Session 1: Wednesday, 2nd October 2019 (Introduction)

Yesterday, I had my first lesson in professional and academic skills. In a way its a method of preparing us for the professional world by teaching us how to articulate ourselves in a professional manner. Whether it’s through speech or a written method or any other type of median it’s important to maintain a professional image to the world as it helps to open up different opportunities for you.

We started the lesson with a reintroduction with our lecturer Robin Kay (great guy by the way). He spent time teaching us and explaining exactly how this module in the course would help us and then how it would be assessed. Most of it will be assessed with this blog, however there is also a one to one discussion with Robin Kay that will also be assessed.

He then taught us how to set up this blog (hence how you’re able to read this) and after a few stressed filled minutes of battling with the wifi, I was able to set up this blog. To be honest I’m really excited to continue this blog and share my journey. So keep reading for more information.

Session 2: Wednesday 16th October 2019 (Self Promotion)

This session was all about self promotion. Truthfully, if you want to be successful in this day and age you have to be able to put yourself forward and show yourself in a unique way. You have to be able to stand out and the best way is to be able to promote yourself. In this session we discussed the age groups that tend to use different social media networks. From there we had to identify how we could best use social media to promote ourselves, whether its the type of account you create, or the way in which you target your posts to a specific audience or using hashtags to get yourself recognised.

Using the advice we gained in the session I boosted my Instagram account and my Facebook account, revamping it as a journalism account. I have made it a task every day to ensure that I post something on my stories and ensure that it is relevant, when days are heavier with work I try and post ore or even do a live so that people can be more involved. when posting I use relevant hashtags to ensure that my images and posts can be filtered into the correct categories and target the audiences I want to. This has helped me get offers for certain projects and has helped me gain valuable contacts for the future that I could use to promote myself even further.

Session 3: Wednesday 30th October 2019 (Networking)

On this session we were learning about networking. networking is all about making contacts for the future, or gaining valuable information that can help you when you need it. In essence the more relevant contacts you have the better as they can help you multiple different situations. The best way to network is through your social media accounts, as most jobs nowadays are posted online and through social media. When you contact someone, you must show confidence and professionalism. However, as students we are not all in positions where we have loads of contacts and plenty of experience. So to remedy this, we were asked in the session to make LinkedIn accounts. LinkedIn is an online resource that finds jobs or contacts that match the profile you have put forwards. Its essentially a cheat code for gaining experience with lots of volunteer and paid work opportunities. When utilized in the right way, you should be able to find plenty of jobs and meet loads of different people, helping you gain contacts in the future.

After inputting my details I was able to create a profile that even now gets many offers. some of these I have taken advantage of to better my CV and make it a bit more focused to my future career aspirations. I did find that it was a very simple way of getting in touch with companies and understanding the kind of people they look for when hiring and what kind of things they expect you to be able to do.

Session 4: Wednesday 20th November 2019 (Team Working Skills)

To be able to work in a team is one of the most important skills that a person should have. Being able to make friends fast and then communicate efficiently at a workplace to get a task done is something that all employers look for. Leadership is good, but you must also be able to successfully work with other to accomplish your task. Our lecturer decided to prepare us for this by improving our team working skills. How you may ask? Escape Rooms. You’re locked in a room with different scenarios and you need to figure out how to get out. We were in a team of four in a situation called “The AI”, where an artificial intelligence would destroy the world unless we shut it down and escaped the room. We didn’t do too bad to be honest. We split into pairs and worked on separate tasks. We were really close to finishing but unfortunately ran out of time. It was a really fun experience and taught me a lot about how to work with people we didn’t know. keeping up a good conversation really helps you learn more about a person and not making judgments too early is vital for effective teamwork. It was defiantly great session and I hope we do more of it in the future.

Session 5: Wednesday 4th December 2019 (Identifying Job Roles and Opportunities)

Doing a degree is good and all, but if you have no goal or aspiration in mind in the future you will really struggle to find the drive to continue. Knowing what kind of job you want to do in the future can be an incentive to push you even further than you have ever pushed yourself before. So this session we learned how to find job roles and opportunities. We had a talk by our Careers + team at BCU that taught us a lot of interesting things, from changing and refining CV’s to improving your resume and making yourself more interesting to employers. Information is the key to any successful campaign and our lecturer made sure we had plenty of websites and other access both inside university and out to help improve our chances of finding a job and living a better and more productive life in the future. We were also made aware of how we can get more support from Careers + if we would require them to help us.

Session 6: Wednesday 18 December 2019 (Photoshop Tutorial)

Adobe Photoshop is an amazing program that lets you edit pictures and images to make them have really cool effects or create posters that match the aesthetic you are planning on portraying. This session was an introduction to this software. Working at a TV channel came in handy as I regularly use Photoshop for YouTube video thumbnail’s and creating backgrounds. Just like premiere pro, it was more of a refresher session just to help me remember some of the miscellaneous things that I tend to wash over on day to day use. It was a great way of helping me solidify my skills and it also gave me some ideas as to how I can make my life a little easier in the long run when using Photoshop.