dimension of creative work recruitment. Employers framed internships as both training towards a role as an employee but also as a temporary placement with no specific commitment to hiring. There is a risk of these positions being exploitative with low or no pay attached and the risk of a failure on the part of employers to ensure that interns receive any on-the-job training. This understanding of the precarity of the industry was mentioned by employers. One broadcaster said clearly ‘There’s not a lot of roles in Ireland’ (A) another agreed ‘ultimately, we don’t know if we’ve permanent roles for these grads …’ (D). One broadcaster was clear about the oversupply of job candidates ‘if a role was advertised in the morning, I would have probably 50 CVs in 24 hours’ (E). In response to the economic recession post 2008 and the further complications of the global pandemic in 2020 employers did admit that entry roles would be even scarcer: ‘It’s been challenging and difficult to try and get any kind of jobs posted’ (A) and ‘the year that’s in it … there’s not a lot of turnover. A lot of people are staying where they are …’ (B) and ‘Our tenure of employees is very, very long because there’s less opportunity’ (E). Some respondents admitted that this situation was problematic ‘there’s this thing about working for free and it’s not nice’ (I). Other respondents believed that graduates needed to adjust their expectations of pay and conditions downwards, without reflecting at all on the fact that their corporate employer made significant profits. As one recruiter said I definitely think if you could, you know, maybe change the mindset with the students, it’s a hard industry to crack and that’s a fact. And I think that they kind of maybe get a bit upset about the salaries. TV salaries at the entry level are quite low … we would be talking the minimum wage and sometimes, you know, they might come in and kind of think, “Oh, you know, I’m worth more”. And they probably are. The thing is … we’ve had over the

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years, people that took proper, decent pay cuts just for their opportunity to be a producer … So, I suppose, you know, if we could get that mindset with the students, it would really help because it’s a battle for them to understand … this is what my wage is going to look like in four or five or 10 years until I get the next opportunity, you know?’ (E).

While employers wanted top-calibre graduates, they wanted them to be clear that graduates were starting at the bottom of the industry hierarchy. Many employers were clear that the industry was challenging as regards the availability of jobs, but many were also responsible about offering internships that were paid and viable and which returned training to candidates. Only a small minority of employers felt justified in advocating for minimal wages and returns on the employment contract, while simultaneously requiring candidates to be higher education graduates.

Conclusion In sum, the findings outlined above note that employers did perceive graduates to have valuable and work-relevant skills, interviewees saw ‘initiative’ as a beneficial graduate attribute and respondents were committed to recruiting graduates with a third-level education, often with an honours award, as a basic entry requirement for media work. Interestingly, employers did not generally distinguish amongst particular types of higher education institutions or universities. Interviewees were not generally concerned as to whether graduates had a 2.1 from a university or an institute of technology. Employers did not see specific higher education institutions as being particularly adept or useful in producing desirable graduates. In short, respondents saw all graduates more or less as still in need of on-the-­ job training, this applied across digital, NGO, public sector and broadcast employers. Some employers did have special relationships with particular higher education institutions, but these were based on personal connections or geographic proximity or linguistic commonalities rather than on the graduate characteristics of the higher education institutions or its degree. For the most part, employers were realistic about the level of competency that could be achieved at undergraduate level and were clear that graduates would need to undertake further training and development once they started work. This was the case whether employers were talking about permanent, temporary or freelance staff. There was a recognition that communications and digital or broadcast work was creative and

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craft-like and that learning was ongoing throughout the course of a career, irrespective of what type of degree graduates had pursued. Moreover a further key finding to emerge from the data was the challenge that exists when attempting to connect education with creative work because of differing expectations and aims between and amongst employers and higher education institutions. This debate has occurred most obviously with regard to the universities, but it extends also into institutes of technology and new technical universities where there is evidence of ambivalence about the liberal-vocational binary. As societal institutions, universities assume responsibility for the ‘cultivation of citizenship, the preservation of cultural heritage(s), and the formation of individual character and habits of mind’ (Gumport, 2000: 71). However, in the last few decades the role of the university has changed, resulting in the emergence of a concern with knowledge transfer, or the commercialisation and transfer of academic activities to the economy (Mould et  al., 2009: 139). Gumport identifies a more corporate model of the university with an imperative to ‘produce and sell services, train some of the workforce, advance economic development and perform research’ (2000: 70). As Chap. 3 noted, Irish educators assume different positions on this question, some express a sense that the liberal education model should be retained without moving to accommodate questions of employability. Other higher education institutions are reactive to policy that pushes them away from goals of citizenship towards an acceptance of using the university as a tool for growing the economy, the IoTs and TUs tend to accept this remit more readily. However, as noted in Chap. 1, the optimum outcome involves holding both of these dynamics in tension. Examining how media degrees address work-based skills is not equivalent to advocating for the corporate university over the citizen university but rather needs to acknowledge that both agendas are active in contemporary higher education. Students can learn work-relevant skills while the university can continue to simultaneously occupy a ‘sacred space’ (Leung, 2003), away from industry for exploration, experimentation, and critical reflection on its practices. Even if both models of education are assumed to be relevant, there nonetheless remains a significant gap between employer or industry norms, ‘and the expectations and the understandings of such creative employment that students are able to gain through their degree’ (Ashton, 2015: 399). As Swain notes, industry and educators ‘have very different cultures and needs that affect their ability to interface efficiently’ (2009: 191). This tends to pit

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higher education culture against industry culture, which tends to want to insert the latest tool or software into the curriculum rather than take a more long-term view of curriculum. Digital and AV companies who seek to create effective collaborations with academia can benefit by understanding its long-range and developmental mentality (Swain, 2009: 194). However, while it’s often assumed that industry is in tension with academia, with the former variously viewing the latter as lacking, or supportive of or incompatible with industry objectives and labour needs, currently there are very few academic studies, and none in Ireland, that explicitly explore how industry or employers view universities and their function in shaping the media workforce, more work is therefore required on that key question. This initial study has established that employers were engaged and interested in hiring graduates because of the skills discussed here, but how graduates understood or articulated their sense of those skills was somewhat different, a question to which the following chapter now turns.

Bibliography Ashton, D. (2015). Creative Work Careers: Pathways and Portfolios for the Creative Economy. Journal of Education and Work, 28(4), 388–406. Aston, D., & Noonan, C. (2013). Cultural Work and Higher Education. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Australian Interactive Media Industry Association. (2005). Digital Content Industry Roadmap- Ping Study. Sydney: AIMIA. Australian Interactive Media Industry Association. (2014). Web Design Survey. Sydney: AIMIA. Bridgestock, R. (2011). Skills for Creative Industries Graduate Success. Education and Training, 53(1), 9–26. Creative Ireland. (2019). Creative Industries Roadmap. Available at: https:// www.creativeireland.gov.ie/en/blog/creative-­industries-­roadmap/ Department of Communications, Information Technology & the Arts. (2005). Unlocking the Potential: Digital Content Industry Action Agenda. Canberra: Australian Government. Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. (2018). Culture 2025: A National Cultural Policy Framework to 2025. Government of Ireland. [Online] Available at: https://www.chg.gov.ie/app/uploads/2020/01/culture-­2025.pdf Department of Culture Heritage and the Gaeltacht. (2019). First Progress Report on the Implementation of the Audiovisual Action Plan. Dublin: Government of Ireland.

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Government of Ireland. (2018). Investing in our Culture, Language and Heritage 2018—2027. Dublin: Government of Ireland. Government of Ireland. (2019). Future Jobs Ireland: Preparing Now for Tomorrow’s Economy. Dublin: Government of Ireland. Available at: https://dbei.gov.ie/ en/Publications/Publication-­files/Future-­Jobs-­Ireland-­2019.pdf Gumport, P.  J. (2000). Academic Restructuring: Organizational Change and Institutional Imperatives. Higher Education, 39, 67–91. Hartley, J. (2005). Creative Industries. In J.  Hartley (Ed.), Creative Industries (pp. 1–40). Blackwell Publishing. Haukka, S. (2010). Education-to-Work Transitions of Aspiring Creatives. Cultural Trends, 20(1), 41–64. Leung, L. (2003). Experience Design: Practising What We Preach When Negotiating Technological and Educational Interdisciplinarity. Create.ed 2003: eLearning for the Creative Industries Conference Proceedings. Melbourne, Australia: RMIT University. Leung, L., & Bentley, N. (2017). Producing Leisured Laborers: Developing Higher Education Courses for the Digital Creative Industries. The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, 47(2), 148–160. Mould, O., Roodhouse, S., & Vorley, T. (2009). Realizing Capabilities—Academic Creativity and the Creative Industries. Creative Industries Journal, 1(2), 137–150. Olsberg•SPI with Nordicity 2017 Economic Analysis of the Audiovisual Sector in the Republic of Ireland. Swain, C. (2009). Improving Academic-Industry Collaboration for Game Research and Education. FDG Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 191–198).

CHAPTER 5

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 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. O’Brien et al., Media Graduates at Work, Creative Working Lives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66033-8_5

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graduate perspectives on their education, the industry and further training supports that facilitate them finding a pathway into media work. Keywords  Media Education • New Entrants • Media Work • Portfolio Work • Further Training

Introduction This chapter focuses on the experiences of graduates, who, having completed their university education, negotiate their entry into media work. As Haukka (2010) argues pathways into media work are not very conventional because education-to-work transitions are not institutionally or occupationally determined, compared to pathways into other industries. Haukka (2010) further explains that there are extended transition periods, often multiple entry attempts and new entrants are oftentimes simultaneously employed within but also outside of creative industries. This chapter examines the ways in which 20 recent media graduates from the same media production degree programme at an Irish university based in the Greater Dublin Area negotiated these dynamics 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 and that the industry and policy poorly defined media work, 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

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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.

Creative Graduates and Aspirations of Media Work Scholars of the creative industries indicate the ways in which employment for graduates is insecure (Taylor & Luckman, 2020), despite the importance of these graduates to the innovation economy and economic growth (Bridgstock et al., 2014). As Galloway et al. note, creative graduates can struggle through an extended education to arrive at a work transition involving episodes of unpaid work experience and internships, additional education or training and reliance on family, social security and/or ‘day jobs’ for financial support. Pathways into the creative industries encompass a significant time of personal and professional identity uncertainty for graduates (Taylor & Luckman, 2020). This uncertainty involves shifting work patterns that include high levels of self-employment, a decrease in full-time employment, an increase in part-time, fixed-term or temporary work, multiple income streams and portfolio careers (Bridgstock, 2005; Ball et  al., 2010; Comunian et  al., 2011). Transformations within the global economy, resulting from the 2008 financial crisis, have established further trends of the creative industries looking for graduates and workers ‘who could do two, to three people’s jobs’ (Rann & Broderick, 2010: 56). While these issues remain pervasive throughout the creative industries, the COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed the precarity of this work. Comunian and England (2020) have tentatively explored the implications of the pandemic and how it is likely to have an uneven impact on workers at different career stages. They note specifically the potential effects on recent creative graduates, who may face even greater challenges either gaining entry into the industry or experiencing even greater salary disadvantages. Researchers have similarly noted that there is an ‘oversupply’ of industry entrants from creative programmes in higher education, which has resulted in ‘entry tournaments’ and prolonged internship work (Stoyanova & Grugulis, 2012; Lee, 2011). Daniel Ashton (2014) has noted that in this challenging industry environment, graduates tend to take up ‘running’ work as an entry-level route in film and television in particular, but notes that these graduates often question the value of this ‘mundane’ entry-level work. The oversupply that’s described here is

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obscured by the fact that education and policy in Ireland both work to imply that media work is plentiful. Students’ transition expectations have also been mapped by Noonan (2013), who notes that students are generally aware that creative work is competitive and precarious and that self-­ promotion and branding were required of them. While the condition of creative work for graduates has been a focus of research, graduate employment outcome in relation to the creative industries has also emerged as a site of interest. Goldsmith and Bridgstock (2014) for example examined the career outcomes of 916 graduates from creative undergraduate degrees in Australia. They developed the creative trident model, whereby creative employment was understood through a triumvirate of those in creative occupations in the creative industries (‘core’ or ‘specialist’ creative workers), those in creative occupations outside the creative industries (‘embedded’ creative workers) and those in non-creative roles within the creative industries (‘support’ workers). They noted that graduates do achieve employment and success following their education, particularly in the creative industries, but this may not always be as a ‘specialist’ creative worker as they describe. We find this similar to the discussion in Chap. 4 pertaining to the perspective of employers in the media industry. Scott Brook also (2016) explores the creative industries in the context of an emerging higher education focus on graduate employability. Brook argues that insecure labour markets must be addressed by higher education institutions, through a focus on transferable skills in creative academic programmes, while also encouraging creative graduates to pursue careers outside of the creative and cultural sector, where they may find more secure employment. Brook notes an increasing pressure on creative industries to demonstrate the contribution made by creative graduates to the broader knowledge economy, a point that recurs frequently in the literature (Oakley et al., 2008). Comunian et al. (2015) further argue that there is a tension between the need to develop autonomy in emerging creative practitioners in higher education, while also trying to provide ‘employability’ training to introduce these graduates into the creative economy. US research on graduate outcomes by Frenetter and Dowd (2018) who performed a large scale study, analysing the responses of 52,000 graduates with degrees in the arts, found that portfolio work was crucial to graduate success after their education. They noted that graduates who freelanced were more likely to stay within the industry, as were those who could work ‘across occupations’ (p. 49). Additionally, graduate

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prospects have in some instances been affected by the status of the higher education institution which they attended (Taylor & Littleton, 2012). To that end, educational attainment is not necessarily valued in creative work, where practical experience can often shape entry routes. Through a survey of almost 27,000 graduates of UK practice-based creative programmes, Pollard’s (2013) work illustrates how progression from a university education to work ‘is neither smooth nor predictable; and notions of what we understand to be a graduate-level job and a linear career path are being challenged’ (p. 46). However, Pollard’s study also found that four to six years after graduating, the majority of graduates had found some sort of relevant employment, albeit often short-term or part-time. These aspects of graduate experiences within creative industries have been very much under-researched within the Irish context. Relatively few studies exist in relation to the creative industries in Ireland more broadly and most of the work that does exist pertains to the Celtic Tiger and the concurrent transformations and expansion of the creative industries. Collette Henry and Kate Johnston (2007) focused on the ways in which the creative industries in Ireland became a significant economic resource, arguing that they were the country’s ‘new Tiger economy’. Similarly, Ellen Hazelkorn (2001) examined the ways in which creative industries were an integral component in the regeneration of Ireland’s economy during the Celtic Tiger, noting the broader implications of growing and developing the creative industries for the Irish economy. Enda Murphy, Linda Fox-Rogers and Declan Redmond (2014) explored the location decision making processes related to the creative industries, specifically that of the media and computer game sector in Dublin. John O’Hagan, Denis Murphy and Ruth Barton (2020) analysed the career progression of 82 ‘prominent’ workers in the Irish creative industries and the ways in which state patronage, geographic location and networks influenced career progression. However, this study focused solely on what it referred to as ‘prominent’ creative workers and is not reflective of the experiences faced by new graduates or media workers more generally. More specifically again, Susan Liddy (2014) focused on emerging scriptwriters within the Irish film industry and the ways in which they negotiate writing their first feature film, while examining the practices of their writing routines. While some research on the creative industries and media work in Ireland has emerged, the gap pertaining to graduates and creative work persists. Much of the research within the creative industries in Ireland has focused solely on particular aspects, such as the socio-economic effects of the Celtic

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Tiger and ‘prominent’ creative workers, along with some micro-level pieces of research pertaining to particular roles within the industry. However, none of this research examines the creative sector from the perspective of media education, the media industry, media policy and more crucially again, media graduates, whose pathway into media work is shaped by all of these factors. As a result, it is important to understand the graduate perspective and how graduates negotiate work since education claims to offer routes to it, industry claims to need it and policy seeks to define it.

Methodology Data for this chapter was collected using semi-structured interviews, based on a snowball sample (N = 20) of recent graduates from the same media production degree programme at an Irish university based in the Greater Dublin Area. The degree in question is an accredited academic programme, with a suite of modules across media theory and practice, with a particular focus on audiovisual training. The degree is three years long and students generally split their credits with Media and another BA subject, with some major/minor options, where students can take a larger credited load in Media modules. Chapter 3 explored academically oriented and vocationally oriented programmes. This particular degree that we focus on in this chapter is a good example as the programme design sits across academic and vocational (theory and practice). The graduates included in this study received their degree within the last seven years. All of the interviews were conducted by the authors, some over the phone and some in person. Generally, the interviews lasted between 40 minutes and one hour. A series of questions were designed for an interview schedule based on a preparatory literature review. The interview was divided into two parts: the first focusing on graduates’ media training and experience of their degree and the second focusing on life after their degree, particularly their ideas about and experiences of how they would get into work and how they would progress once they got some initial opportunities. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, with all identifiers removed and participants anonymised. All participants gave informed consent prior to the interview and were guaranteed anonymity. In analysing the data, transcripts were read and coded by the authors for concepts and ideas that recurred across the participants’ responses. Codes were clustered to generate themes and those themes were analysed to create an overarching

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framework of findings. Short quotations are presented as extracts that represent a theme found across the interviews.

Graduate Experiences of Education and Industry Four key realisations occurred for graduates as they began their journey into the workplace, which were oriented around how they viewed their education, the industry they were entering, their perception of their employers and the further training that was available. Firstly, they had a reckoning with their education in their transitions to media work, feeling short-changed by their degrees and underprepared for the nature of the media industry and its expectations, where experience was a key metric. Secondly, as they began to interact more with the industry, graduates had to adapt their expectations of media work as they responded to the industry in varying ways. Thirdly, they came to understand that portfolio working arrangements, while not ideal, would facilitate them in gaining professional experience, mentorship end experience from employers and developing a credible CV. Fourthly, they availed of support from the industry itself in the form of further training initiatives, which compensated for the lack of skills they had developed throughout their time in education. Finally, they ultimately underwent a realisation about the actual value of their media education, oftentimes based on what status they had achieved within their professional lives. Despite a narrative of openness from industry and skills demands from policy, these graduates defined their career progress in terms of struggle. Valuing Media Education in Transitions to Media Work – How Graduates Viewed Their Education As graduates left their degrees and attempted to enter the media industry, most reported that obtaining media work was generally a challenge. Often, these challenges saw them blame their media education for not adequately preparing them for the industry, with many of them not seeing any relationship between education and work. However, there was an interesting sliding scale to the perceptions of the graduates on these issues. On the one hand, those who had just recently graduated in the past two to three years displayed a clear dismissal of the skills they learned from the degree and of their media education more broadly, with an inability to see the value and transferable, critical skills afforded to them by it. They claimed

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that the degree inherently underprepared them for a difficult industry and they had to seek out further training from the industry itself. On the other hand, those who had been working in the industry for a longer period of time and had forged out permanent careers for themselves only saw the worth and value of their degrees as they solidified their professional identities in the media industry several years after graduation. In terms of the former group of recent graduates, they did not see their degree as useful in helping them gain any form of media work, with one participant noting ‘the academic modules were no use to me whatsoever […] completely and utterly a waste of time’ (G8). A lot of the graduates were quick to dismiss the theoretical component of the course, in particular not seeing any benefit to the academic skills that they gathered: ‘the academic skills weren’t all that useful or beneficial to me in any way’ (G2). This was strikingly contrary to Chap. 4, where employers stated that they valued these academic skills, especially research. The negative graduate response is reflective however of some of the anxieties raised by educators in Chap. 3, who saw education as a space to focus on intellectual development rather than employability. Graduates were more complementary towards the practical components of their degree, with one remarking ‘the radio training was pretty decent. You learned how to book guests, how to research a show, how to put a show together […] we got extremely good video editing skills and research’ (G7). This points to an issue where vocational training after school in Ireland is not the norm and there is an expectation that students will attend higher education institutions and pursue further academic formation. Despite the fact that many aspirants of media work want more vocational experience and training, due to the fact that this is not provided or normative in Ireland, they pursue a media degree at university, only to feel like they are being short-changed on the practice side of things. This directly relates to graduates feeling underprepared by their education for media work: The degree did not prepare as much as I had hoped for. The volunteer experience I received in a social media role outside of the degree helped me more (G8). I really did not feel confident in working on any kind of set after that degree (G12).

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Additionally, many of the graduates considered the practical elements of the degree not to be a standard fit to facilitate working in the media industry. One graduate, who eventually ended up working in digital content creation noted that: I found that trying to get a job, jumping straight into the media industry doesn’t work. It has taken me almost a year to try and get a job and the practical elements of the degree really did not help me get there. Once I started work, I was training all over again (G20).

In the case of this graduate, it was evident that the industry had a good attitude towards them and was willing to train them, reflecting the findings of Chap. 3, whereby many employers were happy to invest in training graduates. Other respondents shared this positive experience, noting the ways in which their eventual employers took the time to train them to particular work cultures and systems: I had used one editing tool for the degree, but in this company I worked for it was totally different and I was out of my depth. But they really took the time to train me on that (G6). Arriving on set, I didn’t have a clue how to behave, but thankfully, a producer took me under their wing and showed me the ropes (G5).

A number of the graduates felt underprepared for work from their degree due to what they felt as a significant lack of a media CV or a portfolio. They felt that the education to work transition should in fact begin in education rather than after it. The media degree that the graduates completed did not have portfolio preparation modules, in comparison to other programmes available in Ireland. One respondent in particular noted that ‘not having a portfolio straight out of college really prevented me gaining any entry-level positions’ (G2). While lacking a portfolio was a feature of many of the critiques, others felt that the production modules were far too broad and did not cover specific areas, like digital storytelling or podcasting (G9). Other respondents were critical of more minor features of the degree, such as not knowing how to read a call sheet (G10). Almost unanimously, core academic skills such as critical thinking, research and writing were entirely dismissed:

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The academic skills were not really all that transferable (G2). The amount of essays and writing really did not contribute much overall after the degree (G4).

As noted earlier in Chap. 3, these skills were actually valued by employers. In contradistinction to these recent graduates, the more seasoned graduates who had progressed into media work and forged a media career were much more complementary of their degree programmes and the academic skills they learned from them. They all cited the fact that initially, they were frustrated with their degrees on leaving and were quite dismissive of their respective media programmes, much like the findings mentioned above. However, when they began to establish careers and grew confident as media workers, the transferable skills of their degree became very important. One respondent noted that the wide breadth of modules and subjects from their degree really provided them a solution-focused mindset, helping to proactively contribute towards problem solving or creative ideas (G17). Many of the graduates spoke to the fact that the writing and research skills afforded to them really helped them to progress (G1, G3, G8). One graduate, who ended up working in advertising noted that while initially dismissive of their degree post-graduation, the semiotics modules that they completed proved crucial in their career (G12). Some of the graduates even noted that their ability to think and conceptualise ideas and offer suggestions all came from their academic programme, which provided a crucial foundation. One respondent remarked: It wasn’t until I was in a brainstorming session for a show and working with various ideas and minds in the room. There were a lot of personalities to manage and I dealt with it quite well. But when I think about it, had I not had group exercises for the academic assignments on the media degree, I wouldn’t have had the foundation to deal with that situation. So it may take a few years before the skills from the degree really click into place and it takes distance from your college days to realise what you actually learned (G16).

These graduates who had been working in the industry in regular work for a number of years also noted that training opportunities were available from the industry throughout their careers. One respondent who works in

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a newspaper in Europe remarked: ‘the degree was great for getting a foundation in broader issues, but the real training can only happen when you get to work. Every media organisation has a different work culture and a degree is never going to fit that reality, no matter how specific it is’ (G9). Continuing professional development then also became a reality of many of the graduates’ professional lives, as training and re-training became a regular part of their professional identities. More significantly, when graduates worked in varying parts of the industry, they came to appreciate that different organisations and companies have different work cultures which would require further education and training to adapt. The disparity between these two groups could be explained by the fact that many of the recent graduates were venting their frustration about the difficulties they experienced along the pathways to media work. Accordingly, they read the roadblocks they encountered as a result of a lack of preparation they received during their degree programmes: ‘The degree really did not prepare me as much as I had hoped for’ (G2). The graduates who had been out of their degrees for a number of years had a greater sense of a professional self and saw themselves as media workers and as part of the industry. The relative stability that they experienced in terms of having regular work made them value their degrees more, given that they did not have to deal with the transitory stresses involved in pursuing a media career following graduation. It took a number of years then for some graduates to realise that their degrees were not a work-training endeavour, but rather, provided them with a set of transferable skills that gave them initiative and a capacity to work across the industry. For those who had recently graduated, they tended to blame their education for the lack of preparation afforded to them and tended to praise the support they received from the industry, particularly the employers that took time to train them. The value of education for graduates in this case reflects and validates the findings of other studies. While the graduates in this instance were critical of the programme and education in parts, they did manage to sustain work for a number of years after their degree, much like graduates of practice-based programmes in art, design, craft and media in the UK (Pollard, 2013) and Australian creative graduates, who after six years post-graduation felt that their degrees were valuable and made them employable (Bridgstock & Cunningham, 2016).

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Adapting Expectations on Leaving University – How Graduates Viewed and Responded to the Industry As graduates of media education began to enter the media industry and engage with elements of work following the completion of their degrees, nearly all participants acknowledged that they needed to adapt their expectations of media work. Graduates had to adapt from what they thought they knew from their time in education versus how the industry saw them and reacted to them as new entrants. As noted in the previous section, many of the graduates felt that their education did not prepare them for the reality of media work, both in terms of the provision of practical experience but also the nature of working in the media industry itself. As one respondent noted: ‘my idea of what was expected of me when I left college is completely different to now working in the media and what is actually expected of us’ (G1). This change in perspective was based on their initial forays into media work where they grasped that they were underqualified for most roles, that they needed to learn new skills like networking and that their work would be temporary and sporadic. Further, experience seemed to have more value than education in terms of obtaining media work. Even when graduates were clear about career goals and where they wanted to work within the industry, the entry routes to specific jobs were not apparent to them. This led to some deflation on behalf of the graduates, as they did not necessarily see the industry as being receptive towards them, given that there was no clear pathway. One graduate expressed their frustration when comparing the opportunities they had to that of a peer from another degree programme: ‘I had a friend in business who knew where they could work and how to get there. In terms of my opportunities, I just didn’t know where they were.’ (G3). As they began to interact with the industry following the completion of their degree, graduates soon realised that their degrees did not automatically qualify them for full time permanent and high-status positions. Additionally to this, a lot of them did not realise that the media job market itself was quite poor, both in terms of quantity of opportunities, but also quality of positions. As one graduate noted: I didn’t realise that it would be a lot of temporary work, working for a week here, a few days there, as opposed to a full time position and I didn’t realise how much admin, office-related jobs there were, outside of production, particularly as you are starting out in some companies at the bottom (G11).

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In fact graduates were surprised to realise that their degrees did not even qualify them for entry-level positions, rather they would have to start at the bottom of the ladder in media organisations and production companies. This was a source of frustration for many of the respondents, as they were under the impression that their degree would confer some capital that would open them up for opportunities. Graduates tended to blame education rather than the industry or policy-makers who create an impression of a buoyant job market. One respondent noted how they felt short-­ changed by the degree, which was sold to them as a passport to work: No one ever told you that the old fashioned way of just starting work was the correct way to do it. I was told at orientations by staff that college was necessary to work in the media. That ended up not being the case (G3).

Another graduate, who was confronted by the industry requirement for experience rather than education, remarked: ‘I know during your free hours you should be out getting experience, but there was no one really there from the department to help you and tell you these things’ (G4). A lot of the graduates had to adapt expectations regarding the kind of work they would be expected to do in the industry. This sometimes even involved being allocated menial or primarily administrative tasks, or what Goldsmith and Bridgstock (2014) refer to as non-creative roles within the creative industry. A graduate spoke to this aspect of having to adapt expectations, noting that they did not think that they would be starting their media career doing administrative office work: It was definitely a culture shock, as I expected to be at least using some of the skills I got from my degree when I began working, but I quickly realised it was back to square one and that I would have to prove myself (G9).

Education in this instance was not considered by the graduate as helping to develop a supportive pathway into media work for new entrants. The adjustment of expectations was not just confined to adapting to particular work tasks or low status roles, but extended beyond this as many of the graduates realised that the pathway to media work would require them to learn new or additional soft skills such as the ability to network and build connections. As one respondent commented ‘Networking and interning really were not part of my expectations and that really was something I had to build on’ (G12). Another added ‘I honestly did not realise

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that when beginning to work in the industry, that networking and just picking up the phone calling people was part of the gig’ (G14). As Chap. 3 demonstrated, these were some of the core skills that employers sought in graduates. Graduates accordingly had to come to terms with and recognise that gaining work involved more work, which encompassed lots of time making connections, and networking, all the while looking for the next opportunity. While graduates on the one hand felt that they were not prepared or skilled for media work, on the other hand, they realised that the quality and quantity of work was poor. This was evident in terms of their realisation that much media work was irregular and freelance: ‘to forge out any kind of living, it was jobs here and jobs there and quite a lot of freelancing’ (G10). While there were certain degrees of awareness pre-graduation of the ways in which the media industry functioned in terms of work, graduates expressed surprise at the extent to which much of the work was freelance: ‘I honestly thought there would have been a lot more opportunities. I thought there would be a lot more entry-level positions with decent enough pay. I kind of realised very quickly that that wasn’t really going to be the case. Jobs of any kind were few and far between’ (G15). This was reiterated by another participant when they explained: ‘I thought the entry routes would be more obvious. But no, it’s mostly freelance and unpaid labour’ (G3). While graduates noted that expectations had to be adapted around the nature of the work being freelance, many were surprised by the extent to which much of this work was unpaid, despite expecting some element of this: ‘From speaking to people who have been in the industry, I know it’s hard work and crappy pay, but I did not realise that a lot of this would be totally unpaid’ (G8). These conditions produced some circumstances that prevented students from pursuing work they were interested in: I was offered an internship that was advertised as paid on Twitter but it was just subsidies they were paying. I couldn’t afford the casual precarity of that. I’d have loved the work but the reality of having to survive hits you on the face (G7). I got an amazing job offer in a magazine that would have provided me so much experience, but it was unpaid so it just really wasn’t an option for me (G10).

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The industry/work narrative that graduates seemed to get from education is somewhat false in relation to the realities of media work and routes into the industry. Graduates came also to appreciate that they would need to build as much experience as possible, as experience became a more significant form of capital for them in comparison to their degree: ‘I realised any kind of entry-level role in Ireland required a lot of experience, along with the degree’ (G16). They noted that the job search was very difficult given their lack of experience and when they got an interview, they would be rejected, ‘with most interviewers pointing out that I may have been a good candidate, but that I just did not have the experience’ (G7). The exit from university brings them to a realisation that there is a new state of play and ‘rules of the game’ (G8) as one graduate refers to it, that they need to play by in order to ensure continuation along their pathway to media work. As part of learning ‘the rules’ of this game, graduates contend with the fact that their degree is not enough and that they must build upon this with experience in order to ensure more jobs, but also to ensure getting a foot in the door as it were. One respondent notes how experience is the new metric for success rather than their education: ‘experience is what is going to get you places, working, temping, freelancing, whatever you can do to build up that CV, that’s what opens doors, not the degree’ (G8). In addition, graduates began to appreciate that even how they went about looking for media work was problematic and that they needed a new skill base just to be able to find out about jobs. One respondent remarked that eight months after graduation, they were looking for a media job, but realised that searching for media work required a different set of research skills in and of itself: ‘I looked at different media jobs but I probably wasn’t looking in the right places and I probably didn’t have the right research skills to properly look for relevant media jobs’ (G12). Following the completion of their media education then, many of the graduates found that they had to adapt their expectations and approaches around finding media work and their beliefs about entering the workplace had to be adapted and recalibrated in order to meet the reality of becoming a participant in an extremely competitive industry. Even when they were clear about what roles they wanted the entry pathways were not obvious to them. As one commented ‘I wanted, to work in the television industry and I found there were little positions available when we graduated’(G10). Another pair agreed:

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I thought getting into television would be easy, but there was no direct route there and I kind of quickly realised that I would have to do a hell of a lot of other things before a chance there would even come up (G11) I really had the naïveté to think that I could perhaps go straight into presenting on radio or even reading the local news. After graduation, that became a quick realisation (G2).

Graduates began to realise that they had very little understanding of how to find work in their chosen area. In short there was a significant gap between the knowledge that graduates had and the reality of finding and getting media work post-graduation. While graduates devalued their degrees, they did not realise that for employers (as explored in Chap. 3), a degree was a basic requirement for entry into media work. As graduates adapted their expectations of the industry, they disregarded and felt short-changed by their media degree, particularly more recent graduates. On the other hand, they were confronted with a media industry where they felt like they were only beginning to learn the ropes. As part of this experience, they realised that the industry was difficult to break into due to irregular work and also the quality and quantity of media work being poor. Interestingly, graduates were more resentful of their education for not preparing them enough rather than of industry for not supplying good work. In particular, this was oriented around them feeling like they had not been told ‘realities’ of the industry, or given any tools to prepare them for employability. In terms of their perspective on the industry, while they found routines and routes difficult to identify, the industry and the way media work operated was not considered at fault. In fact, as the next section will demonstrate, graduates fostered particular strategies to be flexible and work across the industry to garner the experience they were lacking. Portfolio Working Careers – How Graduates Adapted to the Industry Many of the graduates’ initial entry positions were characterised by portfolio work, where individuals were involved in ‘multiple work and/or development activities simultaneously’ (Pollard, 2013: 54). In this sense, there was no single-entry route taken by graduates into media work, but

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rather entry was characterised by multiplicity in terms of routes and trajectories. This was the way in which many of the graduates responded to the industry in terms of obtaining crucial experience, as they realised this was the metric that they would be measured by, rather than their education. They had an awareness that exposing themselves to varying parts of the media industry through portfolio working arrangements would help develop pathways to more permanent work. While many of the graduates felt alone and isolated in places with these arrangements, for the most part portfolio careers provided them a sense of independence and a greater sense of confidence as they interacted with the industry further. As Throsby and Zednik (2011) argue, the conditions of portfolio working and ‘multiple job-holding’ are increasingly the norm within creative careers and labour markets, with these conditions presenting a challenge for many of the graduates hoping to acquire more secure media work. The challenges of portfolio work were documented by respondents who also acknowledged the ‘beneficial’ role played by precarious work and unpaid internships in their working lives. As one graduate noted: I was working for free in a magazine and also working for free for a social media company. It was intense, but the experience built up from developing that portfolio led to jobs and the one I’m in now in [a broadcaster] (G11). It was intense. I worked for a magazine, an online publication and did some radio work and sometimes all three in the one day. All three were unpaid but it let me build up a very impressive CV that started getting me interviews (G17)

Although noting the challenges involved in the conditions of some of the portfolio work and the difficulties of maintaining multiple jobs at the one time, some graduates were clear that they did eventually have positive outcomes from this way of working: I took up some unpaid work with the documentary film festival. I then took up some unpaid work with that with a big production company and worked on some big prime time reality TV shows. Then at the same time as all of that I got an internship with a broadcaster and eventually got a permanent contract (G9). I put my fingers in a lot of different pies to keep myself going. There wasn’t a whole lot of progression, but working multiple different jobs across differ-

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ent parts of the industry at the one time built up a portfolio that did lead me to breaking through to something permanent (G1). I worked with one company on two productions, then I got running experience, paid, then I was offered other running work, but I took up an unpaid internship with a bigger company. It was six months working five days, normal hours […] while there I was running freelance for other companies, then I got a permanent freelance job, then a full-time position with the bigger company (G2).

While graduates were aware of the shortcomings of this kind of working arrangement, they did not see the industry itself as wholly exploitative, and instead, noted how it provided an opportunity to provide them training and knowledge in different parts of the industry: even though all those jobs at once wasn’t ideal, doing that kind of work, employers see the effort and know that you’re doing a lot of this for free. They will take more time I think to give you some support, advice whatever. Maybe it’s because they feel bad, maybe it’s because they care. Either way, I got some help from some good people (G18).

Graduates recognised that their ambition was rewarded in some way, reflecting the viewpoints of employers from Chap. 3, who noted how they ‘liked to see initiative’ with new entrants. This positive attitude to work seemed to reap rewards from both the perspective of the graduate and the employers in the industry. Inasmuch as portfolio working arrangements were complex, difficult, precarious and unpaid, they did have a number of positive outcomes for students, particularly around building their experience, giving them insights into particular aspects of the industry, but also achieving employment in some cases. Where portfolio careers in some instances had positive outcomes, it also served as an alienating factor for other graduates: There was no clear entry route. Every option available in terms of media work was precarious and spread out. There were lots of itty-bitty pieces, unpaid of course, but I needed some stability at the very least due to financial constraints, so that wasn’t an option for me (G4).

Here, class and privilege play a role in the working lives of graduates, particularly in terms of career outcomes and long-term success within the

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industry. As Oakley et al. (2017) explore in the context of cultural labour markets in London, the creative industries, rather than serving as ‘engine rooms’ of social mobility, reinforce social class disparities in cultural employment. Similarly, Sam Friedman and Dave O’Brien (2017) have acknowledged that the creative industries have created an oversupply of middle class workers. To that end, the creative industries have been pinpointed as ‘enclaves of privilege’ (Banks, 2017: 85) that exclude people from the work force on account of class and lack of finances (Brook et al., 2018). While financial reasons were a factor in preventing graduates from holding down multiple jobs at the one time, geography also played a role: On graduating, the only way to obtain a media-related job was by doing an unpaid internship for an indefinite period. Now there were plenty of these available across the industry, but only those who lived in Dublin or had the funding to rent in Dublin had a real opportunity to follow this career path in Ireland (G6).

Given that much media work was centred in Dublin, graduates living outside of the greater Dublin area experienced difficulty in accessing and maintaining this kind of working arrangement to build up their experience. In that sense, some of these graduates felt alone and excluded from the industry, with one commenting that these financial and geographical factors did not let them get ‘their skin in the game’ and develop career pathways into media work (G19). The prevalence of portfolio careers was not solely confined to media work, graduates also held portfolios that were divided between media and other forms of work, which helped graduates sustain nascent media careers. Many of the graduates notably worked in a number of different sectors, including retail, office work and catering. Much of this ‘other’ work was done during evenings and weekends, and students used this income to subsidise their pursuit of media experience in order to build their CVs. One graduate described how they worked 20 to 30  hours a week in post-production for an Emmy Award winner and because this was unpaid, they also worked in bars at night to earn an income (G11). Another graduate noted that they made an arrangement with a radio station to do early morning slots helping with production and research, all unpaid, following which, they would go straight into their retail job to work from the afternoon until the evening.

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Portfolio work was seen by the graduates as a necessary gateway into media work and to achieving long-term employment in the industry they sought to enter. It was also a way of confronting the lack of quantity in jobs in the media industry, as well as quality. In fact, many of the graduates spoke of the ways in which this mode of working afforded them a level of flexibility and employability because of their ability to juggle working across occupations and within a number of areas within the media industry. Some respondents also noted that their portfolio approach indicated ambition and ‘entrepreneurism’ as one participant put it, ‘that was very appealing to a media organisation who ended up hiring me’ (G17). Again, graduates identified that taking this form of initiative and being seen as hard working would be recognised by employers, which had positive outcomes from the employer perspective, as explored in Chap. 3. Although the working conditions that characterise portfolio careers are precarious, uncertain, insecure and inaccessible for a lot of graduates, those that had the opportunity and means to pursue this approach did achieve success and developed skills that made them more appealing to potential employers. Inasmuch as portfolio work was challenging in a lot of respects, the graduates saw this as a positive experience for the most part and a useful way to develop their skillset and pathways into more permanent media work. While the industry was demanding, and at points exploitative, the graduates saw this as a means to an end in terms of building their experience and did not really see the industry as against them all that much as a result. In saying that, oftentimes circumstances and financial precarity served as a significant roadblock for some graduates who could not build their profiles and CVs in this way, due to various economic and geographical factors and for those, they saw an industry that was inaccessible to them. Further Training – How Graduates Were Supported by the Industry While doing this kind of portfolio work, graduates also sought further support and training from the industry. The availability of this training was slowly revealed to them as they worked across their varying roles and as colleagues and employers pointed them out. Graduates became more attuned to varying training schemes that were on offer, which helped them navigate their entry into media work. Many of the students noted how portfolio working arrangements enabled them to pursue further

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training in and around their schedules. A lot of the training that the graduates availed of was offered by various media institutions in-house and took the form of radio training, podcasting skills, sound and editing, journalism and digital storytelling and marketing. These courses were usually six to eight weeks long and took place in the evenings. Graduates looked favourably on these training schemes, finding them extremely beneficial in terms of the industry mentors who taught the classes, but also the fact that this kind of in-house training provided access and face-to-face time with industry contacts: ‘I did a magazine course with Hot Press, and to be honest, while I did it for skills, I also did it to make contacts. Although I didn’t work there or step foot there ever again, I got some great support from mentors who I still speak to’ (G12). Another graduate did an evening course with a Dublin radio station and noted: ‘getting in the door and just being taught something by professionals, it was such a shift from the degree and much more beneficial’ (G4). The latter comment in particular picks up on a thread that emerged in Chap. 2, where education and training are positioned in tension with one another. This kind of training is viewed by the graduates as a necessity, as they feel like their education had not prepared them sufficiently for the industry. One graduate remarked: ‘Working in all those part-time roles, I found out about a sound editing evening course offered by a media company and I knew it would be beneficial, as my degree really had not trained me in those areas at all’ (G16). While in-house training from media organisations served to meet the gap that some graduates felt they had in terms of their media skills, the national training and development body Screen Skills Ireland (SSI) became a source of further training for some graduates, particularly those with an interest in the audiovisual sector. The graduates who availed of further training with SSI marked it as a positive experience and noted how it really helped navigate their entry into media work. As one graduate noted: I did a four night course in continuity through Screen Skills Ireland and I think on the first day, they said what everybody did on the set and that was the first time I ever heard anyone go through everyone’s jobs and just from a simple level, you need to know what everybody’s job is, just something like the director is the person you listen to on the set and that’s just something that we never went through on our degree (G8).

This student’s experience noted how SSI compensated for an omission in their degree and in their view, the lack of knowledge developed around

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the audiovisual industry. This was reflective of the experience of another graduate who saw SSI as crucial to their professional development: ‘I did a course on television drama and learned far more on that than I ever did on my degree programme’ (G17). As graduates progressed along their pathways to media work then, they became more aware of further training and industry supports that they had only become exposed to through this work. The tension between education and further industry training was identified by one respondent, who remarked: ‘the evening courses on offer are not that expensive, I don’t see why our degree did not encourage us to pursue this kind of industry support’ (G16). This comment reflects the gap that appears to exist for prospective media workers, whereby the education system and the media industry itself seems to be disconnected and marching to the beat of a different drum, where in some instances, they could forge a closer connection and provide some further training and opportunities for students and graduates alike.

Conclusion While graduates noted the challenge of entering the media industry, their experiences and outlook were shaped by varying factors, such as their education, the industry, their employers, the organisations they worked within and the further training schemes of which they availed. While all graduates noted the role that each of these had in terms of developing pathways into media work, they were critical of some aspects more than others. As the data for this chapter has suggested, many of the graduates expressed anxiety about their lack of preparedness when they entered the industry, tending to blame their media education for not providing them with the suite of skills to help them achieve employability. Following that, graduates were confronted by a media industry where the job market was poor, with poor quality of work along with poor quantities of work. These experiences that they were confronted with resulted in them having to accept realities of the media industry, such as the nature of freelance work, unpaid jobs and precarious labour. Accordingly, they had to adapt their expectations when confronted with the industry, as they realised that their education was not going to simply open doors for them, but that experience was the metric by which they would be measured and which would result in success in terms of employability.

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The lack of knowledge around the industry further led to graduates feeling somewhat short-changed by their degree, although a small cohort of graduates who were a number of years out of their degree could retrospectively see that their education had merit. Following this, as graduates interacted with the industry, they realised that they had to adapt and develop particular strategies for gaining entry and upskilling. A lot of them did this through portfolio working arrangements, whereby they worked flexibly across various parts of the industry, with the aim of developing experience, networking and making contacts. This proved to have positive outcomes for graduates on the one hand. Employers more broadly were receptive to them and were willing to train them and in some cases mentor them and give graduates advice about their careers. Graduates reported that being seen to be hardworking, flexible and being able to work across the industry was recognised by employers and often resulted in positive outcomes such as more permanent jobs. The development of career pathways for graduates was also shaped by further training, offered both in-house by media organisations and nationally, by bodies such as SSI. In terms of the latter, while graduates did not really speak to their perspectives or outlook when it came to media policy (as explored in Chap. 2), the effects of that policy were evident in their working lives, given that some of them had availed of training schemes developed through bodies such as Screen Ireland. Interestingly, when it came to availing of further training, a tension between media education and further training by the media industry emerged from graduate responses, reflecting some of the issues discussed in Chap. 2. Graduates considered this further training as a necessity, as they felt like their education had not prepared them sufficiently for the industry. While some respondents considered there to be a disconnect between media education and further training, some recommended that the tension between the two could be resolved if they forged closer connections, whereby media students were encouraged by staff to take these courses while doing their degree and these courses sought out media undergraduates to take up places on their courses. Graduates responded to both their education and the broader media industry in particular ways and gave each of them different forms of credit in terms of developing their career pathways. While education was often blamed for a lack of preparation around employability, the industry itself tended to not be regarded upon unfavourably by graduates, with some exceptions. Graduate responses tended to give less focus to policy, as there

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was a general lack of awareness of the ways in which policy itself directly played a role in the career pathways of graduates, when of course, it had direct ramifications in terms of further training. The four findings presented in this chapter speaks to the experience and outlook of graduates, particularly their perspective on how education, the industry, and further training helped to develop their career pathways. Many of the graduates accepted the industry for what it was and adapted to portfolio working conditions, overwork, underemployment and poor pay conditions, all with the aim of becoming media workers. Further, the actual pathways into the industry were identified as precarious, unclear, competitive and challenging. Respondents came to accept that gaining entry into the industry would not be easy and that their formal education for the most part, from their perspective, did not prepare them for the realities of the industry. What this means for both industry and education going forward, is that they potentially could and should establish close connections. This perhaps could be the job of state development bodies which could more robustly incorporate the third-level sector into the development of the media industry in Ireland, given that many of the respondents have identified several gaps between media education, the media industry and further training. Bridging these gaps through national policy frameworks and forging closer connections between these sectors, be it through informal or formal means, could serve as an important factor that could provide more opportunities for media graduates in varying sectors of the creative industries.

Bibliography Ashton, D. (2014). Making Media Workers: Contesting Film and Television Career Pathways. Television & New Media, 16(3), 275–294. Ball. L., Pollard, E., & Stanley, N. (2010). Creative Graduates, Creative Futures. Creative Graduates, Creative Futures Higher Education Partnership and the Institute for Employment Studies. Accessed 23 Sept 2019. https://www. employment-­studies.co.uk/sites/default/files/471sum.pdf Banks, M. (2017). Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Bridgstock, R. (2005). Australian Artists, Starving and Well-Nourished: What Can We Learn from the Prototypical Protean Career? Australian Journal of Career Development, 14(3), 40–47.

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Bridgstock, R., & Cunningham, S. (2016). Creative Labour and Graduate Outcomes: Implications for Higher Education and Cultural Policy, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22(1), 10–26, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/10286632.2015.1101086. Bridgstock, R., Goldsmith, B., Rodgers, J., & Hearn, G. (2014). Creative Graduate Pathways Within and Beyond the Creative Industries. Journal of Education and Work, 28(4), 333–345. Brook, O., O’Brien, D., & Taylor, M. (2018). Panic: Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries. Create London. Retrieved September 21, 2020, from https://createlondon.org/wp-­content/uploads/2018/04/ Panic-­Social-­Class-­Taste-­and-­Inequalities-­in-­the-­Creative-­Industries1.pdf Brook, S. (2016). The Exemplary Economy: A Hunterian Reading of the Creative Industries as Educative Project. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22(1), 27–40. Comunian, R., & England, L. (2020). Creative and Cultural Work Without Filters: COVID-19 and Exposed Precarity in the Creative Economy. Cultural Trends, 29(2), 112–128. Comunian, R., Faggian, A., & Jewell, S. (2011). Winning and Losing in the Creative Industries: An Analysis of Creative Graduates’ Career Opportunities Across Creative Disciplines. Cultural Trends, 20(3–4), 291–308. Comunian, R., Gilmore, A., & Jacobi, S. (2015). Higher Education and the Creative Economy: Creative Graduates, Knowledge Transfer and Regional Impact Debates. Geography Compass, 9(7), 371–383. Frenetter, A., & Dowd, T. J. (2018). Who Stay and Who Leaves? Arts Education and the Career Trajectories of Arts Alumni in the United States. Retrieved September 21, from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Research-­Art-­ Works-­ASU2.pdf Friedman, S., & O’Brien, D. (2017). Resistance and Resignation: Responses to Typecasting in British Acting. Cultural Sociology, 11(3), 359–376. Goldsmith, B., & Bridgstock, R. (2014). Embedded Creative Workers and Creative Work in Education. Journal of Education and Work, 28(4), 369–387. Haukka, S. (2010). Education-to-Work Transition of Aspiring Creatives. Cultural Trends, 20(1), 41–64. Hazelkorn, E. (2001). The Dynamics of Cultural Production in Ireland: Economic Strategy, Digital Technology and Public Policy Making. In K.  Ernst, M. Halbertsma, S. Janssen, & T. Ijdens (Eds.), Trends and Strategies in the Arts and Cultural Industries. Barjesteh & Co’s: Rotterdam. Henry, C., & Johnston, K. (2007). The Creative Industries: Ireland’s New Tiger Economy? Irish Journal of Management, 28(2), 211–229. Lee, D. (2011). Networks, Cultural Capital and Creative Labour in the British Independent Television Industry. Media, Culture & Society, 33(4), 549–565.

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Liddy, S. (2014). First Impressions: Debut Features by Irish Screenwriters. In C. Batty (Ed.), Screenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context (pp. 130–151). Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Murphy, E., Rogers-Fox, L., & Redmond, D. (2014). Location Decision Making of “Creative” Industries: The Media and Computer Games Sectors in Dublin, Ireland. Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy, 46(1), 97–113. Noonan, C. (2013). Smashing Childlike Wonder? The Early Journey into Higher Education. In D.  Ashton & C.  Noonan (Eds.), Cultural Work and Higher Education (pp. 133–153). Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Hagan, J., Murphy, D., & Barton, R. (2020). Do State Funding, Geographic Location, and Networks Matter? The Case of Prominent Irish Actors, Directors and Writers. Cultural Trends, 29(2), 77–95. Oakley, K., Sperry, B., & Pratt, A. C. (2008). The Art of Innovation: How Fine Arts Graduates Contribute to Innovation. London: NESTA. Oakley, K., Laurison, D., O’Brien, D., & Friedman, S. (2017). Cultural Capital: Arts, Graduates, Spatial Inequality and London’s Impact on Cultural Labor Markets. American Behavioral Scientist, 61(12), 1510–1531. Pollard, E. (2013). Making Your Way: Empirical Evidence from a Survey of 3,500 Graduates. In D.  Ashton & C.  Noonan (Eds.), Cultural Work and Higher Education (pp. 154–171). Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rann, K., & Broderick, M. (2010). Please Consider. Desktop, 263, 56–59. Stoyanova, D., & Grugulis, I. (2012). Tournament Careers: Working in UK Television. In C. Mathieu (Ed.), Careers in Creative Industries (pp. 88–106). London: Routledge. Taylor, S., & Littleton, K. (2012). Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work. Surrey: Ashgate Farnham. Taylor, S., & Luckman, S. (2020). Pathways into Creative Working Lives. Cham: Palgrave. Throsby, D., & Zednik, A. (2011). Multiple Job-holding and Artistic Careers: Some Empirical Evidence, Cultural Trends, 20(1), 9–24, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09548963.2011.540809

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Media Work After COVID-19

Abstract  This final chapter examines the key findings of the book in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating how the pandemic has highlighted the book’s core argument: that there is a mismatch between the stated priorities of national policy, educators, employers and students. The chapter summarises the overall perspective of educators, employers and students, suggesting that, especially in the context of a global pandemic, there is a pressing need to recognise current conditions of media work and to foster a solution-centric approach in improving these conditions. Central to this is bridging the gaps between actors involved in media work in Ireland and developing measures for supporting and sustaining ‘good work’. Keywords  COVID-19 • Media work • Irish media industries • National policy • Educators • Employers • Media students The introduction to this book noted the emergence of the Irish state’s interest in creative industries (‘Roadmap for the Creative Industries’) and the subsequent development of policy on creative work, moves that promised increased state effort aimed at developing creative industries in Ireland. This was followed by greater educational and industry activity directed at developing skilled creative workers and producing talent for a changing and dynamic industry. According to some narratives, the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. O’Brien et al., Media Graduates at Work, Creative Working Lives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66033-8_6

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subsequent growth of media industries in Ireland was testament to the success of those policies and to the talent and resources available in Ireland to sustainably develop creative industries. In December 2019, for example, Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan stated, upon the release of the First Report on the Audiovisual Action Plan, that ‘We’re making real progress towards making Ireland a global hub for TV, drama, film and animation. I’m confident that we’re on our way to reach the target of 24,000 audiovisual jobs and expanding the sector’s value to €1.4 billion’ (Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, 2019). An alternative narrative, though, points to the concurrent funding crisis in public service broadcasting, which saw calls for the reform if not the end of national broadcaster RTÉ (Irish Examiner, 2019). In other words, the media landscape of 2019 was one of mixed fortunes and this has, of course, since been exacerbated by the arrival of COVID-19 and its impact on media industries and on media workers. What this pandemic has exposed, once again, is the precariousness of media work for everyone and for new entrants in particular. While certain creative sectors such as the arts were particularly vocal about the supports needed for artists (Arts Council, 2020) media workers were less visible in their calls for economic supports or business funding. Individual media workers were faced with unemployment, uncertainty about future employment or with the possibility of losing work because of having to self-isolate while in production. With this in mind, we suggest that an understanding of how media work in Ireland is shaped and how it is experienced is perhaps more urgent. While we cannot speak to future outcomes for media workers, we can identify various issues at stake for media work and identify some of the key shapers of media workers and work in Ireland in recent years. Crucially, what the findings of these chapters demonstrate is that there is a mismatch between the stated priorities of educators, employers and students. This begins with audiovisual policy, which provides conflicting and often confusing recommendations regarding pointing out skills shortages without clearly articulating what skills are required of workers and what roles the skills are for. Additionally, policy tended to view education negatively. Similarly while the narrative of skills shortages remained a prominent feature with the policy documents, this often obscured the patterns of bad work and precariousness that is common in Irish media work. Although state agencies such as SSI have worked to support media workers through training schemes, workshops, masterclasses and courses, there

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remains a need for a deeper consideration of the type of work that policy and state agencies encourage when they frame continuous skills development and the ability to adapt to industry as something that is the responsibility of individual workers rather than industry and employers. Given that media policy established a particular focus on education, we investigated whether this mapped onto the perspectives of media educators in the higher education landscape in Ireland. The perspectives of these educators however began to uncover the mismatch between educators, policy, industry and media work. Media educators saw media education as fulfilling a broader role which included personal development of graduates, the acquisition of critical thinking skills and the opening of minds, as well as subject-specific knowledge and skills development. In this sense, educators and policy-makers may benefit from knowledge sharing and more understanding of each other so that expectations can be managed. The educators also revealed some parallels and some divergences between the perceptions of our media worker interviewees. Where educators saw critical thinking, transferable and soft skills as important for graduates and their pursuit of work, our media workers found it harder to see the correlation between these skills and their media work. Although this was more the case of recent graduates and new entrants, it does suggest that media educators could do more to articulate clearly the relationship of critical thinking, transferable and soft skills to media work. What we found unexpected was the value that employers placed on these very skills, although the media educators we spoke to did not seem to realise this and felt compelled to defend such skills to students. Ultimately, we found that there was much alignment between the skills development that took place in education and in work, and the skills needs of industry and workers. However, there was often poor shared understanding that could be improved with further communication. In exploring the mismatch between policy, education and industry further, the under-researched perspective of employers was included. This allowed us to move away from an assumption held in policy and by educators, documented in earlier chapters, that industry is automatically pitted against graduates and educators. In fact, employers frequently saw graduates as skilled in a general sense, in the areas of storytelling, research, teamwork and in terms of their capacities for critical and creative thinking. Somewhat surprisingly employers did not claim to be concerned with specific technical skills in graduates and recognised that a capacity to learn on the job was more beneficial to employers who were clear that graduates

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would need to continue to learn throughout their careers. The lack of direct communication between educators and employers points to a significant need for better communication between each and more clear articulation of the expectations and capacities for worker development of educators, graduates and employers. In terms of improving engagement between employers and graduates, there are a number of ways forward. Employers stated their desire for hiring graduates with broad and transferable skills, such as research and team-­ working skills. However, the media graduates we interviewed did not (upon graduation, at least) consider these skills valuable in the media industries. Greater clarity in communication of the desirability of these skills could be made in job advertisements, in industry-talks with students and in the wider policy, industry and educational discourses about media degrees, all of which might help graduates to better recognise these skills as valuable for media employment. In addition, media graduates reported confusion about how to enter media work and so employers and industry bodies could both offer a clearer map of possible routes into media work. This mapping of progression routes could help to demystify media industries for graduates. Media employers could also better identify and articulate their points of view as to what skills can be developed and enhanced on the job or through supported training and mentoring schemes, which would help to encourage graduates into such work and better integrate graduates into entry-level work. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, fairer and more meaningful entry-level work is needed as internships and minimum wage jobs help generate and perpetuate structural inequalities in the industry. Particularly in the years to come, following the pandemic, inequality of access to media work may become even more embedded in the sector if media work is scarce and competition for entry fierce. Given the attention now paid to inclusion and diversity among the main broadcasters, sectoral organisations and state funding bodies, employers need to be even more cognisant of the need for ‘good work’ that is sustainable, fair and genuinely open to all. Having examined varying facets shaping media work, such as policy, education and employers throughout the book, the perspective of the media graduate proved crucial in exploring some ways in which the mismatch between policy, education and industry could be reconciled. Our interviews with graduates allowed us to see whether they felt that their education and the industry they entered were either in sync or were giving different messages about the realities of media work. In particular, the

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graduate experiences accentuated the need for ‘good work’ within the industry that is sustainable and fair. As the interviews indicated, much of the media work described was often characterised by precariousness and uncertainty, where graduates’ trajectories are highly contingent and continually negotiated. Graduates display an awareness of the competing and potentially over-whelming demands of the industry. Graduates tended to blame education for their lack of preparedness, rather than the industry itself. Although the industry was competitive and graduates had to foster portfolio working careers, they saw this as a necessity and accepted this as a way of getting into media work, as their education solely was not going to open up doors for them. Experience became the new metric for graduates rather than education as that opened up more opportunities for them. Further training was also deemed necessary by some. What emerges from their perspective is a tension between media education and further training initiatives, due to the fact that many of the graduates felt that further training was a necessity, as they felt like their degrees did not prepare them enough for the industry. In light of these points, media graduates will face many challenges in the coming years and, as of the time of writing, there is great uncertainty about how and when media work will return to normal or whether employment will return to pre-COVID-19 levels. Insecure portfolio work and national measures, such as country lockdowns brought on by the pandemic may have further contributed towards the precariousness experienced my media graduates and media workers more broadly. While this may paint a bleak picture of the Irish media industries and media work, there is the possibility of a silver lining. The pandemic has caused those involved in state agencies and organisations, in education, employers, media graduates and workers to very suddenly recognise current conditions and to find solutions to the problems posed by the pandemic for continuing work. This suggests that, when required, all of these actors can accommodate themselves to change and for the betterment, more generally, of media work and media workers. If this can be done in the case of a pandemic, perhaps more long-term strategic thinking can be used to develop measures for supporting and sustaining ‘good work’.

Bibliography Arts Council. (2020). COVID-19 Latest Updates. [Online] Available at: http:// www.artscouncil.ie/COVID-­19/. Accessed 22 Oct 2020.

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British Film Institute. (2020). Working in the Screen Industry During COVID-19. [Online] Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/coronavirus-­covid-­19/ working-­screen-­industry-­during-­covid-­19. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. Broadcasting Authority of Ireland. (2020). BAI Announces Supports for Broadcast Media Sector During COVID-19 crisis. [Online] Available at: https://www.bai. ie/en/bai-­announces-­supports-­for-­broadcast-­media-­sector-­during-­covid-­19-­ crisis/. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. Crowley, S. (2020). Budget 2021: Culture and entertainment Sectors Receive a Boost. [Online] Available at: https://www.rte.ie/ culture/2020/1014/1171345-­b udget-­2 020-­c ulture-­a nd-­e ntertainment-­ sectors-­receive-­a-­boost/. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. (2019). Minister Madigan Publishes First Progress Report on the Implementation of the Audiovisual Action Plan. [Online] Available at: https://www.chg.gov.ie/minister-­madigan-­ publishes-­first-­progress-­r eport-­on-­the-­implementation-­of-­the-­audiovisual-­ action-­plan/. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. (2020). Covid-19 Supports For Artists and Those Working in The Arts Sector. [Online] Available at: https:// www.chg.gov.ie/covid19-­supports-­for-­artists/. Accessed: 22 Oct 2020. IBEC. (2020). Audiovisual Ireland. [Online] Available at: https://www.ibec.ie/ connect-­a nd-­l earn/industries/technology-­t elecoms-­a nd-­a udiovisual/ audiovisual-­ireland. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. IBEC/Audiovisual Ireland. (2020). Reboot & Reimagine: Supporting the Irish Audiovisual Sector. Dublin: IBEC. McMorrow, C. (2020). Covid-19 Has Caused a Crisis in the Media Industry. [Online] Available at: https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0411/1130008-­ covid-­19-­media-­landscape/. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. Miley, I. (2020). RTÉ Income Set to Fall by Up to 35% Due to Covid-19. [Online] Available at: https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0629/1150388rte-covid/. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. Screen Skills Ireland. (2019). Skills Needs Analysis Report for the Screen Sector in Ireland 2019-2020. [Online] Available at: https://www.screenskillsireland.ie/ wp-­content/uploads/2020/02/Screen_Skills_Ireland_2019_Report_vG.pdf. Accessed 8 July 2020. Slattery, L. (2020). Screen Industry Calls for Help as Pandemic Pause Takes Its Toll. Irish Times, April 23.

Index1

A Ability, 37, 51, 52, 58–60, 62–66, 69, 71, 73, 86, 89, 96, 105 Academic, 13–15, 31, 35, 39, 41, 45, 61, 68, 73, 74, 80, 82, 84–86 Academically oriented, 12–14, 30, 30n1, 32, 37, 46, 51, 82 Actors, 2, 107 Adapt, 13, 23, 58, 59, 62, 65, 83, 87–89, 91, 98, 99, 105 Advertising, 86 Advocacy, 23, 39, 40, 56, 59, 60, 67 Agencies, 5, 11, 16, 17, 21, 23, 40, 57–59, 104, 105, 107 Alumni, 4 Animation, 36, 104 Anxiety/anxieties/anxious, 46, 84, 98 Apprenticeships, 11 Arts, 46, 80, 104 Aspiration/aspirants/aspiring, 29, 42, 79–82, 84

Audiovisual (AV), 4, 5, 7–25, 23n7, 45, 56, 65, 74, 82, 97, 98, 104 B Balance, 31, 49, 51 Barrier, 2, 60 Beliefs, 42, 91 Beneficial, 38, 45, 72, 84, 93, 97, 105 Biases, 41 Blame/blamed, 8, 19, 49, 83, 87, 89, 98, 99, 107 Broadcast/broadcaster(s)/ broadcasting, 36, 56–62, 64–72, 93, 104, 106 Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI), 18 Broaden, 2, 4, 6, 22, 58, 61, 64, 80, 81, 87, 99, 105 Business, 10, 22, 23, 44, 47, 57, 64, 66, 88, 104

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. O’Brien et al., Media Graduates at Work, Creative Working Lives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66033-8

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C Candidates, 67, 68, 70–72, 91 Capability/capabilities, 60, 62, 68 Capable, 42 Capital, 4, 10, 12, 23, 32, 33, 37, 89, 91 Career(s), 3, 5, 14, 16, 17, 23, 24, 29, 32–34, 39, 43, 45, 47–52, 58, 68, 73, 78–81, 83, 84, 86–89, 92–96, 99, 100, 106, 107 Casualisation, 69 Certificate, 11, 40 Challenges, 3, 5, 8, 12, 13, 30, 34, 36, 48, 49, 51, 52, 68, 70, 73, 78, 79, 83, 93, 98, 107 Cinema, 14, 38 Collaboration(s), 14, 74 Collaborative, 45 College(s), 11, 17, 30, 59, 65, 85, 86, 88, 89 Commitment(s), 25, 51, 57, 70, 71 Communications, 35, 38, 49, 51, 56–60, 62, 67, 68, 72, 105, 106 Competencies/competences, 18, 20, 37, 57–59, 68, 72 Confidence, 34, 51, 69, 93 Confident, 52, 84, 86, 104 Connections, 40, 45, 60, 72, 89, 90, 98–100 Corporate, 60, 62, 70, 71, 73 COVID-19, 32, 50, 79, 103 Craft, 6, 24, 58, 87 Creative, 7–25, 32–34, 40, 41, 48–50, 56–74, 78–82, 86, 87, 89, 93, 95, 100, 103–105 Curriculum(a), 20, 30, 33, 35, 36, 43, 44, 46–48, 51, 52, 56, 61, 74 CV, 71, 83, 85, 91, 93, 95, 96

D Degree(s), 5, 33, 39, 42, 46, 56, 57, 61–63, 65, 67–69, 72, 73, 78, 80, 82–92, 97–99, 106, 107 Demand, 5, 8–12, 15–20, 23–25, 23n7, 32, 34, 35, 37, 42, 43, 46, 47, 51, 78, 83, 107 Demonstrable, 33 Department(s), 70, 89 Dependent, 47, 48 Design, 19, 25, 30, 43, 44, 47, 56, 82, 87 Difficult/difficulties, 24, 30, 45, 46, 49, 50, 70, 71, 84, 87, 91–95 Digital, 38, 56–62, 64–68, 70, 72, 74, 85, 97 Disabilities, 39 Disadvantage(s), 50, 79 Disciplines, 35, 51, 56 Diversity, 30, 32, 39, 43, 106 Documentary, 93 Dublin, 36n4, 44, 81, 95, 97 E Earn, 31, 50, 95 Economic, 1, 2, 8–10, 17, 22, 25, 36, 39, 52, 71, 73, 79, 81, 96, 104 Economy, 12, 13, 32, 51, 73, 79–81 Educate, 37, 41 Education, 1, 7–19, 29–53, 56, 78–100, 104 Education-industry, 5 Education-to-work, 78, 81, 85 Educators, 2–6, 8–12, 14, 17, 18, 20, 23, 25, 31–35, 37, 41, 43, 45, 47–52, 57, 61, 63, 67, 68, 73, 79, 84, 104–106 Employability/employable, 5, 11n1, 12, 18, 23, 25, 30–37, 39, 42–49, 62, 73, 78, 80, 84, 87, 92, 96, 98, 99

 INDEX 

Employees, 32, 48, 56–58, 65, 66, 68, 71 Employers, 2–6, 9, 11, 20, 22, 31, 32, 34–37, 44–47, 56–74, 78–80, 83–87, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 99, 104–107 Employment, 5, 7–10, 12, 13, 17, 20–22, 24, 25, 30, 32, 34, 42–46, 48, 49, 52, 71–73, 78–81, 94–96, 104, 106, 107 Entry, 2, 5, 8, 23, 31, 34, 57, 59, 68–72, 78, 79, 81, 85, 88–94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 106 Environment, 12, 24, 43, 59, 79 European, 14 Expectations, 2, 4–6, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 30, 33, 37, 41, 53, 68, 69, 71, 73, 78, 80, 83, 84, 88–92, 98, 105, 106 Extracurricular, 41, 67 F Facebook, 59 FÁS, 16 Film, 13–15, 15n5, 36–38, 44, 45, 56, 57, 61, 63, 64, 79, 81, 93, 104 Financial, 3, 31, 49, 79, 94–96 Flexibility, 62, 66, 96 Freelance, 22, 63, 72, 90, 94, 98 Full-time, 22, 70, 79, 88, 94 Future, 5, 19, 20, 22, 34, 35, 49, 104 G Gaeltacht, 21, 24, 104 Galway, 11n1 Games, 36, 81, 91, 95 Geographic, 72, 81 Give, 33, 37, 39, 41, 48, 68, 94, 99

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Google, 60 Government, 14, 16, 22, 24, 32 Graduate, 2–6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17–20, 23–25, 30–37, 39, 40, 42–44, 46, 48–53, 56–74, 78–100, 105–107 Graduation, 5, 34, 45, 78, 84, 87, 91, 92, 106 H Higher education institutions (HEI), 12, 16, 17, 21, 57, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 72, 73, 80, 81, 84 I Incentive, 13, 22, 45 Independent, 56, 59–67, 69–71 Individual, 9, 23, 39, 41, 44, 73, 92, 104, 105 Industrial, 1, 2 Industry/industries, 1–25, 29–53, 56–74, 78–100, 103–107 Inequality/inequalities, 38, 106 Influencer, 47 In-house, 97, 99 Insecure, 42, 49, 79, 80, 96, 107 Institute, 11, 15n5, 33, 42, 45 Institute of Technology (IoT), 12, 12n2, 18, 30, 36, 43, 58, 72, 73 Institution(s), 11, 16, 30, 36, 41–43, 47, 73, 97 Intellectual property (IP), 48 Interning, 89 Interns, 69–71 Internship(s), 45, 46, 50, 57, 68–72, 79, 90, 93–95, 106 Interpersonal, 35, 51 Ireland, 2–5, 8–10, 12–14, 18, 22, 35, 36, 36n4, 43, 50, 52, 56, 71, 74, 80, 81, 84, 85, 91, 95, 100, 103–105

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Irish, 3, 4, 7–25, 11n1, 29, 31–34, 38, 39, 48, 50, 51, 73, 78, 81, 82, 104, 107 Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC), 13 Irish Film Board (IFB), 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 22 J Job(s), 5, 18, 20–22, 32, 33, 42, 47–49, 52, 60, 62, 65, 67, 70–72, 78, 79, 81, 85, 88–91, 93–100, 104–106 Journalism, 68, 97 Journey, 4, 47, 83 K Knowledge, 5, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 51, 59, 62, 64, 73, 80, 92, 94, 97, 99, 105 L Labour, 3, 4, 8–14, 16, 17, 21, 42, 52, 74, 80, 90, 93, 95, 98 Lawyer, 60 Learn/learning, 5, 6, 16, 18, 25, 32, 33, 36, 38, 40–46, 49, 57, 58, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 73, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 91, 92, 98, 105, 106 Learner(s), 18, 20, 23, 25, 40 Life, 30, 31, 40, 41, 43, 46, 47, 50, 52, 64, 82 Lifestyle, 67 Location, 45, 48, 81 London, 95 Long-term, 10, 74, 94, 96, 107

M Magazine, 90, 93, 97 Management, 59 Marginalised, 39 Marketing, 15, 59, 97 Marketization, 42 Markets, 3, 5, 8, 10–14, 17, 23, 33, 42, 44, 48, 62, 80, 88, 89, 93, 95, 98 Media, 1–25, 29–53, 56–61, 63, 64, 67–69, 72–74, 78–100, 103–107 Mentors, 97, 99 Mentorship, 83 N Narrative, 2, 4, 7, 12, 13, 16, 19, 21, 22, 24, 31–35, 43, 58, 60, 61, 83, 91, 103, 104 National/nationally, 4, 8, 10, 14–16, 15n5, 18, 19, 21, 29, 30, 56, 97, 99, 100, 104, 107 Network, 33, 39, 41, 81, 89 Newmanist education, 36, 42, 44 Newspaper, 87 NGO, 56, 58, 59, 62, 68, 70, 72 Non-accredited, 11 O Occupations, 80, 96 On-the-job, 64, 71, 72, 105, 106 Opportunity, 2, 12–14, 16, 22, 24, 41, 43, 45, 46, 49, 52, 64, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 82, 86, 88–90, 94–96, 98, 100 Organisation, 2, 6, 23, 40, 48, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 67, 70, 78, 87, 89, 96–99, 106, 107 Oversupply, 71, 79, 95 Overwork, 45, 100

 INDEX 

P Pandemic, 9, 10, 51, 71, 79, 104, 106, 107 Passionate, 41 Pathway(s), 2, 5, 6, 23n7, 49, 78–100 Patronage, 81 Pay, 2, 9, 50, 67, 69, 71, 72, 90, 100 Permanent, 20, 24, 71, 72, 84, 88, 93, 94, 96, 99 Podcasting, 85, 97 Policy, 1–25, 29, 30, 32, 33, 39, 52, 53, 56, 59, 63, 65, 73, 78–80, 82, 83, 99, 100, 103–106 Political, 1, 2, 38, 40, 41, 51 Portfolio(s), 5, 78–80, 83, 85, 92–96, 99, 100, 107 Postgraduate, 21 Post-graduation, 68, 69, 86, 87, 92 Postproduction, 40, 95 Potential, 5, 13, 16, 18, 21, 36, 49, 64–66, 68, 69, 79, 96 Practical, 11, 12, 14, 15, 30n2, 34, 35, 38, 42, 45, 51, 64, 81, 84, 85, 88 Precarity/precariousness/precarious, 5, 22, 25, 31, 36, 48–50, 69, 71, 79, 90, 96 Prepare/prepared/preparedness, 4, 5, 14, 30, 33, 34, 40, 46–49, 51, 52, 62, 78, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 97–100, 107 Production(s), 5, 8, 9, 11n1, 13–15, 20, 22, 23, 34, 39, 40, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51, 56–58, 60–67, 69, 70, 78, 82, 85, 88, 89, 93–95, 104 Professional, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 29, 31, 34, 38–40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 48, 50, 52, 79, 83, 84, 87, 97, 98 Prospects, 9, 21, 32, 37, 44, 48, 81

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Q QA, 12 QQI, 11, 57, 68 Qualification(s), 40, 63, 68, 70 Qualified, 18, 19 R Race, 38 Radio, 64, 84, 92, 93, 95, 97 Reality/realities, 10, 17, 42, 49, 57, 65, 69, 87, 88, 90–93, 98, 100, 106 Recruit, 70 Regional, 19, 30, 39 Requirement(s), 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 19, 38, 45, 57, 58, 62, 66–68, 72, 89, 92 S Sacrifices, 48 Salary/salaries, 71, 79 Screen, 19, 20, 23n7 Screen Ireland (SI), 21, 47, 99 Screen Skills Ireland (SSI), 11, 11n1, 14, 21–23, 58, 97–99, 104 Scripting, 70 SI, see Screen Ireland Skillnet, 11 Skills, 4, 5, 7, 19–22, 30, 50–52, 56, 80, 104 Skills-based, 16 SPI, 12, 17, 19 SSI, see Screen Skills Ireland STATCOM, 10, 14–16, 22 Storytelling, 39, 57–59, 61, 63, 85, 97, 105

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T Tax-relief Teaching, 30n2, 41, 44, 50, 62, 65, 68 Teamwork, 57, 61–63, 105 Technical, 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 22, 30n2, 34, 38, 39, 48, 50, 51, 57–59, 61, 63–65, 105 Technology, 36, 49, 64, 65 Television (TV), 13–15, 44, 56, 60–64, 66, 69–71, 79, 91–93, 98, 104 Temporary, 22, 71, 72, 79, 88 Theory, 35, 51, 61, 82 Theory-practice, 36 Third-level, 3–5, 14, 17–19, 21, 46, 68, 72, 100 Traineeship, 11, 16 Training, 5–11, 13–16, 16n6, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36, 36n4, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 59, 63, 69–72, 78–80, 82–87, 94, 96–100, 104, 106, 107 Twitter, 90 U UK, 2, 9, 32, 81, 87 Uncertain, 32, 34, 96 Underemployment, 8, 9, 22, 24, 100 Underfunded, 51

Undergraduate, 41, 56, 60–63, 72, 80, 99 Underprepared, 83–85 Underqualified, 88 Understaffed, 51 University/universities, 6, 12, 12n2, 17, 18, 30, 32, 33, 36–38, 41, 42, 44, 56–74, 78, 81, 82, 84, 88–92 V Vocational, 15, 16, 31, 33, 35, 38, 39, 43, 51, 82, 84 Volunteer/volunteering, 67, 84 Vulnerability, 12, 25, 31, 36 W Wage(s), 71, 72, 106 Website, 22, 23n7, 59 Wikipedia, 60 Work/working, 1, 2, 5, 7–11, 22, 24, 29, 33, 40, 45, 47, 48, 50, 56, 63, 67, 68, 71, 78–100, 103–107 Work-based, 16, 45, 46, 73 Worker(s), 2, 4, 5, 8–11, 17–20, 22–25, 29–53, 57, 62, 78–82, 86, 87, 95, 98, 100, 103–107 Workforce, 22, 48, 73, 74, 95 Workplace, 43, 66, 83, 91