How the way that we train has completely changed for good

Training is one of those things: everybody agrees that it is vital to the continued health of the industry, but no one wants to pay for people to do it. That means that nowadays it is mostly up to you to sort out, but luckily there are many different routes and options to make sure you get the skills you need.

It all used to be very different. But then so did the industry as a whole, and the two are linked. Broadcast pre-digital era was hardware-driven and based on SDI. Video was physically routed around facilities by cable and plugged into patch panels like so much color-coded spaghetti. The equipment that all this patchwork of cables and connectors fed into was often proprietary and evolved in its own niches over decades of ad hoc experimentation.

It was a whole bunch of siloes, essentially, linked by rivers of cable. And if you wanted to be trained on it you really had to be trained on it by the people that set up the systems in the first place. It was too idiosyncratic for anything else.

That meant that broadcasters in particular had spent a lot of effort in establishing vast training operations. Both in specialist academies and with on the job training in a whole plethora of different apprenticeships, it tended to be large national broadcasters that did the heavy lifting of training for the entire industry. 

Over in post, meanwhile, the runners system was firmly embedded. The only way to be trained on some of the hero kit which cost more than a house and charged hourly rent equivalent to a month’s accommodation was to access it after hours. And that meant you had already to be on the inside to have a chance.

And then the industry changed. And the economy changed. And the technology changed. 

The upshot of all that upheaval is that training is to a large degree no longer the responsibility of the organisation but of the individual. And while this can seem like very much a bad thing, in the end it has really helped democratise the process. It takes a bit of spin, perhaps, but the end of monolithic training by monolithic organisations can be been as a good thing if you squint at it long enough.

It's getting easier and easier to take them off. Pic: Shutterstock

Positive spin

Several interlinked things have happened over the past few decades to make it thus. 

Broadcasters, for instance, are no longer the dominant force that they were. A whole host of other competitors have joined in the free-for-all for viewers. This has meant that they have less staff and less budget for things that do not immediately make them money. Training has been caught up in that drive for austerity. You can trace disquiet about the lack of money the industry has been investing in the next generation of backroom talent back to the turn of the century and further.

However, on the other hand, as we know the tech driving the industry has changed completely. You can now do things on your phone that took a $200,000 Flame suite to achieve not so long ago, and the move towards virtualised software systems running on standard IT components has thrown open the industry to a whole new set of people. Add in the fact that some of the companies making these tools — we’re looking at you Blackmagic — have decided to go for quantity and quality and made them available for free, and you have a whole new dynamic unfolding.

(Incidentally, in post-production the runners system is alive and well, but now there is a better chance that the people competing for these jobs will already know what they are doing when they get their foot in the door. There are huge problems with the system — it can be exploitative and it disadvantages working class candidates just for starters — but access to the technology is no longer one of them.)

This lowering of the bar is everywhere. Local sports teams can get the kit together to have their matches streamed on YouTube for the cost of a single OB camera chain. Schools and colleges can mount serious broadcast operations that mimic in smaller scale studio productions of the major broadcasters. And, crucially, a whole load of organisations and individuals have stepped forward to plug the gap.

Some of these are those selfsame schools, universities and colleges, offering access to courses and training that would once have been only available in-house at broadcasters (or at least to their day students). Some of these have been vendors such as Adobe, that have established a whole range of different options from paid courses to free resources embedded as part of their applications to show new users how to engage with the tools for the first time. Some of them have been end users themselves, uploading reels of how-tos and tutorials to pass on their sometimes hard won knowledge.

Adobe Master Trainer Valentina Vee delivers a semester's worth of Premiere Pro instruction in under 2.5 hours - for free

The net result is that there is more training around than ever. Its costs vary from the expensive to the free, its quality varies from the truly excellent to the rather woeful, and one way or another it is largely on your own shoulders to sort out. Needless to say, there’s no longer a cosy sinecure at the end of it all either. But more people can learn more techniques than ever before. And in the end, even without squinting that can only be a good thing.