Producing a promising career in Media (Part-2)

In my previous article when I was going through my first-hand experiences to help young Media Professionals to make an informed choice of choosing to be a Television Producer, I relived my own journey and concluded that being the loosely structured industry that TV News is, the onus lies on individuals to re-skill and upgrade themselves to climb the ladder of success.

Do go through the article once to get more sense out of this one. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:linkedInArticle:6412679169951526912/

So now a natural question that arises is how to know when to upgrade? Do we really need to re-skill to learn something completely different from our area of work or to upgrade within the sphere of TV Production? There are no clear answers that I propose to give. What I know for sure that each of you must introspect how you want to shape your careers.

Let’s go back to an age-old concept of SWOT analysis for now. Something that looks like a management cliché, it is a powerful tool to enlist things that most of the times we do not know about ourselves. A simple listing down of our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats will give us clarity about where do we exactly stand.

It is natural though to surge in the direction of your strengths without a doubt. I will still ask you to hold on to the thought a bit and focus more on the weaknesses. Reason being it is better to under-utilize our strengths instead of letting our weakness exposed. So, take a moment to understand the things you are not very good at. Try and understand the reasons, find out what in it you can improve, chalk out a plan to re-train yourself and most importantly, embrace the things that cannot be improved. Yes accept your shortcomings to know what direction not to take. Once again, knowing where not to go sometimes is more important than knowing where to go. For example, I may be extremely efficient in producing news based content which requires a decent degree of current affairs knowledge as well as speed and accuracy, but might not be as efficient in long format feature shows. Now please understand, it is perfectly fine to be so. What is more important is that every aspect of our work requires different kind of skill-set. So, when we know our strengths and weaknesses, we must plan our progress weighing out both the sides.

I have always believed that communication skills are one of the most key skills that we all need to train ourselves on. Invest your time and effort on improving your communication skills. Not only it will sharpen your technical skills but also will project you differently. Remember, your technical skills and knowledge will take you only till a certain extent. Beyond that, it is mainly how you communicate, which will determine how far you go. How you conduct yourself, discuss ideas, communicate the plans and instruct your team is so critical in execution of the Production plans of any Television Media house.

Stay hungry for knowledge, keep improving and improvising and always believe in unlearning and re-learning. We all are inclined towards referring to our past experiences and forming new plans according to them. But, how will we build something entirely new and fresh if keep going back to things we have learnt from others in the past. Fresh ideas come from fresh thinking and unlearning old concepts!!