Thursday, April 30, 2020
You are not a unicorn: The transferable skills you already have
SoundGirls.org: I have written before about the need to have a back-up plan for when times are tough What’s Your Plan B. We literally work in a gig economy and there are plenty of reasons why you might not be able to make ends meet solely through audio. Whether it’s an injury, family illness, recession or global pandemic keeping you from working, or you simply want a bit of a change for a while, knowing you have an alternative job you can fall back on (preferably one you can do in any health, from anywhere) can be invaluable.
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8 comments:
I really enjoyed reading this article, as it made me realize how valuable these skills I am learning can be transferred into 'real-life' jobs or 'normal' jobs. Free lancers in theater work through many challenges in finding jobs, even without a global pandemic and possible recession thrown in the mix. Having a backup plan or job that isn't in the theater or film industry is a good idea for anyone who wishes to work in the entertainment sector. It is very interesting to think about because as a student, I am still looking for "normal" jobs that are in retail or in grocery stores, and thus need to sell my skills to potential employers. After reading this article, I realize that selling my skills for a 'normal' job might not be so hard after all. I hope those that have become left rudderless during this pandemic realize this too and find ways to keep these skills sharp, even if it isn't in their chosen career fields.
I was updating my non theatre resume the other day in preparation for a barista job application, and chuckling to myself at the weird things I found on there. Having spent 4 years in a finance magnet program at my high school, and 5 years and counting in theatre crew/design work, I appear very qualified for jobs in those industries (special skills include tax preparation and proficiency with EOS family consoles!), but not so much in the service or retail areas. However, I was able to spin my involvement in those areas into many of the skills listed in this article, and it’s kind of amazing how much a couple words can shift the direction and efficacy of your resume. I prize the soft skills that I learned working in theatre more than anything, and they have made me a better worker in all areas of my life. It’s nice to know that the rest of the world values these skills as well.
This is a really fantastic article! It’s things I’ve kind of heard or assumed before, but it’s really great to hear it all in one place—definitely helps me feel better about my qualifications if I ever had to get a job beyond the entertainment industry, which seems a lot more real in regards to this summer and a global pandemic. I think it’s actually really special that THIS grouping of skills are those that people in the entertainment industry have that are transferrable. These are skills that you just kind of, possess, and take lots of time and practice to achieve, or you just naturally have that going for you. The other skills, the hard skills, the very specific things, are to be learned. So, if you had to be thrown into a new job outside of entertainment, you have become quick to learn new skills, and you carry with you everything else you need. It makes me hopeful that people outside of entertainment would recognize these qualities in an applicant!
The prospect of making money over the coming summer has had me thinking a lot about this. I don't think that a lot of places will be hiring immediately out of quarantine due to budget cuts and such. So, I've been thinking a lot about skills I have that can be transferred into unusual jobs over the summer. Since there's just not going to be in-person theatre for a while, we all kind of need to think about how our skills can function outside of theatre. I've been thinking a lot about how to monetize skills that I've learned this year and in the past. I think selling art is a really viable option for a lot of designers right now because we just can't have access to what would usually pay our bills. As for after the pandemic, I agree that a lot of skills learned in the theatre industry are very transferrable, but I wonder if outside employers know that. Like, when you put theatre-related jobs on your resume, do people understand what they entail? Hopefully, because they do contain development of both hard and soft skills!
Having a secondary job skill is an excellent idea and COVID-19 is really reinforcing that. I’m lucky to have a secondary skill set as an EMT which I’ve got plenty of hours and hazard pay for right about now. I think there’s a lot of transferable skills between theater and my healthcare job, but I think most people in our industry could work a second job. Thinking about what skills technical directors could is an interesting thought experiment. It might make sense to get a carpentry or welding certification so that you could get a simple job as a welder. Project management and budgeting are probably also within our skillset. I could imagine it would be worthwhile for lighting technicians to get certified as real electricians so they could have a skill to fall back as well. There are also probably jobs as manual laborers or painters that would be available. I very much plan on keeping my EMT certification for the rest of my career because if this ever happens again, I’ll be out of a theater job.
I have been trying to go through these transferable skills in my head recently. Since I lost my jobs and gigs for the summer, family members have been reaching out to me about possibly doing stuff like data entry for them during the summer to make some money. It is something rarely remembered, of course until it dangles itself in your face, that theatre is such a dynamic environment in terms of the things we have to do in order to put up a production. I think anyone who is self motivated, a strong collaborator, and able to stay calm during problems while they try to solve them is someone who can literally do anything. I have noticed that a lot of young people, myself included, have a fear of not knowing everything. It can be a paralyzing fear if you let it go too far. I think that all of us, especially in this job market, have to let it go. We have to learn to be willing and unafraid to do something new.
I think it is so interesting that we have so many transferable skills that we can use in different fields. Going to theatre school, you learn so many different skills that sometimes you can't think about how those specific skills can be useful in other fields. Boevers had a class with us over zoom where we had a guest that was a nurse who got her BFA in Design and Production before going to nursing school. She talked a lot about how the skills we are getting at Carnegie Mellon can be useful in other fields. That fact is even more evident as most theaters are closed, and we are all being forced to find jobs in more essential fields during Coronavirus. I personally will be using the transferrable skill of "carrying things" to hopefully work in a warehouse somewhere. Gotta make that big money to pay my full tuition for zoom university.
I really liked this article’s framing of necessary theatrical soft skills in ways that work for other industries as well! This is a topic I’ve been considering pretty heavily, not just because of the virus situation, but before that as well, and I think that even further than the soft skills mentioned here, for some there are hard skills that transfer across as well. Many of the production management work we’ve been covering in PRM and will be covering in PDM involves the use of financial software to collect and manipulate accounting information, and after starting to learn those skills, I decided to take a class this summer in regular accounting for business purposes, as it’s an aspect of management that I ended up enjoying and a skill that can transfer to the non-performance world as well. I think that this article can be really helpful to those of us who are looking at our resumes right now wondering how to frame them in a way to apply for non-theatre summer jobs, giving a clear list of skills that can be referenced.
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