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Careers In Culture
Digital Media - What You Need to Know
Looking Forward to Your Career in Digital Media
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In 1999, it took 24 hours to download a complete edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Today, Internet systems can handle huge amounts of information at incredible speeds.
What does this mean for those in cultural careers? Virtual workplaces where people around the world can collaborate on the same online project simultaneously. Distribution continues to evolve. What can you envision for the future of the Internet? Opportunities will be as close as your imagination.
In the past three decades, our everyday items – and how we use them – have been changing as technologies improve existing products or create new ones. Telephones went from rotary dial to touch tone, to wireless. Now everywhere you look you'll see smartphones which have completely changed the face of people's social and business interactitions.
What's ahead? Even more change. Do you find change challenging or exhilarating? Your flexibility and adaptability will be great assets in your digital media career.
Constant Change
The Digital Media landscape is constantly changing. You will have to continually learn and upgrade your skills to remain competitive. You must be able to mix business skills with your artistic and/or technical abilities.
This means not only learning your craft, but also learning to manage your work. You'll have to learn to work as a team member and understand how to manage a project. Technical and artistic skills are important but you must also possess good interpersonal skills, presentation skills, writing skills and research skills. There are going to be jobs in Digital Media that haven't even been conceived yet. Be prepared to create your own work and forge your own way forward with a new product! Just know that you'll need to regularly refresh your skills and keep abreast of changing technologies.
Keeping On Top of the Change: Continuous Self-Development
Continuous learning is critical to keep you employable. Digital Media professionals need constant skills upgrading in order to keep pace with a rapidly evolving marketplace driven by technological change. Increasingly, artistic and technical "multi-platform skills" are needed to produce content for distribution and exploitation across all potential platforms. Being adaptable ensures that you can respond to changing market forces and the opportunities afforded by disruptive new technologies.