Personal Career Development Material

In the Interactive Media Industry there are many different jobs and roles out there and all are crucial to the business. The jobs themselves have to be earned via use of the skill for instance a company like Nike need a new reworked logo and due to the scale of the company they aren’t going to take on just some kid who knows how to use Photoshop. They will want someone with experience who has worked in the same field before and can show for their work. So rather than just a list of places and jobs they have done on their Curriculum Vitae they are going to have to see examples so photos that they had made for other clients completed and published can be shown and evaluated so the client is sure of who they are hiring and how they will perform. The best means of doing this is to make a Portfolio whether that is a video portfolio or a folder collection of your work.

In many cases the work shall speak for itself but otherwise you shall as expected, attend an interview like any other prospective employee wearing formal dress, shake the client firmly by the hand and above maintain eye contact when speaking. Usually during the interview the client will brief you on what they want you to do for the project for instance if you are a Graphic Designer they would tell you what sort of graphic they are after and the look, feel and features of it, or if you are a Web Designer the pages, structure and content that is to be featured. Usually you can suggest own ideas in an informal manner but once contracted you are available for that job in hand down to the last client specification. 

Legal and Ethical Obligations

Legal and Ethical Obligations

Employment legislation covers laws and standards that make sure that employees do not suffer from dangerous or unhealthy working environments or practices. Employment legislation has a number of various different parts. Health and safety ensure a safe and healthy working environment. The BBC for example has strict policies regarding reporting an accident or incident, guidelines for health and safety, a risk assessment procedure and a strict security policy. Employees will be expected to abide by these rules and they know the policies in order to help the BBC make sure the working environment is safe and continues to be consistently safe. On the BBC website, all these policies can be found on the page and there is even a separate section for freelancers within the company who are unlikely to be familiar with the policies as full time employees.

Most media industry employers will have a policy that ensures equal opportunities for all by not allowing any discrimination in terms of gender, race, disability, sexuality, religion or age by their law. This law is against this type of discrimination but some employers will be better at providing equal opportunities than others. Channels 4 are known to even go as far as to regularly monitor figures, stating on their website that ‘the representation of ethnic minorities amongst permanent staff in 2010 was 13% (2009: 12%). Women continue to form the majority of staff at 57% (2009: 55%)’.

The BBC was recently publicly criticised for age discrimination under Employment Equality Age regulations when ‘Mia Costello, Managing Editor of regional station BBC Radio Solent, told presenters in an official email that they should prevent any "elderly" callers from being allowed on air.’ This caused backlash amongst the media world.

Employers must get insurance in order to cover themselves, should they be liable to pay compensation to an employee who has become injured or fallen sick due to their job. The BBC recommends this insurance to all filmmakers in order to ‘provide indemnity in respect of your legal liability to pay compensation for death, disease or bodily injury to employees arising out of and during the course of their employment’. This means the filmmaker will be covered by their insurance should they have to pay compensation to someone.

Contractual Obligations

Contractual obligations when working in the media industry

There are many different types of employment contract that employees in the media industry should be aware of. Each contract type comes with several different obligations and benefits.  A full time permanent contract means a person is employed as a regular member of staff, usually for 38 to 40 hours a week, often office hours. These jobs will often be salaried and there are many benefits that come with this type of contract such as a regular income, sick pay, holiday entitlement pay and maternity/paternity leave. Part time contracts are similar in this sense but the employee only works a fraction of what a full time employee will work.

Freelance and fixed term contracts are a lot more common in the media industry, especially for technical and creative roles such as camera operators, sound technicians etc. These contracts are temporary and are unlikely to come with the same benefits as full time contracts. Another common type of payment in the media industry is called on completion. This is when a contract states that a person shall only get paid when the piece of work they have been employed to work on is completed; this is an example of working to a brief.  

In the media industry, contracts may also have confidentiality and exclusivity terms written into them. A confidentiality agreement will insist by law that the employee is not allowed to explain any information about the production of the television show or film until a certain date or further notice for example in TV Series this means that names, plot or the employee’s involvement cannot legally be mentioned in writing or other recorded means. This is vital in maintaining secrecy on media productions and to keep viewing figures up as viewers aren't very likely to tune in if they know what’s going to happen.

Exclusivity on the other hand is a term used in contracts to ensure by law that an employee only works with one company and no others, particularly competitors (for example working for Google and having no means of interacting whatsoever with Microsoft). Payment can be suspended and employment terminated if someone breaks their exclusivity agreement by working with a competitor or other company during the period of employment covered by the contract.

For example any workers on a big Hollywood production that demands high secrecy would have to sign a confidentiality agreement in their contract so they could not reveal plot details to the press and media. It is similar if they are involved in for example visual effects work, it is crucial that their work be exclusive to that production and they could not use their skills on a production that will be competing with the film they are working on if there is an exclusivity clause in their contract.

Keynote

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Creative and Technical Roles in the Interactive Media Industry