Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

How to get an entry level job in the creative industries

1. Know someone. It helps if your dad is friends with the editor, or if you went to school with the assistant director.
2. Happen to be doing work experience the month they’re hiring and make a really good impression.

There’s also 3. Be qualified for the job and really, really lucky, but it’s safe to say that you shouldn’t rely on that one.*

I’ve written before about how much those first few months (should that be years?) after graduating from college/university can suck, and one of the main reasons they suck is because it can seem damn near impossible to get a job.

When I first left university, five years ago now, I had a pretty good CV. My grades were good, but more important than that, I already had a lot of experience behind me: countless (student) publications, a raft of volunteer positions I no longer list, and even a couple of paid jobs in the industry. I didn’t expect things to come easily - throughout my degree, the running joke amongst my friends was that we’d be lucky to ever get a job, let alone earn more than $30,000 a year - but my early success rate in the employment market was pretty abominable nonetheless.

As I moaned, in true White Wine style, to my (decidedly more attractive to employers) boyfriend back in 2006 “Unemployable is the new unfuckable.” (Incidentally, I think Frankie published something along those lines, albeit less crass, recently.)

But here’s the thing: entry level jobs suck. And when I say that, I’m not saying you’re above doing the tasks required by them - I would have been happy to photocopy and answer phones at the offices of [insert the many publications I applied for here] - I’m saying that the way in which they’re distributed often doesn’t make much sense, and usually seems to rely on the first two points I mentioned in my post.

This isn’t bitterness talking. Like the famed new 23-year-old Monthly editor, Ben Naparstek, I made a habit of applying for jobs I wasn’t really qualified for (don’t read that as an insult - he applied for the position at 18. He was clearly underqualified!), along with all those Editorial Assistant and Junior Writer roles. And the weird thing was that my interview rate for these positions was actually higher than it was for the positions you would think a recent university graduate would be qualified for.

I never got a call back for any of the Editorial Coordinator roles I applied for, but like Naparstek, I did get an interview for Editor. I never heard back about the Junior Writer position my clips were ideally suited to (I figured, at least, although now I suspect part of the reason I didn’t get it was because that magazine and I didn’t 100 per cent mesh - see point 4), but I got through to the second round for a Senior Writer position at the same magazine. I got an interview to be Deputy Editor of a national magazine when I still hadn’t held down a mainstream media job.**

All this might suggest I was underselling myself in applying for those entry level jobs, but I don’t think I was - keep in mind I was 22, 23, 24 at this time. The real issue, I think, is that the number of applications for these positions is so high that it’s difficult for the people doing the hiring to distinguish between them or give them their proper due (a friend of mine who’s now in the hiring seat says it’s hard to find the best person for them for this reason). Add that to this the fact that a lot of the people applying could do these jobs fairly solidly - that one applicant might be able do them better than another isn’t as important as you might think it would be.

That’s not to say you can just walk into a higher level interview either - to even get a look in, you need the equivalent of entry level experience and beyond. My point is that you need to go out there and get that entry level experience yourself. Submit stories to your favourite publications. Start a not-for-profit. Make a film. Put on a play. If major galleries won’t exhibit your artwork, put on an exhibition of your own. The main reason I started freelancing was because I realised the only way I’d ever get to write the stories I wanted to write - or get a job in the industry, for that matter - was if I proved I was capable of doing it by, uh, Just Doing It.

I tend to be cynical of the fawning over young high achievers - mostly because I’ve gotten to know so many of them over the years. They’re clever, sure, but they’re not superhuman, and rather than being lauded as such (“OMGZ! What a genius!” etc) I think they’d serve better as How Tos.

So if it interests people sufficiently, I’d be happy to start a semi-regular series here profiling Self-Made Twentysomethings in non-traditional job who are doing pretty amazing things - not so you can “oo” and “ah” over how great they are, but to demystify how they got there. And so that you too can get your ideal entry level - or not-so-entry level - job.

* Thinking on this further, I can also genuinely recommend applying for dedicated cadet and scholarship programmes (which, in Australia at least, usually offer more than one position).

** This raises a raft of questions in itself, such as the disposability a number of 30-somethings in my field have warned me about once you command a certain salary. But that’s not the point of this post, or an area I have any expertise in at this point in time. Wait 10 years for that post.