25m 43s

Upskilling the Industry: Finding Time & Budget for Training and Mentoring

Episode Shownotes

Whether you’ve a long-standing team or you work with freelancers, mentoring your teams is a vital step to creating a better screen sector for all.

This much is clear to Mastered’s Co-Founder and CEO, Perri Lewis, whose experience with mentors encouraged her to enable the same for as much of the sector as possible.

Join us on WorkWise for Screen this week to explore the opportunities available for mentoring support, and the incredible effect it’ll have on your next project’s success.

The WorkWise for Screen podcast is supported by the BFI, awarding National Lottery Funding.

This episode covers:

The evolving role and definition of mentors in the creative industries
Specific career development needs and challenges of small, project-based creative businesses
Which skills are currently most in demand
The value of a collaborative, user-centric approach to training and development
Local funding opportunities available, and accessibility of training resources for creative professionals, both as employees and freelancers

Episode Topics

Introductions, defining mentors, and the many hats that Mastered’s mentors wear (0:00 to 4:00)

The value of soft skills, which skills are most in demand, and why businesses need to first identify their skills gaps (4:00 to 12:30)

How businesses can be persuaded to make time and budget for all-important skills, plus where funding and support can be found (12:25 to 18:55)

Episode Highlights

“On a wider front, we have a lot of requests for leadership and management skills, inevitably, and this is all the way from junior first role as a manager all the way through to C-Suite thinking about the direction of the business.” - 7:40 - Perri Lewis

“We're an industry of SMEs. We are not used to having annual goals that are broken down by six monthly goals - it's project by project. I think you can still have that kind of operating system in those projects, but it isn't factored in in the same way, so that's a real challenge.” - 10:20 - Perri Lewis

“I think if people haven't got time for training, then they're probably identifying the wrong problem, because it's not important enough to actually be solved.” - 13:30 - Perri Lewis

“There is this wonderful belief, which is true, that different regions in the UK have very different skill needs, and they should have the autonomy to decide what they do and how they do it.” - 18:10 - Perri Lewis

“I really believe in paying it forward, investment right now is for the good of what you're doing, but also for the good of the industry. That's going to improve the reputation of your business, and create those exciting connections across the sector.” - 20:50 - Keith Arrowsmith & Perri Lewis