1. As a sixteen year-old avid Lincoln City football club fan, I had to find a way to fund this highly addictive and expensive hobby. Up popped a famous Yorkshire supermarket and my employment began. Not the most mind-expanding job but definitely one that taught me a great deal. As I progressed through the hierarchy of stacking orange juice to checking out of date chicken, after a while I was asked to manage the department I was working in for one evening a week. This was my first experience of managing people and I was in at the deep end, when half of them were double my age.

2. After this slightly inconspicuous start, my next foray into employment (after taking a good few years living the life as a student) was through the photography store, Jessops. Joining the dots, there was a relationship to what I wanted to do in the future. I started meeting photographers and creative people, talking to them and asking questions about what they did and telling them about what I was doing. I created some great contacts and of course friends, many of whom I am still in touch with.

3. What may have been seen as a step down in the employment ladder, but what was in fact one of the most important jobs I had was as a cleaner at Staffordshire University. At that time, I found a loophole in the system meaning that if you worked for the University they would pay your post-grad tuition fees. In the third year of my undergraduate course, I finally found my niche and area of practice. It felt a rush to bring everything together in time for the degree show so I wanted to expand this new development in my practice and widen my focus into a fine art field. Working as a cleaner not only paid my tuition fees but also paid me a wage to create new work.

4. After a year of working as a cleaner I was fortunate to be offered the role as a Photography Technician / Instructor at the University covering maternity leave. This gave me the opportunity and insight into the other side of University life and has later led me back to the University this year to teach on the course as a visiting tutor. As well as setting up the studios, darkrooms and maintaining the equipment, I also instructed group and one-one workshops with the students, teaching practical techniques.

5. When I moved to Manchester from Stoke-on-Trent, I started working for Manchester Art Gallery on short-term temporary contracts. This was and has been one of the most beneficial jobs to my progression as a curator and director of an arts organisation and gallery. I was able to both see the inner workings of a large gallery/museum, as well as meet and receive advice and ideas from some of the curators and staff. This was an invaluable support network and helped Blank Media Collective gain a stronger footing within the arts and local community.

You can find out more about Mark’s work on his website. His final exhibition as Blank Media Collective’s Director and Head of Exhibitions, Liz West: Chroma opens on 5 July at BLANKSPACE Gallery, Manchester. Follow Mark on Twitter here.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

My first job after the free-lance joys of a paper round was, at weekends and school holidays, as a store boy for the West of Scotland grocers J Curley’s. Old school, butter came in hundredweight wooden barrels that you had to chop open with an axe. The huge slippery blocks had to be carried up the counter, dodging the girls serving, to the marble slab by the window where, with two wooden paddles, a more skilled operative turned yellow chunks into neat half-pound rectangles. The pay was two bob an hour, the incentive the girls.

As a student, there were summer jobs. (No tuition fees then and as long as you didn’t spend too much on books your grant would just about keep you alive during term time.) The jobs were usually manual labour. One involved being part of a gang making pre-cast concrete lintels, beams and blocks. I’m sure this predated Carl Andre. Another, less artistic but nonetheless satisfying, was loading the line in a brewery’s bottling hall. Here there were good days and bad. Bad when your team was assigned to loading the empties – unremitting, thirsty work. Good the ones, less easy to recall, spent unloading crates of new-filled bottles. (Fowler’s Wee Heavies were the refreshments of choice, at a third of a pint and 8 proof, their illicit consumption, juked doon behind a palette, was both fast and effective.)

Here, whatever the pay, the incentive was to save enough money as quickly as possible to spend at least a month hitchhiking around Europe. Assuming one slept rough, never sat down in a bar, avoided all restaurants and only drank wine which came in large plastic bottles, 50 quid would get you a surprisingly long way.

Eventually it came – graduation with a pleasingly non-swot like 2.1 in Fine Art and time, probably, to get a proper job. After some research a letter wings its way to UK gallery directors (there weren’t that many) announcing their good fortune in having me available for recruitment. Only one replied, Richard Demarco. At that time, 1972, Ricky was based in the New Town elegance of Melville Crescent: the gallery plush, the receptionists posh. Mr. Demarco was on the phone to New York, would I just take a seat. Ok, international art world here I come. All goes well at the interview. When can I start? The vulgar question of money intervenes, the answer £12.00 a week. When it’s pointed out that this is less than I’m getting on the dole my proto-employer agrees and blames the bloody Scottish Arts Council. Ah, what propitious words and, ah, what could have been…

After two or three unsuccessful interviews at national and local authority galleries an (as far as I was concerned) outsider application came up. I got a job as course assistant at the then four-year-old Open University. At the time and now I still think this was the best possible real start to my career. Firstly because the socialist vision that everyone deserved a proper university education, developed by Harold Wilson and Jennie Lee was still very clear and strong. We were also all conscious that what we were, a distance learning university that did not have students on campus, was new and that we were at the front of using, and sometimes inventing, new ways of educating. Internally the organisational structure was flat and democratic – no senior common room, no high table. The range of experience of research, writing, publishing, radio and television production and teaching that I enjoyed in the three years I worked there, not to mention the outstandingly talented people I met, could not have been bettered anywhere. I worked on preparing a course on Architecture and Design 1890 – 1939, taught on the Arts Foundation and Renaissance and Reformation courses and started a temporary exhibitions programme at our Milton Keynes HQ.

I never really looked back after that although soon, going to work at the Scottish Arts Council, Ricky and I were to meet again…

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

1.    Tele-sales Assistant. I was 17, broke and all my friends had new Nike’s on their feet. I took an afternoon off college and went for an interview at a double-glazing sales firm getting the job without much question. I made few sales and was rarely paid. The guy I sat next to was overweight, balding and probably in his mid twenties – he ate ham from the packet and frankfurters from the tin. I soon left.

2.    Sales Assistant. Desperate to have new Nike’s on my feet, my second job took me to THE home of new Nike’s… Croydon. It was a sports concession inside a shopping centre. A lot of weed was smoked in the stock room and the store went under investigation for missing stock. One day, I turned up for work and the manager was ill and the assistant manager was AWOL. As the most senior staff member left, I took my two younger colleagues to McDonald’s and left the shop unattended. I was soon asked to leave.

3.    Sales Assistant. I was 19 and had failed my first year at Uni. After a summer of Job Centre visits I took up a part time job at the oldest off-license in Soho, The Vintage House. I returned to Uni, got my act together, and 3 years later finished with 1st Class Honours. In the meantime, I gave many discounts to local customers at the shop.  They’d later turned out to be TV Execs and I soon left to do some TV work experience.

4.    Runner/ Researcher/ Motion GFX. During my last year at University, I did several Runners jobs at different TV production companies. And after finishing, I proudly landed a job as House Runner at Remedy Productions. I stayed for 3 years – mostly as a runner, but later as a researcher & AP – during my last year I did all their in-house graphics for broadcast and left with my first Motion Graphics show reel. It was reely good.

5.    Freelance. I currently design and produce Motion Graphics with most of my work being for broadcast, as well as the occasional job for stage or web. Further to that, I also do the odd TV job as a Director, Editor or Producer. I’m incredibly passionate about what I do, and currently own two pairs of Nike’s.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

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My first job came after I had finished finishing my Fine Art degree at Chelsea Art School in London in 1967. I saw an advertisement for a full time teacher at Woodstock School in Peckham, South London, a school for maladjusted children (the terminology of the time). With a quick visit to the local educational office, I was appointed to the school to teach all subjects to a group of junior children. I had no experience in teaching nor had passed English O level, but the class I was made responsible for had experienced 9 teachers already that year. It seemed as if every day a window in the school was broken and it was a common sight to see blood on the stairs  from children’s fights. I spent, one might say survived, three years there and then decided to do a one-year postgraduate teaching qualification.

My second job, after I had finished my teaching degree, was at another special school for disturbed children in the east end of London. I found a completely different philosophy in working with these kids. I had a family group, 8 children ranging from 6 to 15 years old. The school tried to run on very therapeutic lines. The children started the day with breakfast, toast and jam and a cup of tea made on a small stove. We had animals in the classroom and more attention was paid to their emotional problems than their education. The school employed a part-time Swedish physiotherapist, and each week there was a staff meeting which included a psychiatrist to discuss particular children. I became very interested in these group discussions and thought about training to become a psychotherapist. Drugs were never a problem then in these schools; knives and fists were the worry.

My third job came after with the birth of my first child. I moved into adult education and became involved in running family workshops based in the community. I taught crafts to adults while their children worked alongside them on similar projects.

In the late 1970s I got divorced and wanted a complete change of career. I became angry at the many Tory cuts that were happening in my local borough of Wandsworth; closures of hospitals, community provision, etc. I picked up a camera in order to document what was happening around me. My camera gave me a voice, indeed a political voice. I was able to publish my pictures in a small community newspaper called Pavement. This led me to think of a career in photography but as this seemed at the time a huge leap into the unknown, I applied for a job as a picture researcher.

My fourth job was working on The Photo, a part work collection from the publisher Marshall Cavendish. As a dyslexic I found working in a busy office difficult. My office skills were terrible. Although I enjoyed the research into finding photos and meeting photographers, I soon realized I wanted to be out there taking photographs myself.

My fifth job was the realization of this ambition. In 1983, I applied with two other women photographers to the GLC’S Recreation and Arts committee for one salary to share among us. With this grant, we made campaigning exhibitions against closures and set up photographic workshops. This led to the forming of the Photo Co Op which at the beginning was housed in my front room. This then became Photofusion, a photography centre in Brixton, London. I registered as a freelance Photographer and started to get regular commissions from weekly medical, health magazines, and housing association’s annual reports.

In many ways I am still engaged in my fifth job. I am on the board of directors of Photofusion, and sit on its gallery and education committee. I run mentoring sessions there. My freelance photography is now more fine art led. I make artwork for hospitals, and am lucky enough to be invited to be artist residence in scientific environments such as genetics and IVF units. I am at present participating in a residency at the Martello Tower (a Napoleonic era fortification) in Jaywick, Essex. This is a continuation of my long-term project, Playgrounds of War, shown this year at Street Level Gallery in Glasgow. This project is an investigation into the physical and emotional detritus of abandoned military sites. My fine art practice has often involved using a pinhole camera. For my next exhibition of work in February next year (at the Horse Hospital gallery, London) I will be making a video, based on ghost stories from the Harrington secret WWll aerodrome, this will be as the latest addition to Playgrounds of War.

Gina Glover Oct 2011

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

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I worked freelance for a while after graduating in Fine Art but my first ‘real’ job, as my Dad would call it, was with the University of Dundee’s Museum Services. I was Assistant Curator of Arts and my principle role was to correctly acquisition Duncan of Jordanstone’s art collection into the main University collection. One of the best jobs was the re-housing of a print collection bequest by the Scottish Arts Council, which can now be seen at the Visual Research Centre in Dundee. I also got to clean the zoology collection – I hoovered an emu and buffed a giant tortoise.

From there I went to the Exhibitions Dept at Duncan of Jordanstone as the Assistant Curator and I had the immense pleasure of working with Jenny Brownrigg. The Brownrigg taught me many things and I owe her a lot. We had a great time and produced some excellent projects such as Jerusalem Syndrome with Nathan Coley, discparc an audio label and Paul Butlers Collage Party. We had 7 great years of creative fun.

I then had the urge to sell all of my worldly goods and travel across Canada, get married and have a baby. In between this I was Dundee’s City Coordinator for the Six Cities Design Festival. This was a great experience as I really got to know and love Dundee and make many new contacts.

After the birth of my amazing daughter I became Cultural Projects Officer for the University of Abertay. I ran an annual programme of events and exhibitions in the Hannah Maclure Centre and in their performance space. This is where I become involved in the NEoN project. For the first manifestation of the NEoN Digital Arts Festival my assistant Clare Brennan and myself were asked to curate an interactive exhibition for the public.

By early 2010 we had become fully-fledged NEoN committee members and we help deliver an excellent programme of events in November 2010 having the pleasure of working with Akinori Oishi, Tado, Pictoplasma and Ken Perlin.

This brings me to me to my two current jobs! I am still on the management team for NEoN and my personal ambition is to make this festival Scotland’s leading platform for digital and technology driven arts, which I am sure is the ambition of the committee also. My main day-to-day job is Curatorial Director of Fleet Collective. Lyall Bruce and I set up this art collective out of frustration really – we wanted to bring together the arts and creative industries, mix the organic process of creativity with the structure of business and get the individuals together to make a powerful creative force.

Fleet is commitment to increasing provisions for the creative community and to tackling retention issues by keeping work, opportunities and talent in Scotland. Under one roof we empower a community of creative people by fostering collaborative working practices, we represent artists and manage multi disciplinary creative projects. Fleet Collective is new, fresh and unique, brought together out of a commitment to the arts and a passion to use it to make a better world.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

1. The Paper Boy

My working life began rudely at the age of 13 with an early morning paper round. I only took the job to save some spending money for an impending summer in the USA, but there was little left to bank after I’d fed my fledgling smoking habit. In the end I think my poor mum gave me £200 for the trip, most of which I spent on a skateboard the minute I landed. (A 1986 Santa Cruz Jeff Kendall – man, it was sweet.)

2. The Trainee Sound Engineer

After reaching a mutual agreement with my school deputy head (I hated the place and he hated me), I left aged 16 and spent about a week plucking up enough courage to call a family friend who owned a recording studio, to ask for an extended period of work experience. Despite my nervous mumblings, he said yes. The receptionist left three months after I started, making way for a proper paid job –on condition I added phone answering and bookkeeping to my tea-making duties.

Our work was mainly TV and radio ads, with the odd folk album thrown in for balance. It was an amazing period I’ll never forget. I picked up more skills and learned more about life in those two years than I did during my entire secondary education, and I got to meet Spike Milligan. And Jesse Rae.

3. The Film & TV Technician

My ultimate failing in the recording industry was a complete lack of musical ability. So at the age of 18 and with two years of real life under my belt, I left for a one-year HNC in Film & TV at Napier Poly. The end of my course coincided with the department’s only technician leaving and, in a moment of desperation, the head lecturer offered me the job.

This gave me my first decent wage, and access to some of the most cutting-edge digital imaging hardware and software in the world. Macromind (who became Macromedia and were eventually bought by Adobe) sponsored the department too, giving me free access to their entire suite of software. So by day I helped students edit on S-VHS, by night I immersed myself in Photoshop, Director, and all sorts of other still barely heard of stuff.

4. The Digital Imager

In 1994, I was snapped up by a fashion photographer making a bold move into the world of digital photography. He gave me a job, sixty grand to spend on computers, scanners and printers, then threw work in front of me from clients like Pink Floyd and Vivienne Westwood. The enterprise was a roaring failure, but it was there I met Graham, who I’ve been in business with ever since.

5. The Entrepreneur

In 1995 Graham and I started a digital agency called Rocket, focused on providing heavyweight digital imaging technology and expertise to Scotland’s advertising and design agencies.

The first version of Netscape was released a few months after Rocket’s launch and we started getting very excited about the Internet. We built our first (if not the first) database-driven website in 1996, and stayed just ahead of the curve as our whole industry gradually turned digital over the next decade. It was that foresight which helped us survive while many of the behemoths we were working for bit the dust.

Blipfoto was borne out of Rocket and is where I now devote every ounce of energy. It’s already grown from a personal project into a pet company project into a BAFTA award-wining global daily photo sharing community and, now, a business in its own right. We serve more than 200,000 visitors a month from 163 countries, but still consider ourselves embryonic. The future’s huge and it’s all still ahead of me.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Noteworthiness of employment didn’t feature at all in my formative years. Sales assistant (although that did entail going to a party at one of Richard Branson’s recording studios / mansions with Johnny Rotten in attendance), hospital laundry worker (picking out the false teeth, wigs and surgical implements from the linen and playing hospital basketball with bundled surgical robes) and unforgettably McDonald’s toy tester for the 1996 Olympics (we got driven in a van to an empty warehouse where articulated lorries would back up and disgorge thousands of plastic toys for us to test). None of these count as my first five jobs. Nor does being a security guard at motor plants whilst having a beard of Elizabethan proportions, nor being a 6’4″ Peter Rabbit at an Easter book launch and scaring children or being a TV extra while my then girlfriend got strangled in an 80s club. (I married her later on).

The first five jobs I really count are these:

1)    Artist – after a poor academic start (failed to get into UCL to study Psychology, failed the maths test to train as a nurse in Great Ormond Street, failed to get anywhere near a post-school education) eventually I started drawing things as something to pass the time. I drew terribly but enjoyed it. Improved from terrible to mediocre and went from Foundation to Degree where they reinforced the fact that I was at best mediocre but most likely terrible. Moved into photography and video in order not to fail the course and found what I had been looking for. Films and art together. Since then I completed my Masters in Cardiff, showed my work around and about and won a couple of financially supportive awards.

2)    Outcasting Founder – in tandem with my artistic practice I set up a not-for-profit organisation for the online dissemination of experimental film and video. The site offers regular screenings of work both online and offline, nationally and internationally. Since the launch in 2006 the site has been awarded funding by the Arts Council of Wales to re-develop and expand in 2012 and is also in the process of partnering the development of a National Film Festival in Wales (O4W).

3)    g39 – an artist-led gallery formerly in a three storey Victorian shop in the heart of Cardiff. I exhibited work in the opening show in 1998, then volunteered as an invigilator / technician, had a solo show in 2000, got employed part-time to help run the professional development scheme to support artists, then became a technician and finally co-curator for the past couple of years. We are about to relocate into new premises in an undisclosed location.

4)    Care worker – working for a couple of years with adults with learning disabilities in a residential setting and then as a support worker in a drugs and alcohol short stay unit. I wanted to do something direct and immediate in the real world. Left to our own devices the job was a common sense one but made overcomplicated by company procedure. The tenants I worked with made lasting impressions, sometimes round my neck, but mostly in my heart.

5)    Editor / Writer / Handyman / Researcher / Decorator – a thread running through the lean times and the financially precarious times. These are the ones that offer / have offered respite. Financially, emotionally and mentally. I always thought it would be prudent to develop skills additional to the often non-paying or underpaid skills of being an artist. Things that you can pick up here and there, that you can do in your down time or even in busy times. Things that are work without feeling like work, things that allow you to switch off or switch focus at the right moment in time.

Image by Claire Cousin Photography

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

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1. Pusher
My first job was self-employment at the age of six or seven, at home in Dunoon. I made a 150% profit selling on penny sweets to my neighbours’ children (and my friends, though I don’t know how I kept them). They were no longer branded penny sweets by the time I’d finished with them. I also avoided all taxes and national insurance. Since then I’ve cleaned up my act, and now run a highly successful (and legal) consultancy.

2. Copytaker
When I moved to Edinburgh University, and was short of cash, my brother pointed out a Saturday job he’d spotted while he was working as a sub at the Edinburgh Evening News, in the old Scotsman building. I went for my first job interview, with Margaret Turner, to become a copytaker. She sat me down and asked me how fast I could type. “60 words a minute” I said, thinking a word a second was surely manageable. She decided to test me. I sat down at the computer and, as was my typing skill, peered at the keyboard to find my letters, any letters. Except there were none to be seen. Everyone in that office was of a certain era where the longer the finger nails the better, and they had, over years, and thousands, millions of words, removed any lettering that had once graced those keyboards. I took a sharp inhale of breath and put everything to practice that I’d learned at the school of “Type As Fast As You Bloody Can”.

I was the Scotsman Group’s first ever male copywriter and, given the birth of the laptop and smartphone, probably its last, too. The job was to take in the Saturday football reports from around the country. The first calls would be the teams, the second calls goals from the first half, a busy third phone stretch as half time reports came in, and then the hectic last hour as final reports came in. One call might be from Winchburgh Juniors, the next from the cacophony of the press stand at Ibrox. I always marvelled at how the Pink was in the newsagent’s at the top of Cockburn Street by the time I left the office at 5.15pm, barely thirty minutes after full time. I was so good at this job, too, knowing all the names of this new batch of Eastern European footballers whose names had no vowels, that I was given the backshifts at the Scotland on Sunday. Triple time. Pay checks ended up being quite sizeable and led me to job number three.

3. Sports journalist (wannabe)
I ended up writing the occasional sports story for the Pink, the Evening News and eventually the Scotsman itself. When I went away on my third year abroad to study in France it was the world cup and I pitched myself to the Daily Record as Their Man In France Who Could Speak French. I did a feature for them on the hotels the teams were staying at. I got photos, text and interviews with the hotel bosses, and made enough money to pay my rent for my final year at university.

4. University lecturer
I left university despondent with covering murders and suicides in the university population for the Sun (or anyone who would pay), and took up a post as lecteur, a language assistant, in a French university. I moved unis after a year, to Paris, and ended up course organiser for economics students. I don’t know how that happened, but it was fun. I also spent 12 months training hard to become a…

5. failed Army officer
In 1999, I longed for the feeling of being part of a team. The milkround of investment bank jobs made me feel everyone was after everyone else’s lunch. It wasn’t pleasant. I wanted a group of people who looked after each other. After a walk up a few hills and mountains that summer, I got it into my mind that this would be a fun way to earn a living. And there was all that skiing to be had.

In the end, I’ve never been fitter. I ran 10kms every morning, did weights and got strong. I aced the mental tests and translation exercises. I fell off a rope in my Royal Commissioning Board exams, nearly removing every bit of skin I had on my hands. I couldn’t continue. I failed. Encouraged to come back in six months, I deferred to check out Paris a bit more, and I’d just met a girl back in France.

I’ve known that girl for 10 years, and she’s now my wife. We have two beautiful daughters. That, if I’m honest, is the best job I’ll ever have.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

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I’m going to get to my first five jobs in a minute, but would like to explain that my job title ‘urban crofter’ is due to the fact that I currently do around 5 jobs (paid and unpaid). My main employment is producing films for the company I run with my husband, as well as freelancing for others. However I am also: co-founder of a drug law reform charity ‘TDPF Scotland’ that campaigns for the regulation and control of all drugs, in a band, a volunteer for the architectural charity Skirmishes, a founder member of the Garnethill Woman’s Institute, and I blog about creative life in the east end of Glasgow. Oh, and I have 2 wee kids that are around most of the time too.

So I am very lucky to be able to lead this varied and interesting life, but how did it end up like this?

My first five jobs:

1) Fiddle player in ceilidh bands: From the age of 13 I spent my weekends in pubs and village halls earning good money while my friends hung out at youth club. This financially sustained me right through university too. The experience of mixing with interesting folk from an early age really helped set me up for lots of the things I’ve gone on to do since.

2) Work experience at Wark Clements Production Company
In my 3rd year at university Alan Clements (Mr Kirsty Wark) came to speak at my history department and I decided that TV production sounded interesting. I’ve never been a big TV watcher, and now (shhhhh) we don’t even have a TV, but I do love the detailed research, hitting deadlines, working with people, story telling etc involved in production. I never did work for them afterwards, but it was a great start to my CV.

3) My second job in television was as a presenter at Grampian TV. I am VERY thankful that there is no evidence of this on youtube or similar. Despite my outgoing personality, I was the worst presenter ever, but it was a great training ground: low budgets meant we had to research, write scripts, direct and present, and I went on to get loads of interesting freelance work over the next few years. AND I met my lovely husband in Aberdeen – what more could I ask for from a job?

4) Having my children / getting older. OK, not a job exactly, but key to how I live my life now. Having the girls forced me to get off the treadmill and find a new way of making things work so as to allow me to spend time with them, but also keep myself connected, fulfilled and earning a living. And getting older….. now that I’m in my 30s I just feel more sorted, confident, sure of my strengths and less worried in general than I was in my 20s. This allows me to try things / suggest things and just go for it.

5) The influence of those around me. So again, this isn’t a job but in a sense it’s much more important to what I’m doing than listing the various jobs I’ve done in the past. I think getting out there and mixing with people is the best way to keep motivated and inspired, and to find out what you really want to be doing. Glasgow is an amazing city for creative and interesting happenings and people so it’s really easy. Bruce Newlands (of Kraft Architecture) and all the other talented people involved with Skirmishes; and of course all the lovely ladies who come to the Garnethill Women’s Institute are just two examples of inspiring and uplifting activities in our fair city.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

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I started working when I was teenager, but I’m not sure if that’s illegal so I won’t speak about it.

1. My first job in London was as a video game tester, I worked at Square Enix playing games all day long and making sure that all the features and the translations in the different languages were good, functioning and accurate. That was fun.

2. Not long after that I got a job at PR Newswire in one of the subdivisions. I was a media analyst focusing on media monitoring. It was around 2003 so we did the monitoring manually looking at newspapers and magazines to identify coverage… if only I would have known about the amazing tools that were to arrive later on. I produced reports that helped brands identify how their new products were accepted by the press.

3. My next big step was in 2004, I interviewed at Google a few times (actually 9 interviews). I was lucky to be selected and I entered an important period of my life that was defined by a lot of learning and moving at a fast pace. I had always been a geek girl, but when I started working at there I felt at home, so it was great. At Google I did 4 different jobs between the Sales and the Marketing teams. I spent almost 6 years working hard and at some point I left.

4. After Google, I felt like the world was my oyster, and I was very intrigued by exploring more my creative side so I decided to start Alpha-ville, is an organisation that wants to investigate the cross over between art, technology and society. I really love this project. It focuses on an annual festival that is just about to happen.

5. Apart from Alpha-ville I currently work as a freelance online consultant helping companies make the most out of their websites and implementing online tools that allow them to make decisions. Since recently also moving onto the mobile app world.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.