Getting your first job

Oh I'll take that one, oh I had fun, although it’s a very long time ago, well before you where born, which ages me terribly. I went from the Wellington Polytech course and we did, those of us interested in radio, did a voice test and I was the one of three taken on. I wanted to go to Dunedin, it was my home my family was still there, so I went to 4ZB, as it was called then, and it was an intern, trainee. Usually what they would do is, they would train you for one or two years and if when you had the skills, and proved you were good enough, they would take you on in that position. That’s what happened to me I think within a year. In those days, we were probably overstaffed and A) I wasn’t allowed to go on air for six months until I had lots of voice training, which was a little excessive, but there you go, and my first rounds where SPCA because I loved animals, and the post office because my parents were postmaster and postmistress, and I think eventually I got the regional council which was the most boring round you could possibly have. So in those days, I stuck with it though, in those days, they really protected you because you were a trainee. These days, I can tell you in radio, and I assume it’s the same in other media, you are thrown in at the deep end. So we take an intern now from the broadcasting school and I would say within a few weeks we would expect them to be working on air, producing documentaries and I think we expect too much from them, and what I find a little sad is: we would hear these young and untrained voices on the radio with no light or shade or authority and they just sound like little kids, you know, and they sound a bit lost. I don’t think you should go on air until you have the skills you need. That’s our job to do it, so you know somewhere in between 25 years ago, 27 years ago and today, hopefully we’ve got it right with some proper training, but I think you might need to expect that you may very possibly be thrown into it, and sometimes that’s not so bad rather than being over protected. It’ll test you, it’ll certainly test you.

I think most journalism courses at the moment have a work placement component at the end of the course and you just have to choose where you want to go. I was quite lucky because no one else wanted to do radio, so I got to go to radio New Zealand and it was really terrifying because most of the journalists there were much older, much more experienced. I think you just have to be very confident just walk in there knowing, thinking that you can do the job. Other people will sort of feel that confidence and that will help you get a job because you have a very short space of time to prove yourself as an intern in that situation, so if you go in there meek and mild, it's not going to work for you... If you can’t be confident fake it.

But then again don’t be too afraid to ask questions because there’s a New Zealand way to learn by making mistakes but it's really exhausting and it slows you down, so I agree with you by confidence is great, initiative, is fantastic. That’s what we want. We want people who come to us with ideas and know how to source them. You know, its an ideas generating business, so do that, but if you're really stuck on something, don’t spend half a day worrying about it or going down blind alleys, just ask a question, that’s your job to ask questions. Just ask the right people the right ones and maybe not too many and you’ll be fine.