subject: Know Where To Look For Av Jobs [print this page] If you are an extrovert that likes meeting people and organising events, then the event management industry or the live events industry is the one for you. This is one place where you can show your mettle and can be quite satisfied in terms of the salary being offered, job content and opportunities for future growth in the industry.
However, you first need to know about the openings that are possible in this industry and you can find that through the internet. While the search engines will throw up numerous results, they will be of a generic type and you need to actually look for specific advertising and event marketing agencies that regularly recruit people for the various audio visual jobs the industry demands. This will give you more time to prepare yourself for the job and not waste time running after opportunities that are not suitable to your interests.
You must remember that such AV jobs are definitely not for individuals who are introverts or who do not like the travel and the hectic schedule associated with such jobs. It involves meeting many people, travelling to many places, liaising with performers as well as their managers, and so on. Many of the regular top performers (despite their talent) have all, at some point in time, been forced to do their stint in some event marketing agency before going on to command the respect and popularity of their fans. That stint backstage has helped them develop many contacts that are still of great value to them.
Doing odd jobs and getting involved with backstage activities has another great benefit. It enables you to obtain valuable experience without the accountability. You need to be like a sponge: absorbing everything about the industry and how things are done so that you are able to talk about it during an interview in future. When agencies want people, they usually specify experience as one criterion and by joining an event management company to do odd AV jobs for them, you are getting that experience - and also getting paid for it.
You therefore need to look for such learning opportunities at concert halls, music clubs and performing centres. All of them do require assistance in hosting events and look for local talent to help them out. Even if the opportunities are of a temporary nature, you should grab it since these are stepping stones in your career. At this juncture, you should not be looking at the salary aspect or the tenure of the job, but what it is that you can quickly grasp when presented with such chances.
The kind of work assigned to you could be of various types and here you should hope that your exposure should be of a diverse nature. Only then you would be able to pick up the nuances of the job quickly. There is no substitute for practical experience and notwithstanding the technical and theoretical knowledge that you may have gleaned from various sources, it is only when you put it to actual practice that you would start getting the confidence and feel that you can become a part of this industry.
