The Topic: Preparing Students for Industry Success
Moderator: Chuck Carey, President and Co-Founder, Troika Design Group
Panelists: Michael Benson, EVP, Marketing, ABC Entertainment Group
and PromaxBDA Chairman
Bear Fisher, SVP, Creative Director, Comcast Entertainment Group
Steph Sebbag, President and Creative Director, bpg
Niels Schuurmans, EVP Brand Marketing & Creative, Spike

So here is the “take away”–

For students preparing for an interview and planning a career in media, six things to know. (These really are universal as far as preparing for any interview.)

1. Where do you fit in? You must know this before going to any interview. Know what your skills and strengths are, and basically what you want to do.
2. Be prepared to show examples of the type of work you want to do.
3. You must do your homework before going to an interview. The panelist said 90% of the applicants they interview have not looked at their web site (!!!)
4. Understand all aspects of the field. Understand how the business works.
5. All the panelists said that they put personality and passion above education. The panelists talked about passion a lot…
6. But work experience is important too, so internships are critical.

The answer may surprise you,

The biggest challenge is managing students’ expectations.

While in London last week, I had the opportunity to talk to a teacher about his experiences instructing high school students. He teaches high school students how to think about digital media, to conceive digital projects and to complete their ideas using whatever tool is the best for the project — be it HTML, Flash, Processing etc. Admirably, these same students go on to teach middle school students similar types of digital media skills.

I asked him what his biggest challenge is teaching digital media. “Many times students come up with ideas that have the complexity of a graduate school thesis.”

My challenge teaching runs along the same line. I find that students are so familiar with complex digital media solutions, our digital media has gotten so sophisticated — be it highly interactive websites, smart phone applications, seamless delivery of broadband content — that there is an underlying assumption the things we use everyday are somehow easy to create.

For my graphic design students there is this common frustration:

What a student can imagine and design, they may not be able to technically create.

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Update 08/14/09: In all fairness, students are not the only ones who assume digital solutions are easy to create and implement. The public in general does not possess a basic understanding of what’s involved in conceptualizing, designing and building interactive projects. In large part, the digital media community is responsible for educating the public in order to develop this understanding.