Jobs discussed in this article:

1. Canoe Instructor/Camp Counsellor
2. Flower Shop Attendant
3. Ice Cream Scooper
4. Baker
5. WORN Fashion Journal

Inheriting a long standing organisation and expecting to good by it is a daunting position to be in. But I somewhat unexpectedly found myself in that exact spot when I started working at Document. To say my position at the festival has snowballed over the past two and a half years would be something of an understatement. Coordinating means putting out a lot of fires, multi-tasking and collaborating to your hearts content. When people ask me what it’s like I’m often inclined to tell them: “I herd cats for a living.”

Looking back on my twelve odd years in the workforce is a strange activity. My past jobs feel like past lives – and the path to Document is much more like a process of elimination than a coherent career path. Growing up, friends lay the groundwork of fruitful careers while I pinged from childcare to the service industry to a smattering of arts jobs.

Before university I was a film obsessed, theatre nerd who pined for a job in journalism. Rather than volunteering or trying to gain work experience I nurtured a short attention span for part time jobs. Spending a number of summers working at camps as a glorified babysitter and canoe instructor. At 17 I worked in a flower-shop where I wasn’t allowed to touch the flowers – instead I was sequestered in the basement where I washed pots and vases and was kept company by Seabiscuit … the store cat. Then there was the ice-cream scooping where I and a staff of teenagers made thousands of waffle cones and slung ice-cream in a badly ventilated but very popular shop in Toronto’s east end.

While friends made smooth transitions from unpaid internships to salaried jobs in advertising, journalism, and politics – I was left floundering. There was this abstract career in my mind. It involved the arts and outreach but I had no idea how to make it happen. Instead I spent hours at the cinema, trolling bookstores and trying to undo the circumscribed ways of thinking that four years of liberal arts can do to a person. Throughout that process I went to a lot of events that challenged my notion of creativity and success. Most memorably Trampoline Hall which was a “bar room lecture series” in Toronto’s west end. Founded by Misha Globerman and Sheila Heti, I became enamoured by their grassroots and idiosyncratic approach to programming. It was a salon of sorts and every time I left there was a little voice in my head saying … “that is what I want to do, but how?!”

I came out of of undergrad with an Honours in English, exasperated by abstract thought, and craving practical work. Seeing a final product come out of hours of toil that wasn’t just an essay but rather something tactile was incredibly attractive. So in my post-graduation ennui I wound up baking. I’ve got the scars to prove it. The hours spent in hot kitchens and early mornings served their therapeutic purpose but it was hardly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Although it was tempting seeing as I was good at it – and it was delicious.

In 2011 I got the opportunity to intern at WORN Fashion Journal. Whilst there I worked on the publishing team and I got to see first hand how you develop a marketable brand within a strict budget. It was a brilliant publication and one I greatly admired. It was feminist, intersectional and intellectual but always accessible – WORN, however, did not make money but they had conviction. My time at the publication was spent entirely in a learning capacity – it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say I was expendable. One time my editor turned to me and said: “Cayley you know so much about everything we just need to figure out how to apply it?” I took it as a compliment at the time.

By 2012 it was pretty obvious Toronto wasn’t working for me. I was so aware of what other people were doing and how they were doing it better I couldn’t focus. So I put an ocean between myself and my home town. Which may have been one of the best things I have ever done. It gave me the perspective and ability to apply all of the curiosity and passion I had for film and outreach without second guessing and comparing myself to my peers. It’s also a testament to cities like Glasgow. Where your ambition isn’t drowned out by the cacophony of competition you get in bigger towns.

Despite what I consider very separate stages in my eclectic CV, have somehow coalesced to be the perfect background to running an independent film festival. The years of running around hot kitchens, getting through a never-ending todo list, and hours of customer service drudgery have made me surprisingly adept for coordination.

There is a hell of lot more I need to learn but my time with Document has been the best education I could have gotten in confirming what it is I want to do. Which is work with communities, remain fiercely independent, and inspire conversation and change through the arts.

Document 2015 is running from October 16, 17, and 18 at Glasgow’s CCA.

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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.

Award-winning broadcaster and director David Street (pictured above) made programmes for all the main UK’s TV channels before he turned to feature documentaries. Here he describes his career progression.

Getting the work habit

I was brought up in a small village in the peak District of Derbyshire. My family had a building firm so I spent most of school holidays working for the firm.

I had a variety of other weekend and holiday jobs during my teens, like paper rounds, Christmas postie, working in a textile factory, serving in a post office, but always it came back to working for the builders. By the time I left college as a qualified Art and Drama teacher at 21, I was running building sites, responsible for 50 or more men, often two or three times my age building a 100 plus homes at any one location. I was working 12 hour days often 7 days a week. After 18 months, a disagreement with one of my uncles, who was running the business, ended in me walking out.

Striking it Lucky

It was a two and a half mile walk to the next village where I lived, time to pull my thoughts together. I bought a Manchester Evening News and in the classified jobs section someone had written an advert just for me – or at least that’s what I felt.  They wanted some one between the ages of 21 and 25 – I was just 23, with an interest in Drama and Art – my qualification, who enjoyed watching TV – one of the reasons I’d been made to go to work as a youngster was because I was getting “square eyes” from watching too much TV. It couldn’t have been better.

I applied and after 2 interviews I was offered a job as a trainee assistant film librarian at Granada TV in Manchester – working 40 hours a week for 3 times the wages I’d received in the family firm. When I was told later that over 350 people had applied for the job I couldn’t believe my luck. I was given a great piece of advice on my first day, I was wide eyed and star struck being amongst the cast of Coronation Street, my boss Keith Thompson, just leaned over and whispered in my ear “they go to the toilet, just like you and me” bingo.

“Square eyes” was now getting paid to do what he loved doing, watching TV, or to be more precise, watching and logging TV films and clips – it was a fabulous time to be at Granada. The Bernsteins still owned the company but let Denis Foreman and David Plowright run it. I was watching material shot by the Mikes’ Apted and Newell, Johnathan Powell, Roland Joffe and the brilliant Leslie Woodhead, I was learning by osmosis, listening, watching soaking it all up. After a couple of years I made the move into the cutting rooms, as an assistant film editor working with such brilliant editors as the late Kelvin Hendrie on World in Action, Stan Challis and Tony Ham on drama’s like Country Matter’s or doing inserts for Coronation Street.

It was a different world. We had to be in before the editor, make sure the Acmade or Steenbeck was running smoothly, all chinagraphs sharpened, clean selvits to hand, no dust or single frame trims lying around and get teas and coffees before they were even asked for. Many would now see this as the bad old days, but for me the privilege of being in edits with brilliant programme makers such as Brian Moser, Gus Macdonald, Ray Fitzwalter, Brian Blake, a very young Steve Morrison and the inimitable Leslie Woodhead was a privilege. I was watching how they worked, how they thought, what they liked and what they thought was crap. It was a brilliant education. So brilliant, I feel sad that people coming in to the industry now don’t appear to have the opportunity to do this.

Setting up on my own

While working at Granada I met the fantastic animators Mark Hall and Brian Cosgrove, they were going to set up Cosgrove Hall in an old tobacco warehouse in Chorlton-cum-Hardy – I took a couple of room’s there, bought a couple of Steenbecks and set up David Street Editing Ltd with a contract to cut all Mark and Brian’s work.

Working with brilliantly talented animators and their proteges such as Chris Taylor, Jackie Cockell and Barry Purvis gave me a fabulous insight into the precision and accuracy of animated film making. During this period I started editing TV commercials. I found the discipline of telling a 30 second story fascinating and wanted to do it myself.

Buying the T shirt

This was my move in to Directing and Producing. It was a time when you had to have a showreel – no one would give you the chance to do it if you couldn’t prove you could do it – sort of Catch 22. Saving short ends from various commercial shoots, I eventually built up enough stock to shoot three commercials and with help from camera hire companies and labs I had a showreel. That was me a director – I could wear the T shirt.

Decades later after countless TV commercials and programmes I reverted to the same basic principles to prove I could make a feature documentary. Fortunately now the equipment is so much cheaper, shooting digitally and the computerisation of edit systems means you don’t need labs to process the film you can virtually do it all on your laptop, so that is how BATTLE MOUNTAIN Graeme Obree’s Story started. To get it finished though required a virtual army of brilliant people who all brought their own particular talents and skills to it.

Many more than five jobs later the basic principles I learnt in those early jobs on building sites, in shops and factories are still important. Turn up on time, be enthusiastic, work hard and never stop learning.

Read more about BATTLE MOUNTAIN in David’s My Process article Central Station 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.

Edinburgh based freelance graphic designer and photographer Ken Gray tells us how he got to where he is now.

I work on a large variety of pieces, including arts catalogues, magazines and corporate identities. My design work is at kennethgray.co.uk and my photography work is at kennethgray.photography.

1 University Libraries Department, John Smith’s bookshop, Glasgow

For two summers, whilst studying Book Publishing at Napier in Edinburgh, I worked for John Smith’s bookshop in Glasgow. The job was based in a converted church building near the Mitchell Library. Basically I had to open boxes of books and check them off against orders. The part I really remember though was the weeks of adorning books with sticky back plastic protective covers. Much as I wanted to work with books, it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

2 The Scotsman newspaper, Edinburgh

It seems that most people working in graphic design in Edinburgh went through The Scotsman at some point in their career. This was my first job after leaving college. I had to set adverts for The Scotsman and Evening News using Quark Xpress. I had never used it before, so I bought a visual quickstart guide, went to the pub and read it cover to cover. I was working the 4-11pm shift, which meant that most dinners were takeaway baked potatoes from the shop at the top of Cockburn Street. The advertising department was in the basement of The Scotsman building, and I was working with people of my age and time-served typesetters who really knew their stuff. I had to typeset adverts for the likes of ‘Dial-an-Iron’ and various car companies. The adverts, once we had printed them out, went to paste-up where they were glued on to the page layout. I learned a lot about working quickly and accurately to deadlines.

3 County NatWest, Queen Street, Edinburgh

Next off, I worked for the in-house graphic design department of County NatWest, a division of the NatWest Bank. This would have been about 1991. Already you could see technology changing whilst some practices remained the same. I had to print out the titles of reports for covers, then paste the printout on to a board for the printer. I would adjust kerning between the letters by cutting and moving the text printout on the board. I would make outline drawings in Freehand, then paste them on to the board and overlay the printout with a markup sheet for the printer to let them know what colours should be used. We had a photographic enlarger in its own darkroom. Eventually we had some equipment which seemed like science-fiction at the time – a desktop rotary scanner for transparencies plus Photoshop version 2.5 (before layers!). We would either commission photography or buy it in from agencies like Tony Stone, which at the time had an office in Edinburgh and would send across selections of transparencies for us to choose from. The job was mainly designing covers for the analysts’ reports, making up presentation material or charts, and producing small newsletters. I really learned to pay attention to typeface and layout details.

4 Shaw Marketing and Design, Edinburgh

I joined Shaw Marketing and Design in Edinburgh as a visualiser, which meant that I would take a rough sketch from one of the two designers and work it up into a full design. Whilst there, I worked on a lot of visuals, including making photo-realistic renderings of scotch whisky bottles with proposed labels mocked up on them. I would also work on the packaging artwork for whisky, including Cutty Sark and Glengoyne. I began to learn HTML and CSS, working on websites using the ExpressionEngine CMS. Eventually I became a designer in my own right. I learned how to take a job, right from initial idea and sketch, all the way through visuals, to final finished print-ready artwork.

5 Freelance graphic designer and photographer, Edinburgh

I went freelance in 2006 and was lucky enough to start working for Alliance Trust in Dundee. I worked on material for their newly introduced corporate branding, in co-operation with the in-house department. During that time, I also began to work for other clients, including Scottish Natural Heritage, The Scottish Gallery, Fettes College, the Scottish Wildlife Trust and St Columba’s School. I have worked on a wide variety of commissions, including arts catalogues, brochures, corporate identities, prospectuses, children’s magazines and websites. I know some really good creative people to call upon, so I have a roster of folk to collaborate with, including printers, photographers, paper makers, illustrators and developers. Freelance work comes with its own set of hurdles, but it also allows for opportunities. I’ve been able to develop (boom, boom) more of an interest in photography, and had a couple of photographs included in the RSA Open exhibition in 2014. The most enjoyable part of working as a freelancer is building really good, strong relationships with a client.

More: Website | Twitter

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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.

Nic Hamilton is a visual artist, working in video and animation with a strong connection to music. He collaborates with record labels and electronic music producers, creating evocative pieces of visual and aural synchronicity and combining the categories of video art and music video. His videos capture experiences of natural and constructed environments.

Nic is also Director at SquintOpera Melbourne, an international creative agency specialising in imagining the future of the built environment through film, installation and illustration. Here are his first five jobs:

1. Cherry Picking
I used to pick cherries in Tasmania’s Tamar Valley and would start at 6am and finish at 3pm. It was hot, boring and hard but paid well for a 15 year old.

2. Petrol Station Attendant
Between the ages of 17 and 20 I worked at Launceston’s only 24hr petrol station wearing serving petrol and polishing the bowsers for the nightmarish couple that ran it. My best moment was filling up a red faced man’s diesel 4WD with petrol and subsequently having to get under the car and drain it while being threatened with a bashing.

3. Foundry Assistant
My Dad ran a commercial foundry fabricating large bronze and aluminium artworks. The work was particularly hot and and dirty. Breaking the massive sand moulds apart after a pour to see the result was always exciting. Then came the clean up, grinding and finishing. Having an insight into the huge amounts of labour and technique behind a cast metal artwork was influential and instilled in me the value of craftsmanship and technical rigour. Perhaps the most boring part of the whole process is when it ends up anaesthetised in a gallery.

4. Architect
I worked as graduate architect for a few years after a 5-year degree, but quickly realised I would have absolutely no say in how anything worked or looked until I was either 50 or practising for myself. As a mild control freak with a disdain of being told what to do this profession didn’t sit well with me. On the plus side, I am now fluent in understanding the language that architects deploy.

5. 3D Artist
I taught myself 3D software and worked freelance to make club flyers, grant presentations for artists, various bad logos and design images for architects. I was working blind at this stage and learning from print books before the internet tutorial explosion. I still love learning new technologies and techniques.

More: Website | Vimeo | Twitter

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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.

Pat Kane is a musician, writer, consultant and researcher. Here he talks about his first five jobs…

1. Summer student jobs: play school attendant and train cleaner | mid-80s
The first made me realise that the expected terminus for a boy of my class and smarts – school teacher – was not going to be arrived at. No patience for weans being sick in synchrony on Wurlitzers. The second – working out of a repairs depot in Motherwell – gave me a big insight into industrial working culture: “slow down, son” being the best remembered phrase. Though after a summer of arguing about politics, it was the coolest thing when a quiet wee fitter gave me a battered copy of Bobby Seale’s Seize The Time, with the injunction to “pass it on.” And I did.

2. Musician under major record contract | 1986-1991
I exchanged labour for money, so I guess it was a job. But in all other respects, far too much fun for a young adult male (working with his brother, in their band Hue And Cry). My version of 80s excess was all realised aesthetics (rather than powdery substances). You’d loved post-punk and its ideological and musical freedoms; now, with a major record business flush with both profits from CDs and still-idealistic A&R men, you got the chance to use the actual New York jazz-and-soul sidemen that you’d only previously made po-mo ironic references to. And conduct muttered album artwork sessions with lugubrious St. Martin’s graduates, or make videos with moonlighting members of Throbbing Gristle (Peter Christopherson). Like I said, too much fun. And still having it: our last Hue And Cry album was Remote: Major to Minor in 2014, and we’ll be bringing out an all-new ballad record in 2015.

3. Freelance journalism and media | 1985-present
While waiting for a record contract in London, I started scrivening for NME as a media/TV reviewer (for my then editor Stuart Cosgrove), and for a pop-culture mag called Jamming. I parlayed my early pop-success into more writing by-lines, and ended up with a column in the Scotsman called “Citizen Kane,” which became a book called Tinsel Show: Pop, Politics, Scotland in 1992. That generated a whole range of gigs for TV and radio, including a live chat show called Nightwatch for Channel Four, and a Sony Award winning series on Radio Scotland. Two reasons I’ve been able to pursue this, through almost all major titles, magazines and broadcasters in the UK. One: my mum compelled me to endure the Scheidegger touch typing course when I was 17. This meant that when my arse got kicked out of the major music biz in 1992, I could sit down to a keyboard and rattle off scripts, texts, articles, and display an employable facility. Two: my film and television studies and literary-theory classes at Glasgow University. The ideas ingested there have enabled me to think out of any tight corner, and leap into surprising places, with both seeming to have pleased enough gatekeepers and budget holders to give me cash for content.

4. Editorial roles within The Herald, founding editor of The Sunday Herald | 1996-2000
I shifted my column back to The Herald from the Scotsman, struck up a friendship with then head of the Scottish Media Group Gus MacDonald (he employed a sociologist as his personal chef), who then gave me two pages every week in the Saturday Herald to do with as I wish. I called them ‘E2’ (for “Second Scottish Enlightenment”) and “Scotgeist” (just to annoy people) – the first a think-tank, the second a New-Yorker style cultural review. Three great outcomes from that. i) When I walked through the editorial floor of The Herald, people whistled the theme tune from “The Twilight Zone.” ii) A senior executive once said, “this isn’t journalism for the 21st century – this is journalism for the 31st century.” iii) Andrew Jaspan saw my trouble-making and asked me to be part of the founding editorial team of The Sunday Herald along with Robert Brown and Richard Walker (now the current editor). So exciting, and so traumatic, was the launch of this title over 1998-2000 for me that I forswore any regular job from that point onwards, and settled down to write The Play Ethic for Macmillan, published in 2004.

5. Speaker/researcher/consultant on play, creativity and innovation | 2000-present
Initially I launched the idea of a “play ethic” – a new mentality for productive, creative lives in the information age – in an essay in Scotland on Sunday in 1996, but amplified it in an essay for The Observer in 2000. From that point onwards, I began to be asked by organisations both commercial and public – whether advertising, tech or toy companies, or broadcasters, educators and public services – to talk to them about the power and potential of play for their organisations or occupations. Over the last ten years, The Play Ethic – now an innovation consultancy – has taken me to Australia, the US, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe. My play axioms even got onto the walls of The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012! My latest engagement around this topic is to be appointed the lead curator at FutureFest a two-day London event organised and funded by Nesta. My next book will try to fuse my understanding of play with our growing sense of environmental limits – it’s to be called Radical Animal.

There’s only one thing I know about “jobs,” and that’s from Confucius: “the man who finds a job he loves never works another day in his life.” That sounds right to 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.

Kerr Vernon is the Creative Director and founder of KVGD, a Glasgow based design studio that creates engaging, thoughtful, crafted design work. This has been recognised by numerous publications and organisations promoting design excellence. These include D&AD, Scottish Design Awards, Counter Print, Computer Arts and Creative Review.

1. Paper round -  I think this counts? It was 1986. I was obsessed with BMX at the time. It wasn’t too much of a hardship getting up early and bombing round the mean streets of Glasgow on my BMX delivering papers for an hour before school. Obviously the pay was a pittance (enough to buy a record a week and a few cans of Tennents for the Saturday night) but it did sow the seeds of some sort of work ethic. This is despite my best efforts over the following years to do as little as possible, mess about in bands and concentrate on being the next Johnny Marr. (Sadly, a dream I still hold onto. It’s never too late, right?)

2. Finished Artist – A fancy sounding title for a spirit-crushingly dull job. I left school hastily aged 16. To this day I still kind of regret this and I really wish I’d stayed on till 6th year, got good grades and studied at Glasgow School of Art. This could never have happened though as school just wasn’t for me. I was hardly ever there and I had no interest in any subject other than art or P.E. I liked playing football, still do to this day every week.

Nobody in my family went to college or university so it was decided I’d get a job doing the only thing I was any good at. On the strength of my pencil drawings I got a job as a finished artist in a Glasgow advertising agency called Chris Cole and Associates. The pay was a pittance and in hindsight I should have still been at school hanging with my friends. I spent 3 years (from 16-19) processing darkroom prints of cars for press ads for the likes of Arnold Clark. We’d use graph paper and letraset to put them together. It was very, very old school and I was pretty green then. The creative department (3 of us) sat at big desks with slide rules. The creative director smoked a pipe all day and the studio manager smoked at least 20 a day. We each had a can of spray mount on our desks too so the air was pretty toxic. I’d easily spend around four hours a day in a tiny cupboard converted into a darkroom. Pretty miserable stuff and eventually I was made redundant. On the plus side I had some experience behind me which helped open doors.

Kerr Vernon at age 23

3. Various art working jobs - I’m bunching these together as I didn’t really stay at one place for any length of time. From ages 19 – 24 I worked in three or four Glasgow advertising agencies. All gone now of course. They were good times and I met lots of cool people. Some I still see to this day. Incredibly, I was promoted to studio manager at the Bridge/Alliance. I was in charge of six art workers, it was hard work but I never took it seriously and only cared about whatever band I was in at the time. A major pet peeve of mine would be when an art director would stand behind you and ‘Direct Art’. This involved me moving things around the page for them while they stroked their chin and made the layout juuuuust right. In fact, this is pretty much what motivated me to become a designer. I also decided being a manager wasn’t for me and I left on a whim to go to Australia. I spent about two and a half years in Sydney all in. Happy days.

4. Designer – My first proper job where it said ‘Designer’ on a business card was tictoc. (They’re now a digital agency, doing pretty well I believe). By this point I’d crashed a year at Cardonald College gaining an Advanced Diploma in Graphic design. I had a student folio and some designs I’d done in Australia. It was deemed good enough for tictoc and I was delighted. I got off to a good start winning pitches but it quickly went downhill (there’s a continuing theme developing here).

I was sat next to a designer who just got it, and he knocked me into a cocked hat on a daily basis. It just wasn’t happening for me, every day the CD would say my stuff was meh, nothing I designed was good enough to make the cut. This is one of the single most important learning curves I’ve ever experienced and much later I drew upon this and got my act together and practised design properly. I didn’t hit my stride until my thirties and I’m still learning. Ultimately, I was fired from tictoc after my boss went through my emails. I was naive but desperate to get out of there.

5. Senior Designer – I joined The Curious Group after a stint of freelance. It was a fun place to work and nobody took anything very seriously, least of all the directors. I’ve learned that the quiet, studious agencies do the best work but the noiser, relaxed agencies are more fun to be in. I guess it’s about striking a balance between the two. In hindsight, if I’d stayed on at school and gone to Glasgow School of Art I’m pretty sure I’d be where I am today anyway. I just took a long, messy road to get here.

More: Website | Twitter

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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.

Orlando Mathias is co-founder and Creative Partner at interactive design and user experience company, AllofUs. Here he talks about his first five jobs:

From the very early days of my career I have fortunately been in positions where I have been involved in companies at the beginning. Therefore I have little experience in having a boss looking down on me.

It did however start after leaving Art School and struggling to find money to make short animated films. This led the government to insist that I do a back-to-work scheme. Coincidentally, it was the beginning of the internet age and I chose a course in HTML which then lead to learning Lingo (Macromedia Director). Suddenly, the world opened up and I realised I could make money and be creative.

1). 4MAT - Web Designer
To show how young the industry was my method for finding my first Web developer job was to look in the Yellow Pages (The big Yellow book). I chose the first company in the Web section (which was only about 20 companies at the time) they were called 4MAT a standard web company in East London. The team there taught me all the basics that I needed and very soon I was free to design and build full sites on my own.

 2/3). Freelance
Creative frustration leaked in and I went Freelance, working for many of the young agencies in London, Sunbather, Online Magic etc. I also spent a lot of time at the BBC and the BBC News sites, this was a fascinating time in the early days, a 24hr department of Developers, Designers and Journalists all working together in the same space.

4). Digit – Head of Interaction
A company that I kept returning to when freelancing, was Digit (next on the list in the Yellow Pages), a small team of 3 in Soho who paid a third of what I was getting elsewhere, but they had a vision and creative passion that was in tune with my own desires. I soon became the 4th member and spent an amazing 7 years experimenting and forging the path for genuine creative and user centred design.

5). AllofUs – Co-founder & Creative Partner
Forging a harmonious relationship with 3 of my partners at Digit, we set up AllofUs in 2003. We were ready to build a company that could design digital experiences that transcended the computer screen and leap back into the physical world, helping humans interact in intuitive and exciting ways. My coding days are long gone now, but I do work across all departments leading projects that either require integration into physical spaces or products that require a digital interaction with the real world.

More: Website

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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.

Richard Warden is a Canadian film producer based in Glasgow who regularly teaches producing and production management. After programming for the Renfrewshire version of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival for a number of years, Richard is now the national Film Curator.

For the most part, I’ll skip my first five non-film jobs, which include various tourism-related posts in my birthplace of Niagara Falls – a town where the circus never leaves! Running a ferris wheel when you’re 16 feels like a huge responsibility, but it’s nothing compared to the importance of handing out raincoats for the Maid of the Mist, the boat that travels to the base of the largest cataract. If I’d stayed in Niagara, I’m certain I would’ve continued my rise through the hometown ranks to be mayor now instead of my high school chum… he was merely selling snack cakes back then.

Volunteer – Toronto International Film Festival:
Almost exclusively, this involved moving chairs and people around an industry forum. The biggest thrill was meeting Bob Geldof, who delivered the keynote address (I still have the speaking notes he left behind buried among my possessions somewhere). While the work was mostly unremarkable, the connections made at the event led to my first paid employment in Toronto, so I’ve appreciated the potential inherent in volunteering ever since. Good thing, as much of my film work has turned out to be that, whether intended or not!

Executive Assistant – Canadian Film Centre:
I had the good fortune to assist a producer who was overseeing Canada’s national film school at the time. He was very generous with what he had learned ‘in the trenches’ of independent filmmaking, which greatly eased my first forays.

Programme Coordinator – Canadian Film Centre:
A second role at the Centre allowed me countless opportunities to observe Canadian and international film talent at the peak of their game. Many years later, I continue to be inspired by the creative bravery I witnessed there.

Production Coordinator:
An unpaid position on a short drama offered invaluable insights regarding how to lead a film project. It was a trial by fire, having not worked my way up via production assistant and production secretary gigs, as is often the case. However, having survived it gave me the confidence to leap into producing.

Producer:
Four shorts, three feature-length films, and I’m still at it – my fifth film job continues. I love the variety of doing other things as well. Teaching requires me to organise and better understand what I’ve learnt along the way. And being Film Curator for the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival is not only an honour given the important work it does, but also keeps me on my toes as a filmmaker. Many of the films I have the pleasure of viewing challenge me to improve my own craft, as well as to see things in new and exciting ways.

With over 300 events across Scotland from 1 – 19 October, you can find out more about this year’s Scottish Mental Health Arts & Film Festival on Central Station 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.

Karen Gardiner currently works freelance in TV Production; working on drama, film and commercial productions.

Helpline Advisor – Learn Direct Scotland:
Although not my first job, this is probably the most relevant starting point as this job helped me achieve skills that I still use in my career today. While I was studying Digital Film & Television at the RSAMD, this was my part time job. I was in a call centre helping people with funding for higher education. I learned how to engage with people from all walks of life and also how to communicate with people effectively. This job also taught me the true nature of hard work. I was at uni five days a week and worked in the call centre every weekend and in the evenings. There was no such thing as a day off, I remember coming off a long day of shooting and still going to work afterwards for a few hours of answering calls.

Production Assistant- Ever Here I Be – Digicult:
This was my first experience on a short film run by Glasgow based company Digicult, who invest in growing new talent in Scotland through short film schemes. It was a work placement opportunity so I wasn’t being paid. I was assisting the coordinator with prep for the shoot and the day-to-day running of the production office. Although a fantastic experience, I have one memory of being sent to set to work as a floor runner for one of the days and my job was to lock off an area in SWG3. I was in an empty warehouse for hours alone beside a smashed window in the middle of February. I remember standing there with my feet numb from the cold thinking “one day I better get paid for this”. It was worth it though, as later the same year I got the position of Production Manager on the Digicult Film ‘The Rule of Thumb’ directed by the talented Gregor Johnstone.

Tern Digital – Development Researcher:
I was very lucky to get a position at Tern as the Development Researcher on the digital adaptation of the novel ‘The Thirty Nine Steps.’ This was my first job in digital and made me realise just how transferable production skills are. I felt like a detective on this project, I knew the novel inside out. I had to research every single description in the book for images that the digital artists could work from. This ranged from what a London flat looked like in 1914, to what brand of cigars were popular at the time or what the newspaper headlines were just before the First World War. It was such a creative group of people to work with and was a lot of fun to be part of. I still genuinely think that if I was ever a contestant on Mastermind that this novel would definitely be my specialist subject.

STV Creative – Producer:
I was offered an AP job at STV Creative (Commercials department at STV) and was excited about going back into TV production. It was a real learning curve for me as commercials are fast paced and there is little room for error. I worked my way up to Producer during my time there and the role was extremely diverse. Pitching to clients, budgeting, casting, overseeing edits and directing voiceovers were just part of my role. I got to work with some really talented people during my years here and I would say that this is the one job that taught me almost everything I know about TV broadcasting.

Freelancer – Production:
Deciding to go freelance was a decision that looking back, I took without much thought or planning. I had absolutely no savings and no job to go to when I left STV but I just had to trust that it would work out as I wanted to explore other opportunities. I was out of work for around three weeks and it was quite a scary time. Luckily the work started coming in and I haven’t looked back since. I have since worked in various production roles for MTP, STV, Shed Productions and have even been attached to the development of a feature film as producer through the Lo-Fi scheme. I would encourage anyone to consider going freelance in this industry as Scotland really is thriving at the moment; there are so many great opportunities out there.

More: Linkedin

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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.

Adam Lee is a freelance photographer based in Liverpool UK. For his personal and commercial photographic work his clients include the Wigtown Book Festival, The Observer Escape Magazine, Granta Books, Sara Maitland, and DaDaFest amongst others. Adam also works as a freelance facilitator of participatory photographic projects with commissioners including PhotoVoice, Preston City Council, Liverpool City Council and Minerva Arts. Adam is Chair of the board of directors for LOOK: Liverpool International Photography Festival. Here are his first five jobs:

1. My first job (other than working at McDonalds and for a local gamekeeper when I was at school) was for Ladbrokes the bookmakers while I was at university. I started this job in my third year and carried on until I went travelling, six months after graduating. I started off as a cashier and eventually worked my way up to the assistant manager’s role at a shop in Toxteth, Liverpool. It was quite fun (due to the customers, not the work) and was my first experience of any kind of people management. On the whole, I think I learned a lot about customer service, managing staff and it was a crash course in scouse banter!

2. After university and a bit of travelling, the first job I got was as a Student Support Worker for Liverpool John Moores University. I have been doing the job for over ten years now and cannot see myself quitting soon. This is a great job: it’s fulfilling, particularly knowing you’re helping people rather than creating profit for shareholders. Furthermore, I get all the good sides of being a student (attending lectures, receiving an education and being paid to be there) but with none of the exams or coursework. Over the past ten years this role has taught me skills and knowledge I still use today. The job has opened doors into the arts world that I had never considered when first starting: I work regularly as a photographer in this field as well as delivering participatory projects to disabled groups. Finally, it forms the basis of a sustainable business model to support my fine art photographic work.

3. I got my first project with PhotoVoice, a London based charity that delivers participatory photography projects nationally and internationally, in 2009 based primarily on my experience with disability from my support work role (I had limited, professional photographic experience at this stage). I didn’t really know what participatory photography was until I saw this role advertised. Since then I have built a pretty solid career from this type of work. I work regularly for PhotoVoice and now have an extensive portfolio of freelance participatory work and projects. I find the participatory work to be an excellent string to my bow – it is again very fulfilling, helps me to think about the visual literacy side of photographic work, is highly practical and brings in a good bit of money.

4. Since starting the support work job in 2003 I haven’t had any other types of “employment” (other than my freelance photographic and participatory work). I had been volunteering for Redeye, the Photography Network, since 2009 as host of their Liverpool network meetings and when the post of events co-ordinator became available in 2013, I thought that this would be a great job to support my own personal practice. It was a fantastic job – I got to meet some of the big names in photography, to establish myself as a figure in photography in the North West of England and to deliver some great events – from talks to masterclasses to conferences and mass participation projects. In the end, I decided to leave the job earlier this year, as I wanted to refocus on my personal photographic work, having been awarded a residency at Metal in Liverpool. I continue to work voluntarily for Redeye now, resuming my role with the Liverpool network meetings.

5. Since 2008 I have been working on a voluntary basis for LOOK: Liverpool International Photography Festival. I was brought onto the board of directors when the festival moved from Manchester to Liverpool in 2008. Since then, I have fulfilled a number of roles including treasurer, company secretary and web and social media manager. In June this year I was made chair of the board of directors. Despite being unpaid work, LOOK is something I strongly believe in and have put my heart and soul into for the past six years, helping to deliver two highly successful festivals in 2011 and 2013 and am now working with the board and executive director to plan for LOOK/15 next year.

More: Website | Twitter

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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.