How To Turn Your Job Into A Career

A friend of mine has just landed a new job directing an observational documentary for BBC1. He’s a great director, his self-shooting skills are second to none and he just happens to be black. The series he will be working on has nothing to with ethnicity and is not about racism. This is exactly the kind of example that people interested in diversity in the media, like myself, are trying to achieve all the time: People chosen for their ability, working on a broad range of work irrespective of their race, gender, disability or any other characteristic that should be completely irrelevant. So why am I not ecstatic? Why is it not ‘mission accomplished’ as George W Bush would say?

The fact is this is not his first directing gig, it’s not even his tenth. He has lost count of how many documentaries he has produced and directed. Sometimes he will have three programmes one after the other to work on. Other times he won’t have any work for months on end.

Talking to him he says he can’t complain - he knows that other people don’t get as much work as him and in many ways he is quite fortunate. But over a coffee he described his dilemma:

“What I have are ‘jobs’. Sometimes I get great ‘jobs’, sometimes I have not so great ‘jobs’. But I look at a lot of my colleagues and what they have are ‘careers’. I get no sense that the jobs I get are going to add up to anything.”

My friend is not alone.

One of the biggest battles in increasing diversity in television is about creating careers and career structures for people from diverse backgrounds.

The first thing to identify is that different groups may have different career paths, and these different career paths need to be recognised and valued.

Let me give you one simple (and possibly obvious) example. The career paths of women are different from men. If we simply treat everyone the same we will disadvantage women. It wasn’t until the last 20 years that the television industry really began to recognise the impact that maternity leave and raising children can have on a career path (women still do the vast majority of childrearing). It wasn’t enough to give men and women the same opportunities to apply for jobs and expect them both to have the same careers. Women’s career paths needed to be acknowledged and policies such as flexible working hours needed to be implemented. Countries with the most flexible working hours legislation have the smallest gender gaps in employment.

My concern is that while this difference in career paths has at least been recognised for women, it is hardly discussed for people of colour and with disabilities working in television. The result is that many end up having ‘jobs’ and no ‘careers’.

Two very quick examples.

The first is related to factual television. In this genre people have to break through the barrier of non-directing Assistant Producer to being a Director. It is a big step and many people find it difficult irrespective of gender, race or disability. However, over the last ten years I have seen a very clear path develop. The Assistant Producer becomes a self-shooter and effectively becomes a second camera on shoots. As people gain more confidence in them they start to shoot entire sequences by themselves and eventually people trust them with a crew. Finally they start directing all by themselves. It isn’t easy to do, but it now seems to be an accepted career path.

A career path - that is - for someone who isn’t disabled. Self-shooting is a very physical activity and is incredibly difficult for people with certain disabilities. 

So when an executive producer wants to get an AP that can self shoot, they may well overlook the disabled person who - through no lack of talent - hasn’t got that experience. They don’t have to be prejudiced to discriminate. There’s a structural problem.

Here’s the second example. It’s about the path to senior management in the BBC. 

The path often proceeds as follows: A person works at the BBC for a number of years; leaves the BBC to “prove themselves” outside in the cut-throat commercial indie sector; then returns at senior level to the corporation. Sometimes, BBC senior management are then even poached back by the commercial sector.

Many black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people try to follow this path and leave the BBC - but then their careers stumble. This is because they don’t usually have the same wide range of informal contacts in the industry that are so vital to get on in the commercial sector. In turn, this is because the BAME employment percentage in the independent television industry of just 5% which is a lot lower than the BBC’s BAME employment rate at around 9%. Again, there’s no prejudice at work here - but there is a structural problem.  The BAME people face additional difficulties in replicating career paths trodden so well by their white counterparts, and end up going from job to job.

While we need to battle for people from all diverse backgrounds to get jobs in the television industry, my producer friend is a good reminder that we also have to equally fight for them to get careers. The first step is to stop being naive to structural difficulties, and recongise that not all career paths are the same.

I Am Television's Invisible Man

“Hello! I’m right here!!”

“Can you hear me?! Can you see me?!”

“I know you saw me yesterday because we were having coffee together but today I’m invisible!”

I know too many professional black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people (BAME) who have shouted those words out loud at the radio and TV in frustration, or sometimes silently screamed it in their heads in work meetings.

Here is what normally prompts those shouts and make us wonder if we are invisible:

Well-meaning liberals who say they want to get rid of the glass-ceiling

Every couple of weeks there is a discussion around the glass ceiling that BAME people face in professional occupations. This discussion might be in the news or at a management meeting. One week the discussion will focus on the fact that of the 18,510 university professors in the UK only 85 of them are black. The following week on Newsnight you might hear a discussion on how only 5% of QC’s come from non-white backgrounds and the figure drops to 3% when you look at High Court judges. And then another week there will be a discussion on C4 News around the fact that just 10 people from ethnic minorities hold the top posts of chairman, chief executive or finance director of the top FTSE 100 companies – that’s 10 out of a possible 289 (3.5%).

Finally, working in television I often hear people discuss the low number of BAME people in senior level positions in the media. For example a few years ago only two of the seventy-four senior managers in BBC News were BAME, and the figures have not improved massively.

The reason we feel invisible as BAME professionals is not because nearly all of us in one way or another have hit a glass ceiling but because the discussion is normally between white people as they talk about how; “They really want to solve this problem and would love to have more black people at senior levels”. At which point if the discussion is in a news programme friends I’ve known are jumping up and down shouting at the TV; “What about me?” or “If you want to solve the problem promote me!”. Or if the discussion is at a work meeting they sit there in quiet disbelief wondering if anyone else can see the irony of the situation.

This week marks the 100^th anniversary of the birth of the great African American novelist Ralph Ellison who wrote the “Invisible Man”. In that book his black protagonists describes himself saying: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.... When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

I too have experienced my fair share of invisibility. I’ve been told I broke through one glass ceiling (from producer to series producer) due to a black Production Executive “seeing me”. There was a staffing meeting where senior management were lamenting that they didn’t have anyone to series produce their next documentary series. The meeting was taking place in a glass panel office as I worked just the other side of it. It was the Production Executive who suggested my name, to which I am told, everyone said “of course – he’d be great”. The rest they say is history. But up until that point despite the fact I was sitting in their eye-line I was invisible.

I believe this ‘invisibility’ has an incredibly damaging effect on black professionals, not only to their career progressions but to their confidence and mental health.

Every time a member of senior management professes to really want to break down the glass ceiling and then fails to promote staff from the diverse backgrounds it is even worse than if they hadn’t said anything. They are sending out a message that the BAME people who are around them, the BAME people that they know are just not good enough. Because the logic would be that if you really wanted to promote BAME staff you would simply do it unless there was something wrong with the BAME staff.

The contradiction between senior words and actions eats away at our confidence and eventually our wellbeing.

My experience however is that BAME staff are more than up to the task when we break through glass ceilings. But my experience is that sometimes like the character in Ralph Ellison’s seminal novel we are invisible.

In marking the 100^th anniversary of Ralph Ellison’s birth I would highly recommend reading the Invisible Man. Sadly its message is just as relevant today as when it was first published.