Jump to questions

1. What was your biggest challenge after graduating university?
2. When you started applying for jobs, what do you consider to be the most valuable skills?
3. How do you deal with rejection in your careers?
4. How do you look after your wellbeing at the beginning of your careers?
5. What was your first paid career?
6. How do you determine like working out what your value is? Moneywise?

 

Audience Questions

7. There’s always talk about giving opportunities to young people or next generations, but isn’t that excluding people who are over 25?
8. What industry skills do you think should be more embedded in creative education?
9. Lots of opportunities in the creative industries are apprenticeships for 18-25 year olds, or you need a degree in a similar subject. How do you overcome those obstacles?

 

Leena Norms

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this Breaking In session. Today we’re going to talk about breaking into jobs and careers, and kickstarting your creative life going forward. It’s very exciting and we’re really happy to have you here. We’re going to try and use this time as best as possible to answer as many of your questions and curiosities as we can. As we all know, it’s a bit of a struggle to work out what industry you’d like to work in, what kind of thing you’d like to be part of creating. But once you find that thing that you want to be part of, what the dream is, how you get there? How do you get through the door and what happens once you’re through the door?

So, my name is Lena, I am a poet and I’m also one of those awful YouTubers you hear about. But I also worked in the book publishing industry for almost a decade. And I’m really excited to welcome our two amazing guests today. So first, we have Hannah Chukwu, who is an award-winning editor at Hamish Hamilton Penguin Random House, who is working on literary fiction and nonfiction. She is the editor for Five Dials magazine and the editor for the Black Britain Writing Back series and policy and campaigns consultant for the Lit in Colour Campaign.

Georgia Attlesey FRSA, is a creative producer, associate lecturer and founder of Pudding. Having made big ideas more accessible through culture for organisations, including Poets in the City, How the Light Gets In, Julie’s Bicycle and London Film School, she founded Pudding in 2019 as the sweet spot between organisations and their audiences. A Roundhouse creative entrepreneur alumni, she mentors, for I Like Networking, Arts Emergency, and hosts a weekly office hour for young creatives. She lectures in collaborative practice and creative facilitation at BIMM, facilitate for organisations including Inc Arts, and host the Confluences event series for Penned in the Margins.

Thank you so much for being here, Georgia and Hannah. It’s cool that you both have so much stuff that you’ve done. I think that’s what’s overwhelming. It’s why you both have these incredible careers. And so, I wanted to chat first about professional development in general. Then we’re going to get onto some well-being and maybe even some money talk.

So first, I wanted to ask you both, did you attend university? And what was your biggest challenge after graduating? And if you didn’t attend university? What was your biggest challenge having not gone to university?

Georgia Attlesey

I did go to university. And I think I’d always known that that was something I wanted to do. I had the classic tussle between art school and an English degree. But with two parents who were artists, that nudged me towards the Literature degree. But I had parents that kind of said, come back to this if you’re still interested in it, but whatever you do, don’t follow in our footsteps, which was a calming introduction to the arts. So I was really clear that I wanted to go off and do an English degree. I just had no idea what I wanted to do afterwards.

And I think it’s probably worth saying, I missed my grades and my first choice, and thought that it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but that actually it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened. So, I just want to say that the kind of do or die moment getting into university – It kind of feels so cataclysmic at 18, but I just want everyone to feel very comfortable that it doesn’t necessarily determine one thing or the other. And I think you ended up in the right place for wherever you’re meant to be. So, I did go to a university. And I think the thing that I regret most about it is I didn’t have more fun when I was there. I was very studious, got my head down. So, looking back, I would have loved to have been a little bit rowdier. Hannah, I don’t know if that chimes with your experiences(?)

 

Hannah Chukwu

Yeah, absolutely. I mean – I also did an English degree. But I had – what at the time I called the quarterlife crisis – pre-uni, when I was like writing personal statements for basically every subject under the sun all at the same time. Things that I knew I didn’t even enjoy, really, but for some reason, I thought maybe three years of that would be great, because I just was so kind of terrified about what was on the other side, and like making the right choice.

So, I suppose kind of ended up choosing English because it was just my favourite subject. And I thought that would like keep options open, and you could kind of come back to the anxiety at the end of my degree.

And then afterwards, because I didn’t want to move home after university – and I went to a uni that where most people kind of don’t stay in that uni town afterwards – the options generally are to kind of move home. That’s mostly because rent is like, so expensive there. And there’s like not a huge kind of 20s community as well, or like grad community. I really didn’t want to move home, or to move to London, really. And so it’s like, I’m not really sure what my options are. And I think that was probably my biggest challenge afterwards. Like I still had that kind of fear around what was the right next step, but then it was mostly kind of thinking about how am I going to kind of set myself up like, how am I going to pay rent? How am I can do that without that kind of stability? Or like, a net beneath me. That kind of fear was the biggest challenge. And I yeah, I kind of worried that would stop me taking risks that I thought I should be taking, at that time, because I didn’t really have the option of like moving home.

I think, what’s hard is that, everyone who does go to uni, and then kind of moves into the working world afterwards, feels that same fear of transition. But actually, you’re all coming from very different contexts. And quite often, you’ve gone from spending three years thinking that you’re kind of exactly the same as everyone else on your course. And then suddenly, like some of the other parts of your life and your journey become a little bit clearer. And, you know, what is a risk for one person is quite a different risk someone else? And so I think trying to assess that and figure out what was next was quite a challenging moment.

 

Leena Norms

Definitely. Georgia, with what you were saying about, like not having quite enough fun at uni, I think I probably had too much fun, definitely missed out on some grades, but what I realised from that was that I, I joined like five societies. And then when I got into publishing, I realised – Oh, I can just talk to anybody So I didn’t get the grade, but I did get the gob. There’s something in that.

When you started applying for jobs and from being a new grad into being employed, were there any skills that you realise that you that you did have that really helped you navigate that space? And were there any that you were like, I really should have got that skill before I started applying?

 

Hannah Chukwu

Yeah, to kind of similar to what you were saying, what I hadn’t really realised was one of the best things to get out of uni was that ability to talk to people at all different life stages. Again, from doing quite large societies working quite different jobs over summers and things like that, I kind of just gained so many new experiences in such a short amount of time that I didn’t really feel that as daunted by like, you know, meeting new people or being thrown into like a totally new situation. And that is, I think, incredibly useful when you’re kind of starting out. And I think what I probably should have done is reframed what building a network/community looked like, because at the time that felt like the slimiest thing to like network and go to events to network, but then actually understanding that it is just like meeting other people who are passionate about the same thing as you or doing jobs that you might want to do at some point.

 

Leena Norms

Georgia, how about your regrets?

 

Georgia Attlesey

I spend my entire kind of teen and degree years, just bombing around the country going to events I thought looked interesting. It never crossed my mind that someone got paid to programme events. So, I was just kind of following my nose in terms of what I thought was interesting. And then, after graduating, a very good pal who’s a literary agent kind of said, well, have you thought about events programming? I’ve just seen this job, this is surely your ideal job ever. Right? And she was exactly right. It was a researcher for a philosophy festival. And but it just never ever crossed my mind that that was something I could go into.

So, I guess one of the things that I’d learned at university was to follow your nose and follow things that you think are interesting. Because there are some things that you think are interesting, and then you start doing them, like through internships or placements, and you realise that they’re not great. But there are others that you realise that they are skills or kind of areas that you do want to continue to develop.

And so saying yes, to as many things as possible, and being quite fearless towards rejection, as well. It’s a very hard skill to cultivate. And I’m sure we would all say that we struggle with that now, but to not think about each individual opportunity is kind of the be all and end all but to think about the bigger picture of kind of building up kind of a constellation or a map of opportunities and knowing that some of them will land. So reinterpreting failure, and also using those research skills, we all develop through our degrees to become kind of problem solving. And being able to think creatively or think a slant on subjects I think is really valuable.

 

Leena Norms

When it comes to rejection, I’d love to ask you guys, before we get on to like the success stories, how do you deal with rejection in your careers? Especially obviously, as a graduate, there must have been some knock backs, and sometimes you were like, I’ve never gonna get a job. But also, that thing kind of carries on, I find out because every time you want a promotion, or you want to go do something else, you have to put yourself through the wringer all over again. So tell me about your relationship with rejection and how it’s changed over the years.

 

Hannah Chukwu

Yeah, I mean, I think I would say, I have realised now that basically, no one that I admire, or who I find really inspiring, started out doing a dream job, but literally no one. I really love what you were saying Georgia about, like, having an idea of things that you might be interested in. But actually, until you try them, like you really don’t know where it is that you’re gonna end up. So it’s kind of impossible for the process to say, ‘this is definitely what I want to do, I’ll just start doing that.’ And then ‘I’ll do that forever’. So I think once you kind of move that expectation aside, it’s trying to view like rejection as, just like you said, the first step in the process that you have to be rejected quite a few times before you get accepted. And each rejection is like that you’re learning from the interview you’re learning from.

But then obviously, I recognise it’s so much easier for me to say that in hindsight. I always think this when you hear kind of celebrities talk about like their failures or things that have gone wrong, like it’s so much easier to talk about with clarity, when you’re not feeling filled with low self esteem. I think the hardest part is just like carry on believing that you actually have something to contribute.

It’s kind of worth going for something like that might be a little bit seen a little bit more risky, like creative careers can feel just because there’s often not a very clear kind of progression, track or like, very clear set of steps that you need to follow. And so, I think at the time, what was most valuable for me was, like, just being really honest about those experiences with people that I was close to, whether they were working or looking to work in similar fields or not. I think just as soon as you know that everyone else is also going through that, you’ll always have that friend who seems to have just like, immediately smashed it and you’re like, ‘why isn’t that me?’ but if you share it with lyour close group of friends, or that kind of people that you, like, feel really comfortable talking about that, when you’ll kind of realise that actually, those feelings are not just yours alone. And then I think it feels easier to see it as part of the process, rather than just something that uniquely has happened to you. And it means that once you do get your successes, you can kind of share them with those people too.

 

Georgia Attlesey

Yeah, completely resonating with a lot of what you’ve said there, Hannah. And I think, it’s really interesting your point about the clear progression path – it’s often denied to those of us who are going into the creative industries. It feels like a very kind of closed network. And I think though quite a lot of us are working to try and change or disrupt some of those processes, because it feels like it’s an insider’s club – as soon as like you’re inside it, everyone kind of knows everyone. But if you’re on the outside looking in, it can feel kind of impossible to penetrate through those first couple of kind of rejections, particularly.

I think the more rejections you chalk up, the more fearless you become about them as well. So part of it is just a numbers game, like, if you’ve applied for one thing and being rejected from it, then that’s the only one thing that you’ve applied for, and also been rejected from it. But you know, once you start getting into your hundreds, which I like, I think I would like easily say, I’m at that point in terms of opportunities, then, then it starts to become a little bit, you view them slightly more objectively. And also, I think it’s really easy to think that you that your personality, or it’s you that’s being rejected, it’s not like it’s, it’s your skills, and like, you know, like it often comes down to something is kind of incidental as one person having like one extra point on their CV than you did. And so I know, it’s really hard to start thinking about it like this. But one way that I tried to reframe it was that there was always, like, every job I applied for, I just assumed that they already had the perfect person for the job in mind. So how was I going to be the person that they were going to be interested alongside that person. So I just automatically assumed that they maybe had like an internal candidate. And to kind of distance yourself from that, because it’s not about you being rejected. It you know, like, they’re not saying, we don’t think you’re good enough, they’re just saying that it’s your skills, your experiences that aren’t quite the same as someone else. It doesn’t mean they don’t think you don’t deserve a job in that industry. And one thing I started doing a few years ago, when I became a freelancer was a tip that I picked up from someone else. Amber, Massey, Blomfield, who is the Executive Director at Complicity Now, but she said that she aims for 100 rejections a year. And she keeps a list of them. And I cannot tell you how transformational this approach has been. So like celebrating rejection and failure, but also knowing it’s okay to feel sad.

 

Leena Norms

Definitely. And I’ve been on the other end of the interview table at hiring people, and sometimes there’s no feedback. I’m like you’re literally great, you’re perfect, but we already have one of you in the team, so we have to hire someone else. I love what you said about the 100 rejections because I think sometimes you have a better chance of getting something when you go for the stuff that you really want. And a lot of the time we hold ourselves back from going for the stuff we really want, because we’re like, oh, but I’m not good enough for it yet. And I’m actually way more likely to hire somebody who really wants it and really wants to be here. Rather than somebody who’s like 100% ticks, all the boxes, is qualified, but I’m not really sure if they’re going to enjoy it. You know, I mean, so I think enjoyment is part of it, and reaching for the stars, and going for all of those kind of big possible rejections is an incredible way to start.

I want to talk about this word, ‘wellbeing’ because it’s a word that scares me. And I can’t really attest to being very good at it. But when you’re approaching wellbeing at the beginning of your careers and motivating yourself past those kinds of failures. How did you do it? Do you look after yourself?

 

Georgia Attlesey

I think, like with rejection, it is probably something you get better at dealing with, but you almost only get better at dealing with it, because of your experiences of taking the gamble the wrong way. And I think when you’re starting out your career, I think we often feel tempted that you need to go in kind of all guns blazing, you know, you need to be doing the 2am stints on your CV to get everything spot on and perfect. And I really wish looking back that I’d have been a little bit kinder to myself, because if I’d have known where I would have ended up now, then, then I just wouldn’t have beaten myself up about it. And I don’t think it would have changed the outcome either at all. So I really liked the idea of changing your mentality of having an inner critic being an inner mentor. So think about what you’d say to a friend if they were going through the same things. And you’re giving often exactly the same recommendations, or you’re listening in exactly the same way. But the voice that you’re doing it with is a much more compassionate one.

So again, it’s really hard. Like, it’s a really easy thing to say. And it’s a really hard thing to execute. But a couple of things that have helped me along the way are getting rid of the word should, in relation to myself. So not saying I should do this, I should do that. Either you’re procrastinating, in which case, go off and do it and stop kind of beating yourself up about it. Or you don’t want to do it – in which case, like stop thinking about it and shelve it. So that was a really exciting lesson for me. But I also think making sure that you’re giving yourself downtime, like, just because you haven’t got a job doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing for you to be working Saturdays and evenings and bracing yourself. Like make sure that you’re doing things that are fun, and crucially, you’re not your job, and you’re not the process of applying for jobs. So making sure that sense of self is completely distinct from your career. I think I’ve only really learned that in the last year. And that’s because I set up a business. And like if I hadn’t done that, I think I would have continued to think about myself as a freelancer whose entire personality was their job.

 

Hannah Chukwu

Yeah, I think I also really resonate with the idea of your job taking care of your entire identity, which is a huge kind of problem in publishing, specifically, especially because reading time often takes up evenings and weekends. Things like events, taking up a huge amount of time and kind of not being necessarily on your job description, but there will be something basically every evening and every week – no one external really is going to put those boundaries in place for you. And I think that’s what’s very challenging when you start is that you don’t really have a model of how to make those decisions. And it’s quite overwhelming to be presented with this. Yeah, kind of all-encompassing amount of work you could be doing and especially when you’re feeling like you want to constantly be like hustling and constantly be like levelling up and kind of growing up.

It takes a long time to understand actually, what is expected of you, what it is you’re able to actually cope with and still, you know, feel like a full functioning person outside of work and have like a separate identity. And I think for me, the, the kind of best way that I managed to approach that and kind of think about that early on was with mentors. I’m a huge advocate of having a mentor. I think just having someone who is not in your workplace – someone totally separate from that, who’s just seeing you as a person who wants to challenge themself and is curious about things.

I think it’s one of the best things you can do for wellbeing. And I think like motivation at the sidebar, is also quite a tricky thing. Because, again, as soon as your you start to feel tired, or kind of exhausted or overwhelmed by work, like motivation completely goes, you get like a, you basically lose, like a sense of why you’re doing the thing that you’re doing. And so that is also something that requires some stepping outside of work requires some stepping outside of yourself really, and re engaging with like your own passions and desires, and the things that you that just make you really excited.

And there’s lots of different ways to do that. And that will be different for everyone. But I’ve also noticed recently that a lot of my friends who are kind of applying for things that has now become a question, and in lots of interviews, it’s kind of ‘how do you manage stress outside of work?’ Or ‘how do you like relax?’

 

Leena Norms

I’ve never had that in a job interview that gives me hope for the future. Yeah, I also agree – book publishing is just a bit of a scam that I’ve always felt was a scam is that you don’t really get paid to read, you have to go do your reading in your own time, which I always felt was a little bit like, Sorry, what?

 

Georgia Attlesey

I think that runs through every industry. Your commitment is considered in the amount of extracurricular hours he put in. And I think that that’s a real danger. Like, the idea of the number of events that you attend – the real work happens outside of working hours.

I also just wanted to say on that, I know that we kind of enjoy talking about creative careers in quite an elevated way, just wanting to really reiterate, that all careers are really competitive and I don’t want there to be kind of an element in which people think that they should feel downbeat about a career in the creative industries like you know. I used the example of plumbing yesterday’s with might some third year students I was teaching like, there are no world class plumbers, like no one know that like any world class kind of leading plumbers, but that’s because it’s really hard to be like an incredible kind of celebrity plumber, right? So I think the idea that any job but to get to that standard in any industry is just as impossible. So it’s just about the ambition and making sure that the kind of the goals you’re setting are kind of responsible and suitable for where we’re at in terms of your career. But I just, I really want to kind of start to pull away from this idea that the creative industries are somehow like more competitive and more challenging. Like it’s impossible to become a lawyer. It’s impossible to become like a slamming carpenter.

 

Leena Norms
Yeah, definitely, I think it’s also like knowing where your genuine skills are. But anyway, tell me what your first paid career was.

 

Hannah Chukwu

Yeah, so my first job out of uni was, was at Penguin, essentially doing the job I do now, but on like a traineeship. So, it was like a six month training editor or traineeships specifically aimed at people who were coming from non traditional backgrounds to publishing. So yeah, publishing more generally has been quite a traditional industry and kind of historically hasn’t represented people from more diverse groups. So I was one of the first cohorts to do that scheme. So that was six months, like September to March. And we were paid £11,000 for the six months. So I suppose like 22,000 for the whole year. And I mean, I think that’s quite useful to share, because the scheme is still happening, and I think. The reason that I applied to it specifically was because I didn’t have any experience in publishing. And so I wouldn’t have been able to go into an assistant role without that kind of step. So in that way, it really kind of opened up an opportunity for me, also, I felt very nervous about the idea of moving to London, to my family live in Manchester. And I kind of thought, like, six months felt much more manageable, and like, you know, I could kind of test the waters, even though you know, obviously, if you’re applying for a permanent position, you can leave. In my mind, I was like, it’s fine. I won’t be like held to anything at the end of these six months, I can just test it, which is like, yeah, a really great position to be in. But then on the other hand, like there aren’t that many kind of six month long, like rent contracts. So trying to figure out how I was going to have like stability. And what I was going to do, at the end of that six months, was something that like kind of definitely hung over in my head like over that time. So yeah, just to kind of share that as my experience of starting in the industry that there was like, whilst there was kind of flexibility and like, definitely like access there. There was also that kind of insecurity that I had to manage as well.

 

Georgia Attlesey

Yeah, resonating quite a lot with Hannah. So I graduated 10 years ago, I graduated in 2012. And I’m afraid that my first salary was £13,000 pounds for a full year contract. So and that was after a three month unpaid internship where I was doing exactly the same job. Happily, I think these opportunities are less kind of normative now. But it felt, I mean, but it’s worth saying that it felt exploitative at the time.

And actually, there were kind of things about that role, but made it very, very challenging. Beyond the fact it was an unliveable amount of money to be in London on. The tricky thing about that opportunity was that because there weren’t very many other places that I would have got a similar experience. So I actually felt quite suffocated by the kind of the fact that this opportunity existed because there was just absolutely nothing else.

Lena, it’s so interesting to hear you talking about 40,000 people working in the publishing industry and in the kind of the influencer kind of YouTubing kind of landscape. The reason I set Pudding up in March is because this concept didn’t exist. So, I am in like an industry of one now. It’s exciting, but for me at the time, I remember thinking, like, if not this, and where am I going to go to get this experience. And so I found that they weren’t really any other doors to knock on. And I just want to say that your dream career might not have been invented yet and I think that’s worth bearing in mind – like the thing that you want to go and spend the rest of your life doing might not yet have been conceptualised as a role. And just to be aware that that might be the case or the industry might be tiny, but that that doesn’t mean that it’s not still worth pursuing. Because I’ve spent the last five years trying to carve out the semblance or structure of an industry for myself. But it’s taken a really, really long time. But, but you do have to take a few kind of wrong turns to get there. And that first job was important, but made things almost impossible for quite a long time afterwards.

 

Leena Norms

I love that kind of if you can’t find your industry make your industry. It’s amazing. One of the questions that I had for you, before we go into the great q&a, we’ve got lots of questions coming in in the chat is how do you determine your monetary value? How do you go about having in your mind an idea of what a fair salary is? And then actually getting it? I know, they’re very different things, but how do you determine like working out what your value is? Moneywise?

 

Hannah Chukwu

I’ve, I suppose because I’ve stayed in the same team and kind of progressed up in that same role. I kind of have just been, given the salary, I’ve been given that the next stage, and I’ve had to advocate for each of those promotions, partly because I knew that the industry isn’t amazing at doing that without you kind of advocating for it. So I didn’t know that going in – the traineeship taught me that I was partly going to have to do that and having to kind of advocate for salary rises, like every time, I’ve had to make the case myself. No one has ever sat me down and be like, “Oh, we’re gonna out of the blue, like, give you all of these other things for the job that you’re currently doing.” So that has always been something I’ve had to do.

And then actually, what I think is very important when you’re in that position is to like, basically completely try and take away your identity from that number. Because actually, even within the same industry, you could be paid, like very different amounts for the same job at a different company and the skills that a different company are gonna value and you might be quite different from what your own team values just because of the need and the team or the gap in the team or like, yeah, exactly what you’re, you’re doing with them. So I think it’s like, whilst I think it’s really important to have complete transparency about, you know, pay grades, and to make sure, especially that there’s no pay gaps within one role. I think seeing it as like an actual number on your worth, can be very damaging when you don’t have something to compare it to, and you can’t actually see that you could be being paid much more somewhere else, and they would give you a higher number for the same role. And you know, your skill, you’re just as skilled, just as talented within your current team.

So yeah, that’s, that’s slightly more of an abstract point, but I think I started off very much thinking about like, oh, I need to know my worth, and then I’ll ask my worth. And once I get that, then, you know, I’m at the next stage, but actually it’s about you also have to make sure you’re divorcing your identity from that. Otherwise that then becomes quite damaging, I think. Yeah, so I’d be really interested to hear kind of how you both do that. Especially having to decide what your day rate is in a way that I don’t have in my job.

 

Georgia Attlesey

I mean, it’s probably the case, of course, for all careers but you can only be paid as much as someone who’s willing to pay for your time and for you. But there are things that you can do to kind of enhance or improve your chances are – the idea that no one is going to say, “hey, we think you’ve been working really hard, we’d love to offer you a 15% pay rise just to carry on doing what you’re doing”, just as a thumbs up kind of well done. And that just like, that just doesn’t happen. One thing that I would say is that for those of you thinking about pursuing freelance careers, or portfolio careers, make the most of unions and make the most of industry standards, there are a couple of really incredible websites out there. And if you’re not in a job that like has kind of a union. I mean, like equity, for example, is a really brilliant one for actors and has lots of kind of support there for people who are interested in exploring careers in the mean it within the third sector, but it can often feel hard if you’re going into an emerging discipline, that no one’s really sure how to pay people that like what their worth is. And the way that I, as an organisation, set my rates is based on industry standards, but I am trying to match those and be slightly more ambitious about those, as we kind of progress up. Hannah, your point about secrecy – I think is a really important one. I would never apply for jobs that didn’t have a salary attached to it. And because that always tells you as much about the culture of that working environment as you need to know. Jobs that don’t just go salary are going to discriminate about against kind of the candidates who are most likely to feel excluded from those opportunities in first place. So, thinking really strategically from the office about what kinds of opportunities you go for, because you don’t want to spend two days writing an application for a job and saying that you’d like £20k as a starting salary, when there are other people pitching for £80k for the same job. So if you’re going for entry level jobs, make sure they’ve got a salary against them. And if they don’t, then make sure you’re chatting to someone about what a salary expectation is likely to be. I think it’s really cheeky way of organisations paying people less and seeing what they can kind of get away with.

The other thing I wanted to say is that for freelancers, there’s some really exciting work being done as a result of this pandemic, which has been about the position of precarity of freelancers. And so there are some really interesting things like the Freelancers taskforces that are being established, that are going to provide a little bit more transparency and structure for supporting individuals to set rates and making sure that you know, organisations are being held to count on kind of late payments, etc.

Just to say that, like your work is worth something, you are worth something, and making sure that you are competent in talking about that. No one likes talking about money at the start of their careers. But it’s so important that you do give it some airtime. And also, I guess the sad thing to say is it doesn’t get easier. Like because the more experience you become, the more guilty you feel about saying, well, actually, I know I used to cost this, but now actually cost this. But you’re not being paid for the delivery, you’re being paid for 10 years worth of experience. So that’s something to bear in mind. It’s all the lived experience as well.

 

Leena Norms

I think for me, one of the motivations of going freelance after working in companies for nine years was because of the gender pay gap. And now I’m a company of one, there is no gender pay gap. So I think that that is something that the industry does have to address. I think they’re losing a lot of people to that, because I’ve never worked in a company that had less than a 17% pay gap. And it’s been up to 35 or 40%.  But there are lots of downsides to being a freelancer. And it depends on what your financial goals are, for instance, it’s much harder to get a mortgage. You don’t get a pension. There’s loads of other things.

Just to speak to what Georgia was saying about charging as a freelancer, is that, what helps me is that I know that if I accept less than I know that the work is worth, I’m going to be devaluing that work for other people in that industry too. So it’s more thinking about, ‘no I’m not going to let you pay me this because I that will also result in other people not being paid’. If you can’t advocate for yourself, you can advocate for other people and think about it like that. Because I think some there is a bit of bashful Britishness about me that’s like, oh, no, don’t pay me. I’ll just do it for free. It’s fine. I’m worth nothing.

 

Leena Norms / Question from Audience

There’s always talk about giving opportunities to young people or next generations, but isn’t that excluding people who are over 25, who would still be new entrants or breaking in, I’m thinking about career changes, long term unemployment, or like myself returning after childcare?

 

Leena Norms

I’ll jump in quickly and say that in the UK, but publishing industry, I’ve met a lot of people who have transitioned between roles. And I think it’s something that’s viewed very, very positively. In the interview process, I’ve met people who were working for the NHS, I’ve met people who spent five to 10 years as a teacher then took some time off for childcare, and then came back as somebody in publishing. So it’s definitely something that is looked on favourably from my experience. I think it’s obviously a different approach to breaking in, because you’re not just graduating and starting from the ground up. But I don’t know if you guys have anything to say on that idea of breaking in over 25?

 

Georgia Attlesey

Yeah, I mean, it’s someone who missed out on a whole raft of those opportunities, and was only able to start developing their business because of schemes that extended to the lofty, grandiose ages of 30, let me say that I think the landscape is changing as well, like the idea that National Rail have extended their, you know, railcards to 30, I think demonstrates that we know that the idea of being an emerging creative isn’t contingent on age. And just to say, also, I think that language is changing as well, so while we used to talk about young career professionals, or like early career professionals, we’re now talking about emerging creatives, or we’re talking about emerging creative professionals, which can happen at any point in your career. And also just to reinforce, there are so many transferable skills that you have, and all of that kind of incredible life experience, make sure that the roles that you’re applying for are equivalent to the ones that you’re in. But if they’re a sidestep, rather than thinking that you need to go back to the bottom of the ladder, again, you absolutely don’t need to – it’s all about how you frame and position that experience. In addition to having loads of mentors, I have a brilliant network of mentees. And a couple of poets in their early 60s, and it’s really interesting to see that those kind of competence, issues that we think are limited to your early 20s are actually there throughout your entire career. But just to say, like, you can be emerging at any point.

 

Hannah Chukwu

Yeah, definitely. Also, to speak to that last point, I thought I’d just talk very specifically about authors who I work most directly with. And there does seem to be quite a real fear for writers that they need to have a book deal by certain point or need to have been published in a certain amount of places by a certain time. And it just 100% is not how it’s looked at all from within the industry, like it’s talked about often as a really positive thing exactly, as you say, to have had, like life experience that has kind of produced the art that you’re creating. And yeah, it’s just one of those things that I’ve definitely noticed is an actual myth, because I’ve seen the conversations from within the industry as only ever, like very positive, very encouraging, and they’re not really being at all cut off or seen differently. And so obviously, I can mostly speak to authors and publishing in that experience. But yeah, just to say, from an insider perspective, verdict is go ahead and emerge whenever, whenever you are ready to emerge.

Leena Norms / Question from Audience

What industry skills do you think should be more embedded in creative education? So if you’ve been to uni, or you’ve had a creative education, what were they missing out on? And if you’ve already had a great education, what should you be catching up on

 

Hannah Chukwu

It is such a bugbear of mine, that the idea of entrepreneurship and creativity have been kind of completely distinguished and separated. The idea that you’re either interested in kind of the arts or you’re interested in kind of the nuts and bolts of whatever would make business makes sense, I think is incredibly frustrating. It’s patronising to both communities to not address there is significant overlap in both. I think, degrees do a really nice job of talking about money. Like it’s really important that you understand what the relationship between your tax return and your pension is. But in terms of this sense of a creative entrepreneur, it’s only really being taught as an industry now for the first time. Some of that so much of the language is obfuscating, people aren’t bothering to do the translation from the business world into the creative industries. And it’s our responsibility within that space to reframe that language. Like, you know, a cash forecast or cash flow can seem completely intimidating, so the elitism of the language is often the thing that needs to change. So I’d really like to see there be a more suppleness in the way that we’re talking about, about entrepreneurship ambition, and within that, the kind of the nuts and bolts of establishing your own business or pursuing your freelance career.

 

Leena Norms / Question from Audience

Lots of opportunities  in the creative industries are apprenticeships for 18 to 25 year olds, or you need a degree in a similar subject. How do you overcome those obstacles?

 

Hannah Chukwu

Similarly to what we were saying about like language change, I do think this is something that has changed a lot quite recently. Over the last few years, so many opportunities that used to say you needed a degree or a certain level of experience, have erased that. And I would say, that’s also only because they’ve kind of directly been proven to not be useful. Like it’s not that a degree is not useful, but you can still be really fantastic in a job without that specific experience. So yeah, of course, publishing, there are so many opportunities now, where a degree is not necessary.

And I think sometimes, it’s difficult to know, if you haven’t done a degree what you would look like as a candidate in comparison to someone who has. And so I think that often what is difficult is that confidence gap – where you potentially feel like you have way less skills because you haven’t had three years’ experience. If you do have a mentor, it might be something that’s useful to talk about, just so you can understand where you might be like tripping yourself up a bit, which is not actually anything to do with the experience you have, but just your expectation and perspective of your own skills. So yeah, I’d say that’s definitely not in publishing anyway. And not just for entry level roles. Also Higher, higher roles, they don’t have that as a listing anymore.

 

Georgia Attlesey

I think the recruitment processes are changing massively not leading with CV or work experience anymore, and leading instead with job applications. So they’re about qualities and kind of approaches rather than being about specific roles. I think it’s exciting thinking “I’m going to hire someone who can demonstrate to me resourcefulness about their, whatever experiences they’ve had, rather than being able to tell me that they’ve read the back catalogue of how to like how to programme and Event 101” – I’m interested in the experiences people have got and their approaches rather than kind of box ticking in, or in terms of, like qualifications. I think that it’s our responsibility as organisations, as employers, and as people who have been successful in creative industries, to keep finding ways of bridging those, those relationships, and to keep saying kind of, ‘it doesn’t have to be like this for you. Let’s find another way of making that possible.’

 

Leena Norms

Yeah, definitely. And I think it’s also with a lot of these creative industries. If you’re somebody that consumes it, then you can speak to that industry. So with like book publishing, we’re not just selling to people who have English degrees. So if you don’t have an English degree that’s actually quite good for our marketing, research, and the same with events – you don’t only for events for people with specific degrees, so if you can be part of the audience, I think you can be part of the team that makes it happen.

 

 

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