At our NME #Lifehacks event in London last month, Lyndon Saunders joined other leading creatives on a panel discussing the skills we need to succeed in a digital age.
Saunders is a lecturer in TV and Radio Production at University of Salford. He has over 15 years of experience working in the broadcast industries, and his CV includes stints on Dragons’ Den and Strictly Come Dancing. He also won a top radio industry award for his Radio 1 documentary about Badly Drawn Boy.
After the panel, he shared some advice for young people who are considering following in footsteps and embarking on a career in TV and radio. “You shouldn’t go into it thinking you can do it easily and thinking it’s just a job,” Saunders said. “It’s got to become a way of life – it’s a vocation, a passion, you live it.”
“Filming can involve 16 hours a day and there can be a lot of office work, which a lot of people don’t actually expect,” he continued. “They think it’s all the glamour, the filming. But actually 80% of it is the planning: the hard yards in the office, getting ready for it.”
Advising people not to go into this industry lightly, he added: “You need to really do some soul-searching and think, ‘is this really what I want to do?’ If you don’t love it, and you don’t live it, it really will eat you up and you’ll be out of it quicker than you can decide not to be in it. Someone else will decide that for you because they’ll see your passion isn’t there.”
Watch the full interview below.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/?bctid=5675998265001
ME teamed up with University of Salford and youth initiative Create Jobs to lay on the #Lifehacks event at London’s Islington Metal Words on Thursday 23 November. Here’s the full story of the event in pictures.