No matter how much advice we seek from friends, family, or the internet, it feels like finding (and securing) your dream job, is the unsolvable equation that none of us have ever properly been able to solve. How much of it is down to chance? Do we really just have to be in the right place at the right time? How can the job description for a work experience placement require gazillions of years of work experience beforehand?
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It's no secret that the economy is shit, post-uni employment is a pain in the ass and no one really knows how to practically do anything about it. So, instead, we find ourselves doing anything we can just to 'get a foot in the door'. The problem is, though, that this phrase which was once constructive advice seems to have become little more than a convoluted cliché to justify working your ass off for little to no money, all for the sake of squeezing our sad, tired feet into a crack between the career of dreams and a really fucking heavy door.
But what of that in-between stage? We all know how it feels to be either unemployed or stuck in a job we don’t want to be in. Some of us even know how it feels to finally be in the career we'd longed for. However, we rarely ever talk about actually being at the coveted in-between stage we’re told to work really hard to get to. What does it actually mean to have your foot in the door?
After taking some time to travel once she graduated university, Naomi joined the Bauer Academy on the Making Creativity Work training program. When we spoke she was excited to soon be starting an internship at Heart but, interestingly enough, doesn't quite describe herself as having a foot in the door just yet. 'I want to be a radio producer ... maybe in a couple of years a presenter, but producing is the thing that I’ve got a strength in at the moment', she explained. 'Then, once I’ve got my foot in the door and have been producing for a while, maybe I can explore other areas'.
So, if her foot's not in the door now with an amazing training program behind her, an internship up ahead and the prospect of being put on the Bauer Talent Development Programme after, I asked, how can we define 'having your foot in the door' these days? 'I think that having a foot in the door is just maybe having a job. But if you wanted to be a producer for example, you could start by having you foot in the door as a broadcast assistant which retrospectively you could say you have your foot in the door with internships and stuff but there are so many students that come in and out of a company that they’re not going to remember everyone'.
It's a pretty disheartening prospect, but the reality is that landing an internship is just as stressfully competitive as finding an actual, full-time paying job. Especially when the pressure around interning is no longer just to do with making a good impression on the people you want to employ you, it's also about being able to outshine all of the other people fighting for the same dream and, arguably most importantly, being able to finance it too. 'It’s hard to get into the media industry with internships', Naomi said, especially with so many of them being unpaid. 'I’m quite lucky that my mum supports me but it is quite difficult. I think a lot of people do give up and just go into a full-time job elsewhere because of [the financial aspect]'.
Perhaps, then, doing an internship isn't necessarily having your foot in the door but rather a stepping stone to reach this mysterious door and some sort of employment which will then give you a way to the job you actually want to do? Danielle, who was also on the Bauer Academy training scheme, seems to think it's something along those lines. Before joining The Academy, a lot of her time has been spent doing voluntary work at radio stations and trying to get experience, while also doing content management for a company called Inner City. 'I approached the Bauer thing to get more experience and training in the right company', she explained. *
'I've found it hard but if you want to do it, you just have to stick with it', Danielle added. 'I feel like I do need to grow. There will be so many people out there with degrees or experience and I feel like I need to go one up over them'.
The pressure to compete is something we're all pretty familiar with. According to the annual review by High Fliers Research, the number of work experience places available at the UK's leading graduate employers was expected to fall by 4.3% in 2017 which would be the first annual drop in work placement recruitment since 2010. And with the wide, general understanding of the inherently competitive nature of the creative industry in general, is it any wonder that it's become increasingly difficult to pin point what having a foot in the door or finding a way 'in' actually means at the moment? Because the reality is, despite the fact that 80% of young people think that doing work experience makes themselves more attractive to employers, it kind of looks like simply doing a work experience placement isn't quite enough to qualify as your break into the industry. It's more than that. Having your foot in the door means having done experience, the training, the networking and so on. To throw in another analogy, it means already being on the career ladder, which, as subjective as that itself might be, is probably why no one knows how to define where the door is, and when your foot is sufficiently wedged between it.
Making Creativity Work is funded by the European Social Fund and delivered by The Academy. Courses are free, last around two weeks and take place in London. Applicants must be 19+ and unemployed or economically inactive. To find out more and apply please go to www.makingcreativitywork.co.uk
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.