ACC Careers: The Next Stage in your Career

ACC CAREERS: THE NEXT STAGE OF YOUR CAREER

Words by Matt Thompson

Why do students go to college? You’d be mistaken for thinking that it’s all about the qualifications received after a period of hard work, proof of a strong knowledge, work ethic and ability within their subject that can be taken into their future.

And while the qualifications we offer to our students are, of course, vital and provide all of the above, there’s so much more to making a person hirable and numerous ways to reinforce the learned knowledge and skills. All schools and colleges have a dedicated careers service, to expand on what is taught in the classroom and ensure that students leave with as much information and guidance as possible to maximise the reach of their qualification.

At ACC though, we wanted to take careers one step further and use our deep knowledge of and connection with the industries we teach about to do more to bridge the gap between learning about and being part of the industry.

In the following pages, we’re taking a deep dive into our careers service and breaking down how they can help set you up for success starting with ACC Live.

ACC Live is a programme of events designed in line with the Gatsby Benchmarks, a series of government careers guidelines set out in 2013 to run alongside your studies to boost your knowledge and get you handson industry experience in the form of work placements, career fairs and face to face conversations with real-world industry employers. Basically, we give you multiple opportunities throughout the academic year to step outside of the classroom and to make industry connections, experience what your career will be like when you finish and we round it off with dedicated and personal careers advice to help bring everything together and get students on the road to long-term, viable careers that match their passions.

We as a creative college are a key part of the industries we teach students about, educating the industry professionals of the future. We recognise the responsibility we have to give our students the ‘whole package’ alongside their qualifications, and to provide industries we’re passionate about with the best future staff possible to ensure these industries continue to exist long-term.

ACC Live is the result of our efforts to give you more opportunities when you finish up your studies. You can expect a whole host of unique experiences that connect you to the industry you want to be a part of. Here’s what will be on your agenda as part of ACC Live:

Industry Takeover

A chance to hear from some of the industry’s best and brightest professionals about what it’s like to work in the field you want to go into, plus time to ask questions and dig down into what you’d like to be doing.

Field Trips

Get outside of the classroom and visit a gallery, museum, gigs or even a real workplace. Another chance to immerse yourself in professional world experiences, learning from what’s been and growing your understanding of the standard required when you finish studying.

Next Steps Career Fair

Think of this like the Industry Takeovers but based entirely around your new career and what comes after study. You’ll hear from employers, arts organisations, creatives, entrepreneurs and bodies such as the Local Enterprise Partnerships. Taking place in the form of talks, workshops and exhibitions, this is your chance to get focused on post-study options and to go hands-on in workshops and exhibitions.

ACC Awards and Showcases

ACC Live isn’t just about putting you on the best path to your career; we also want to celebrate you and your achievements. The ACC Awards and Showcases put your work out in public and give you the chance to nominate those coursemates who have done amazing things. You could even be nominated yourself. We then round things off with award ceremonies to ensure that everybody has a chance to revel in their success!

We checked in with a few of our alumni to see how their time at ACC and careers service have helped them in their professional lives.

Vanessa Sinclair

My name is Vanessa Sinclair, a Music Manager from Birmingham. As well as being a freelancer I also run two companies via my VNS brand. VNS Management is a music management company offering a range of services such as artist management, events management, promoting, scouting, artist development and booking agents. The second company is VNS Productions CIC - a community interest company focused on providing platforms and opportunities to empower, educate and develop people and their careers within the creative industry. We mainly do events and workshops.

I started my Music Business course at ACC Birmingham in 2014. I could honestly give you a whole list of all the modules that I completed on the course and how each of them prepared me, however I'm just going to concentrate on the two that I feel have really helped me.

Firstly, the music contract module - this module really prepared me for working in the industry. I can now look at a range of contacts that people would most likely come across working in the music industry and understand them, not only that I can now write my own contracts.

The other module was listening to music - as a person that is constantly scouting artists whether it be online or at live events, being able to really listen to music is important. Before the unit, I'd say ‘oh i'm going to listen to a specific track’ but I wasn't really listening, now I really listen to music. I hear the vocals, I hear the instruments and sounds within a track, I feel the music more because I'm listening so deeply. This is important for me as I scout for my own events.

One of our events is ‘Live Vibe’, which we have now developed into a festival. I also scout for other brands I work with, the main being ‘Iluvlive’, a brand that is known for discovering and providing a platform for artists to support career development.

I learned a lot of transferable skills while studying including maths and English which are so important within most careers. As an entrepreneur handling finances for my businesses and organising events, I am forever doing budgets so calculating incoming and outgoing figures is key to ensure I get the numbers right.

English is vital for me as I am always writing contacts, emails, letters, press releases, biographies, electronic press kits, funding bids and social media posts.

I started my businesses while studying at ACC, but it has taken me years to get to this point. I have some big plans for the growth of my brand which will continue to create opportunities for people within the music industry. I've always been a person that loves helping people so I have to say the best thing about my career is being able to provide opportunities for emerging artists. There are so many amazing artists in the world so being a person that discovers talent and is able to support them in different ways is so rewarding. The advice I’d give to anyone aspiring to work in the creative industries would be to work hard and be passionate about what you're doing, have patience and determination and don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Peter and Phillip Sawyers

We have a brand and fitness business called ‘Twinsane Fitness’. We deliver fitness classes such as boot camps, circuit training and group boxing which mainly involve full body cardiovascular type exercises. We also offer 1-2-1 personal training, nutritional guidance and online virtual classes. We studied Music Production in 2008/09 at Access Creative College Birmingham.

Studying at ACC taught us time management skills, adhering to deadlines, learning how to work in groups and collaborating to get tasks done, as well as delegating roles based on strength within the group. We also learned a lot of editing and programming skills using software such as Reason and Logic. Both have a similar editing structure to the software Since leaving Access Creative College, we’ve worked in various jobs and done freelance work. We had roles in Penny Woodcock’s 2009 film 1 Day before moving on to study Sound Engineering at university. Fitness has always been a key interest and we set up ‘Twinsane Fitness’ in 2015, so it’s taken us eleven years to get to this point.

The best thing about our career now is making positive, healthy changes to people’s lives and being appreciated and recognised for it. The best advice we can give is to research the type of career you want to go into, network with people in that field and keep practicing and developing the skills required to be at the top level within that career field.

Lee Fisher, ACC Head of Careers

Lastly, we asked why our Head of Careers wanted to be involved in ACC Live.

“I had the pleasure of working with a talented and knowledge hungry group of students in the last year I taught for ACC back in 2012. This group of students all had really interesting and diverse musical projects happening and wanted to understand more about income streams. We put time aside away from unit work to explore music publishing, mechanical copyright and synchronization.

Mechanical copyright is a complex subject, but we chipped away and I could see through some in class assessment that the penny was beginning to drop. The more that this group of students understood, the more they would present interesting lines of inquiry and ask me questions that took me out of my comfort zone. This required me to read, research and contact associate industry colleagues. One such associate industry colleague I contacted was working at Universal and suggested that I bring the students to London to see how all of the different departments worked together on various projects.

I talked to the students about the opportunity and they got really excited, which sparked a conversation about the geography and culture of the UK music industry in London. We discussed the various publishers in Charing Cross Road and why Denmark Street known as ‘Tin Pan Alley’ with an array of musical instrument shops was located so close by. This was because most songwriters historically would head to Denmark Street after getting their first publishing cheque advance!

The day came for the planned trip to London. We headed over to Denmark Street to check out the musical instrument shops and then walked down Charing Cross Road identifying the various publishing houses. Next up, Holland Park to visit Universal where we received a tour of their recording facilities, PR and marketing department, sync department, A&R department and met with the managing director on the top floor who talked about his own career journey and explained how Universal operated. The students were massively inspired by their experience, which was something that we could not provide for them in a classroom setting. Students need meaningful engagement with employers and workplaces to understand what a particular industry looks like and visualise what steps they need to take to get there. We can’t promise any student a job, the world just doesn’t work like that, but we can provide meaningful workplace experiences outside of the classroom. A positive workplace experience is an important step that will help students take responsibility for planning their own career journeys.”