The wonderful story of student standing on street for a job reminds me of the extreme lengths for my big break

David Tyoember, a besuited Chemistry undergrad, stands outside London Tube stations with a placard looking for a job. It's not the first time it's been done, but it still takes gumption. Robert Toffel, a veteran investor was exiting the station, took a photo and his CV, and with David's permission shared it on Linkedin.

His story went viral. David has since been inundated with job offers, and today following press interest is on Sky News. The future looks bright. Last year 22-year-old Mohamed Elbarkey, also suited, graduated with 2:1 in Aerospace Engineering from Southampton University. He was outside Canary Wharf with a sign. His message contoured to the struggle he'd endured: "Came as a refugee, just graduated from UCL in Rocket science". What's not to love about this story?

Last year too Reggie Nelson (below) fascinated by the lifestyle and the homes of people he saw as successful, he decided to knock on every single door and ask what they did to make it. It paid off. In all three cases success was a derring-do away. How far would you go and what would you do to get that job?

The three mentioned here and undoubtedly there are more found themselves trapped by the imperfections within conventional job hunting, and perhaps even more frustrated by what they could do to find a job in the competitive market. Then they got creative and it worked. Why? You could seek a myriad reason.

Whilst the three examples don’t by any means exemplify the spectrum of extents to which a young person would go to find a job, it says something about character, confidence and resilience, but that doesn't seem enough. During a visit to a publisher in central London, seven Masters students are entertained by an editor of a well known woman's magazine.

She, the editor, expresses an admiration for creativity. As we wrap up and leave one of the student asks me: "David, I've brought my CV with me, should I give it to her?" Earlier that week I had told the students how in pursuit of a job I would carry a CV in my breast pocket and dole them out, even, at night clubs where I knew lots of TV people went. The student did, and after her work experience was kept on.

Industry conventionalises the accepted method and approach when it comes to job searches through HR. However, it remains an imperfect system. HR faced with stacks of applicants has specific criteria in mind. A well polished presented CV is a requisite, but there are nuances that shape decisions. A lack of connections to the potential job, or your surname alone, as BBC discovered, puts candidates from ethnic backgrounds at a disadvantage.

BBC Media Editor Amol Rajan asked the question in an insightful BBC documentary “How to break into the Elites: Why are working class kids passed over for top jobs?” Lack of networks, contacts, confidence, their mannerism, dress sense and the dynamics of an unwritten game said one of Rajan's interviewees. A sort of finishing school is required. When a student of mine found herself being invited to an industry dinner at a media festival, I couldn't have been more happier for her. Take lots of CVs and cards. You're about to face a captive audience for 2 hours.

At Bafta, a young black woman struck up the courage to ask the star documentary maker Neil Crombie, who produces Grayson Perry, how she could get her doc on TV. "Great !", I said to her afterwards when Crombie publicly offered to put her in touch with Channel 4. "But ask too if he can email or ring through the introduction and if he wouldn't mind a meet up to mentor you".

No alt text provided for this image Job searching can be soul destroying, but Tyoember shows "you dare you increase the odds of winning", which made me reflect on my journey back in 1988 and which continued into the 90s. I studied Applied Chemistry, like Tyoember, but for love or money afterwards I couldn’t find a job. I had one interview for a chemical company and I was wearing an ill-fitted suit. That did not go well. I desperately wanted to work in media.

A clever decision, truly not, but that's where my heart was. The rejection letters poured in. I had enough to plaster two walls, which I did. Sometimes the replies were kind, others pointed to flaws they made you feel were the size of golfball boils on your face. I quietly knew I could work on a couple of things. "You know you have an African accent, and your intonation...", someone told me, which essentially meant if you're planning a broadcast career in the UK, forget it. I tried for the African service and got rejected too.

There comes a point when you have nothing, absolutely no more to lose. Your dignity has itself been shot, but you cling to it as the facade of your being. One thing I was always aware of, I liked people, was personable and could hold a conversation when I needed. Then I did two things that changed my fortune. Firstly, I wrote a courteous but firm letter to the BBC requesting why I was always overlooked.

They, after several weeks, responded and called me for an interview. Except it wasn't an ordinary interview. Several BBC executives would interview me, as they were being observed to find out what I was doing wrong or whether they were missing something. Some months later, I was called to an interview for a job I applied for. The post was researcher, BBC Newsnight - the BBC's flagship news programme. I got the job.

I talked about my letter and BBC experience. The immense joy of that was tempered by fact that after the contract post I was out of a job and couldn't find another one. It's wrenching when you're in that despairing state. I don't think I'd ever contemplated standing outside a station, or knocking on doors, but had an idea. Where was the biggest challenging story in the world at that moment? Amongst a small number you could include South Africa (SA).

How far would I go to get a job? Would I go to South Africa? I didn't know anyone there and couldn't afford the fare. Then, I found someone in the newspapers and wrote to him. He wrote back. My friends warned me about fraternising with Afrikaners (whose politicians drove apartheid).

It was as if all Afrikaners were the same, which was ridiculous, but I had nothing more to lose. A recession in 1991 was beginning to bite in Britain. I then wrote a letter to British Airways explaining what I wanted to do. They wrote back. One of its senior UK marketers met me in a pub in Brixton, South London. We had a pint and he gave my guilt-edge free tickets to go to SA.

When I got to the country, South Africa Airways matched British Airway's hospitality with unlimited travel around the country. I would come back to the UK for some months and then return for almost two years. On the ground, broadcasters who would not even reply to my letters were now asking me to produce some broadcasts. In 1994, on Mandela's inauguration, I wrapped up one of my last reports broadcasting on the BBC World Service.

https://soundcloud.com/david-dg/president-mandela-south




It's a moment I will always savour. I had survived some tricky moments, become a bit more wiser and come to know more about a place and people I'd read from afar. But I learned too a lesson about me. This proved to be a turning point. Other challenges would surface again and again, but the experience of Guillaume Apollinaire's poem 'Come to the edge' had empowered me.

I’ll be adding David’s story to my lectures when I talk to students about job searches: How far would you go to get that job? What would you give? No one owes you. It’s not personal. Finesse the CV. And you can’t win it if you’re not in it. People will chuckle, some smile, some even belly ache laugh, but it’s you and what you want. Few things come easy.

No one get’s there without sacrifice. You can be the best in the world, but you need to come into the light from behind the bushel. Give and you’ll get back. And then there's the sense of humour in all of this, as if that sounds too far fetched. Up for an interview with a large exporter, my friend Sandra summoned the courage from loads of rejections to apply for the Comms job.

Her favourite suit and heels were readied. Upon entering the interview room, with the chief executive, personnel and operations manager seated, she momentarily baulked, her confidence gave way and so did her step. Her 3-inch heels got entangled on the carpet, snapped, and she was sent flying across the room splayed out inelegantly in front of the panel.

She says, she stayed on the floor for a beat, stood up calmly, looked back at her heels and then the panel and dryly said: "Well I've made a right old heel of that, haven't I?" The panel were now in tears of laughter and admiration. She got the job. Be yourself and never forget the gifts you have, even when those times are hard. No alt text provided for this image

Dr David Dunkley Gyimah speaking at Apple's flag ship store in London. He's a senior lecturer at the Journalism School in Cardiff and a Co-investigator on future of News projects. He's an advisor for the British Library's News Project. More on David here

The Era of Newspaper and Magazine Journalism Degrees and the AJ ( Academic-Journalist)

Instyle Editor talks to Masters in Journalism students about the need to hire the new generation.

It was bound to happen. The relationship between academia and publishers has been long standing. In the 1970s their relationship manifest itself in a publishing boom.

Where else might it explore? Academia publishing their own books, and publishers offering their own degrees? To one of the party plan A would remain too distant a concept.  

But the centrifugal forces of the dissociative economy are turning those pipe dreams now into concrete channels.

Super brand Vogue magazine's announcement it would start its own journalism degree at the Conde Nast College of Fashion and Design laid the foundation. Competitors, you'd imagine, might either have been falling to the floor with laughter at morning editorials while the more sanguine were trying to crunch the numbers.

Across town Academia was faring in a different way with mutterings: "They're having a laugh, it'll never work! "

Oh but it will ! The writing's been, well, er, slowly taking shape literally on the IPad.

Now in the UK an unspecified number of newspapers are looking to announce their own degrees. At the moment it's Chatham House rules, the equivalent of a super injunction.

Welcome to one future of journalism - brought on by the cause and effect of the Internet / Outernet

Future Watch 

The Internet out of its net- The Outernet from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

But then many outfits have already been offering some form of pedagogy in the shape of higher national certificates. The Press Associations has been one of the major participants with links with skillset or recognisable accrediting bodies.

In 2005 it successfully launched and sustained an accredited videojournalism programme for it's regional press. I worked with their head of training, Tony Johnston,  devising the inaugural programme.

BBC Camerawoman and film maker Christina Fox took the helm bringing in her rich knowledge for its six years while I played an integral part captured in this Press Gazette report.  Close to some two hundreds journos were trained.

The Daily Telegraph, working with the Press Association,  offers an accredited training regime to 12 young very fortunate journalists, whereby psychometric testing is one of the selection criteria.

Many have gone on to do extremely well. Unsurprisingly they got the integrated form of videojouralism I advocate very quickly.

But a degree, Masters or even, say, a PhD, well that's another matter?  We've an inkling how we've got here; finance, sales and projections, and how seemingly one piece of technology provides hope on the Net.

As the Wall Street Journal commented

...with the iPad they (Magaziine Publishers) feel they have a technology that best marries the splashy look and size of a full-page print ad with the cool interactive features of a digital ad—and the ability to count how many people saw it.

The IPad Movement
The IPad has become the Tabula rasa of the web. In my lectures it's my interactive interface between working new ideas from the student enclose and projecting those ideas on the screen.

With the IPad, I can control the screen, and the raised platform barrier of the them and us - lecturer/ student

And the tech-fest, rights of social networking have never made the link with savvy young journalists more clear.

Last year, I accompanied a group of students (see top) to one of the UK's most successful womens' titles, Instyle.  Its editor, Emily Dean, stressed the importance of the new generation of journalists needed who can see this new future of journalism.

One enterprising students, a diligent blogger, duly pulled her CV from her inner coat and snuck it over to Ms Dean's and won some invaluable work time.

The idea of bespoke universities, and no one has a monopoly on knowledge, seems tangible. If you wanted to play for Manchester United one of your routes as the golden boys of Giggs, Beckham, Scholes et al  proved was to get trained young by attending their academy

Likewise tennis has its grooming for professional status at a tender age. So why not a journalistic output with a degree to boot.

Of course it raise interesting questions:

• What is it worth ?
• What happens if you leave the publisher before you've finished ?
• What would a publication do that journalism schools aren't doing already ?

A lot I might say, but this is the beginning and in spawning a refined area of entrepreneurial journalism, those questions will get worked through.

Significantly though, this won't necessarily spell the end of tertiary institutions, though if this publishers make the figures work, it'll be interesting to see how the adoption of generic journalism degrees do against the bespoke, which might offer generic subject, plus a deeper understanding of the clients workings.

But the winners in this scenario are not just the publishers, or even applicants, but forward thinking institutions who will be offering support in the myriad areas professional learning calls on.

And then, as is slowly emerging, the new AJ ( Academic Journalist) whom balances practical knowledge and heuristics with classic and contemporary theory of journalism.  For the moment though all eyes are on which publishers gets off the blocks.

Exit interviews

For the past couple of years taking a Masters class in journalism, I have conducted exit interviews as they ready themselves to fly from the nest - ok analogy I suppose.

Sometimes I have asked odd questions.

Who would you invite for dinner and why?

What one thing would you like to change in the world?

Sometimes you might even get asked these at interviews as I have in the past.

So coming up a dive into the recent archives and class of 07 -the fantastic new generation of journalists, doing everything and anything we, you might have wanted or still want to do.

In the excerpts coming up on viewmagazine, they're talking about the year: short burst clips summing up what they've done, their fears ( should they have any) and the road ahead.

Amongst the group is the 24 year old zeigeist journalist now at the BBC as their Gaza Correspondent, Tamer.

And others who are commanding respect and attention in their endeavours.

Makes for fascinating listening

VideoJournalism - break some eggs

In 1979 I saw my first conflict. I was caught in the middle of small arms fire with some of my college cadet colleagues

This was Ghana.

In 1992, this time armed with a sony and hi 8 I was in the townships of South Africa evading conflict between Inkatha and ANC supporters.

Since then I have had further scuffles.

One things certain, as my VJ stripes got dirtier and dirtier, I've come to realise vjism is not a glampuss job.

If you want to practice Videojournalism on foreign, even domestic assignments, be prepared to get into the trenches.

At its heart we can cover stories of any nature, but Vjs immediacy and gonzoism ( that doesn't translate as unprofessionalism) offers a raw, up close and personal way of capturing stories.

No glamour, no airs and graces, but the photojournalist of old and new, jeans, trainers an attitude and armed with a cine capturing device.

"Get the shot, get the shot".

Today I said probably my last byes to a group I have known for a year.

They were students when we met up and now they are that no more.

I had a frank, but neccessary discussion with them, that I would not normally have.

You own this space. You make your own rules. What you know surpasses what many are unaware of, in radio, broadcast, magazine, newspapers, online, CSS, Mashups.

Some have found jobs, others are in the process, but I have no doubt all of them will find their calling.

It really is an exciting time to do journalism, to really break some eggs