Media Graduates at Work

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.

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.

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.

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

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’.