MASTERCLASSES

Friday 24 September 2010

How to get your first job at the BBC

Alex Gerlis, Head of Training, BBC College of Journalism, on what you need to know to get a job at the BBC.
 
“I'm often asked at universities how can I get a job at the BBC, and what is a BBC job interview panel – a board – looking for, so I came up with this acronym: TRICK.
T stands for truth because you quite want people to tell you the truth, it's a surpise that sometimes people aren’t terribly frank.
R is for resiliance, which is absolutely critical
I is for ideas, you want people to come up with ideas, and ideas about how to cover them. I remember doing a whole series of interviews at the time of the last fire-fighters’ strike and you say, on day 23 or whatever, how would you cover it? And after you’ve heard the 22nd person say well we’d follow a fire-fighter and their family you are looking for someone – because there will be people out there – who have something just a little bit different because they’ve thought about it and they come up with something that’s original because that’s important.
“C is curiosity.
“K is knowledge. Sometimes on BBC boards we do general knowledge questionnaires and its no good having people say…’I think its really unfair to ask who won the recent heavyweight fight because I’m not interested in sport’, it’s having a good knowledge and also a thirst for knowledge.

Alex was speaking at the NCTJ's Journalism Skills Conference: http://www.nctj.com/events/journalism-skills-conference.html

Find out more about careers in journalism at Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide, www.multimedia-journalism.co.uk

1 comment:

Aisha Miller said...
This comment has been removed by the author.