I’m going through entries I wrote for the better part of 18 months over at MySpace and found this from March 24, 2007:

I spoke at a broadcasting class this week. Columbia Academy is in Vancouver and is a rotating program for students to learn radio. They have different sections going on all the time, so you just pop in when you can, rotate through all the classes and graduate when you’re done. It’s about $13 000 for a 10 month program.

RADIO IS NOT THE END – IT IS THE BEGINNING

You can substitute “radio” for “your job.” So many people just go do their 8 hours and nothing more and then wonder why they can’t get ahead. When I was in Vernon making $1050 a month at the radio station, I got a job on YTV, as a writer for the paper and as a waiter at Earls.

Radio, and many other jobs, open you to so many opportunities for other income, you’d be foolish not ot pursue it.

As a radio announcer, you can freelance in commercial voice overs, acting, emceeing etc. I take my interviews from the radio and turn them into articles for newspapers, let tv stations film them, I blog them, sell them to other blogs or write them up for magazines.

Currently I write for a magazine, a newspaper, I have a national radio show and the blog. I’m also interning on a television show.

If all you do is 9-5, you’re missing out on opportunities to not only make more money, but to move ahead in your career and open opportunity with other organizations.

VANCOUVER IS THE END – NOT THE BEGINNING

So many radio people pay the big tuition fees and then get a job reading traffic on one of our many full service stations in the city. Those jobs pay mininum wage, or a few pennies more. These are “McJobs”. It’s great for practice and to become comfortable in a radio station while you’re in school, but if you just forked out $13 000 to learn how to do an $9/hr job you are a fool beyond belief.

Yet so many people take that job, work in radio for a couple months, bemoan it’s lack of money and leave.

If you want to make it as a lwayer, you have to article and start at the bottom before you’re a partner. You have to do the grunt work and learn your craft before you’re driving a Lexus or Mercedes and making $200 000. Same in radio.

Only you can’t do your articling in Vancouver, you’ll never make it. You have to go to Smithers or Red Deer or Lloydminster or Trail. You have to start at the bottom and make your way back to the top. It could take 10 years to get there, but when you do make it, you will be rewarded.

BE AGGRESSIVE AND AMBITIOUS

I got my first job in Vernon in May of 1990. By January of 1991, I was looking for a new job. I had set a career goal of being the evening announcer in Vancouver by 1995 and I needed to take the next step to get there. I sent tapes all across the country for 2 years with no luck.

In April 1993 I flew myself to the Junos to attend the radio conference alongside the awards so I could meet and network with radio stations right across the country. I took the train to Ottawa to cold call a new radio station that was starting to ask for a job.

You can be lucky, but first you have to make your own luck and so I was chasing it. Eventually I was hired back in Vancouver by Z95-3 in September of 1993. I had been sending tapes every 3 months to the boss there for 3 years. He had a drawer full of my tapes. Whenever I came to see my parents, I called him for a coffee. It was a 3 year job interview.

The point is, I didnt sit in Vernon waiting for someone to headhunt me. I hunted them. In all jobs, you can’t wait for a promotion, you have to ask for one. Ask in the way that your boss knows what your career goals are so that, when something opens, they know you’re eager for the chance.

I got the evening job in Vancouver 2 weeks before my 25th birthday, right on time.

I have always wanted to be on television. I’ve done it more than a few times, but the opportunities never fully flushed out. So I’m creating my own luck again. I’m volunteering on The Lab with Leo. I asked the right person and they gave me an opportunity. I stand in the shadows and listen and learn. Just like the highschool kid in Trail at his local radio station, I’m just on set absorbing all I can. This week I even made it into a show as part of a demo.

If I had sat at home wondering why nobody called me asking me to be a guest, that never would have happened.

GET AHEAD OF THE CURVE

One of the skills that has served me well in my career is my ability to seek out new trends. Like the internet, I had a website in 1995 – 5 years before the big tech boom of the late 90s.

I am a cultural anthropologist who seeks out what my target audience wants to know with the voracity of a pig looking for truffles. I may be a guy pushing 40, but I try to think like a woman pushing 30, and the ability to do that has kept me ahead of the competition my entire career.

So many people just do what it takes to get by and live in the moment, that sometimes that moment passes them, and they’re left behind trying to catch up. If you’re the one setting the pace, constantly staying ahead, then you become a trend setter, a leader that your audience can look to for guidance and advice.

Young people just getting into radio now have so much technology at their feet, yet I see few coming into the business with a full grasp of it. I want to see a new kid come in with an audio editor on his laptop where he cuts up music and songs at home, I want to see him with a podcast where he practices and archives his best stuff, and a blog where he works out his show prep with his audience before he gets to air.

Lots of radio people have a blog, how many do you know actually use it to help their career? Jojo at KIIS in L-A put his “Question of the Night” in a bulletin every afternoon, but of all the radio people I have in my blog, he’s the only one that does anything.

I’m on here 7 times a day or more, throwing out my ideas, reading feedback from my target audience and honing my material before it goes on the radio. I put many more things in my blog than make it on the air and I’m forming a deeper bond with my listeners. There is nobody else in radio in Canada doing this. Noone. (Well a few might now, I know many people in the biz troll my site looking for good ideas for their own shows – this is one of them, guys)

The technology is here. Learn it, then embrace it and use it to get ahead.

I gave it to the kids at Columbia pretty hard. Afterwards, the students thanked me. Many of their lecturers just share their broadcast history, they don’t offer any encouragement or insight on how to get ahead. They’ve become complacent and comfortable.

You can’t be that, in any career. If you’re not looking for some way to better yourself or learn something new, somebody else is and they’re going to pass you. So be the one on the edge, be the one seeking opportunity, be the one taking risks and you’ll be the one with a career that you love and enjoy, not a job where you punch the clock and bitch about it just to pay the bills.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

Tags: insight