Transcript

Hiya I'm Angie. I graduated Warwick back in 2017 with a degree in Classical Civilisation. I originally did that degree because I wanted to work in museums, but then I sort of had a bit of a career shift midway through Uni and realised that marketing was a sort of growing sector and one that I could really sort of develop and flourish in, in terms of a career.

So once I graduated I had a couple of marketing internships in my belt, one with a fashion agency and one at a sort of travel insurance type company, and once I had had that experience I managed to get - it was originally an internship, it was sort of right after I graduated, a couple of months after, and then it had the promise of a full-time job so that's part of the reason why I took it on - otherwise I wasn't really keen to do another internship.

And that was a marketing coordinator role, so a very like entry level marketing, and then eventually I worked my way up in about two years to senior marketing executive. And that company it was like a corporate finance consultancy, so I realised that I love marketing but I didn't love the industry and I wanted to work in a more creative industry.

So very recently I decided that I wanted to shift into music because I've had a music blog since I was 16. I've just sort of reviewed articles but then changed it into like opinion pieces and like at one point had a small team of volunteer writers, so I really tried to make it into something worth shouting about really while I was at Uni to add that extra experience and that extra exposure. So with that that was really the main sort of thing that helped me make that shift to music.

So in about June of this year I actually started my new role at Skiddle - so I'm a B2B marketing executive, and what Skiddle does is they're essentially a ticketing website so it's basically Ticketmaster but more independent and on a sort of smaller level, but we sell tickets for gigs, clubs and festivals. So festivals like Park Life, Cream Fields, loads of other ones and - see I can't think off the top of my head now - loads of club nights we work with promoters who put on their own club nights and want to use Skiddle to sort of maximise their ticket sales really.

And I think the key skills that I probably learned at Warwick that helped me with my career was time management and like learning to actually prioritise things. So when you have like loads of different essays due in the same week, you kind of learn to do a little bit at once for each thing, and I think that is a really useful skill to have in any job really but especially I think in the creative industry when you have loads of different things thrown at you and no really clear deadline - it could be next week it could be, you know, whenever you're done - you just have to learn to sort of prioritize yourself and I think that that is a really key skill that I probably wouldn't have had had I not gone to Uni. In terms of my position itself, I am in charge of making more sort of promoters know about Skiddle and who we are.

So it's a role, because it's B2B which is business to business rather than business to consumer or business to customer, instead of actually helping customers find events I'm helping promoters find Skiddle so they can use us and list their events on Skiddle and we essentially make a profit. So it's a bit of everything: so I do content creation for our blog, I edit video clips for social media, and I manage the B2B side of the social media channels. So it's a sort of jack-of-all-trades role, which you'll which you'll find at more like entry-level marketing positions.

In terms of what actually attracted me to the position - as I mentioned I love music, and I wanted to work in an industry that I was sort of passionate about while also sticking to what experience I already had because I didn't want that to go to waste and I was worried that I've already had such good marketing experience it’s just in a more like traditionally corporate background and not creative. And I think that's probably been the biggest challenge of my career to date as well, is finding out how the music industry actually works because there's so many different moving parts and there's so many different ways to like present yourself.

And something big that I learned is like anyone in the music industry hates the word corporate and they like run away from it as like as far as possible, so you have to like come across as really like casual and informal, while still remaining professional. Which I think is a hard line to draw, but it's something that I've learned while I was looking for this sort of next step into the music industry, and I think that has probably been my greatest challenge so far. But in overcoming it, I think networking really really helped.

So I found networking really daunting at first like just walking up to someone and saying hi and then just exchanging details, I just found it hard to sort of naturally get into that. But one way I think is really good is going to events, I mean these days obviously it's difficult but a lot of people are doing like online networking events which means it's even easier to talk to people and chat to them online. And then just oftentimes if you just tell them about your situation, and you know that you're looking for some help, they may reject you but they may also say yeah sure you know let's have a call.

And it's doing those little things, and developing those connections, for music in particular, really really helped, because it is such a people-led industry. Everyone ends up knowing everyone, so really sort of just get out there try talking to people and now is a great opportunity to do so because people have more sort of free time now that they're working from home etc.

So yeah that's it pretty much. Just make sure you get that experience early on. And there is a lot of pressure to decide what exactly you want to do, but as long as you have a rough idea and just try and get as much exposure to the different things that you like, it's all about reading job descriptions and just tailoring your CV to that, and making it as sort of personal to the role as possible I think is the best thing you can do.

So that's what I would recommend, and just try and like network online as much as possible really - because I found two mentors through just going to an event and telling someone I need advice, and it's worked out really well and eventually it helped me land my role because I knew the right tone to strike, so I'm a big big advocate for networking.