Every once in a while I catch an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed, a half-hour weekly slice of sociology presented by the wonderful Laurie Taylor. This week’s edition reports on a recent paper by academics at Durham University analysing the labour market in the UK media industry.
About 20 years ago, TV broadcasting and production was dominated by large, highly regulated national networks in the UK. The BBC, Channel 4, and the regional commercial tv broadcasters (Carlton, LWT, Central, Yorkshire, Tyne Tees, Anglia… the list evokes the sights and sounds of all the old channel idents) not only broadcast everything, but produced most of it as well.
Then there was a concerted effort to put more competition into the production side of the industry, with strict quotas put onto the broadcast networks to acquire proportions of content from independent production companies. Twenty years on and we find a significant consolidation of the old broadcasters (only STV in Scotland and UTV in Ulster survive independently of ITV which covers the rest of the country), a huge expansion of new broadcasters as a result of new digital distribution methods, and hundreds of relatively small TV production companies supplying content into the industry.
The sociologists’ analysis of this as a labour market sees considerable “casualization” of jobs in the media space over that time – small production companies operate with a tiny rump of full-time staff, and mostly use freelance resources for their production work. One of the results of this is that the social networks that these freelance staff require to keep work coming in become vitally important (and that the net result of that in media seems to be a smaller diversity of types of people involved in the industry, which is worrying).
What can the world of development learn from this? Well, as the worlds of software and media continue to combine and intermingle, the future for software developers could well become increasingly casualized. This is often the case already in agencies that develop software for the web and for mobile devices – skills are hired on demand rather than on an ongoing basis.
What does this mean for developers? Well, managing and maintaining a network of professional contacts becomes vitally important in a world where you don’t necessarily have a “job” but work short term on a series of jobs. With shorter turnaround times for people making decisions about software to build (and from my experience, the software part of media-esque projects comes right at the end of the production cycle), people hiring will be relying on who they know rather than recruitment processes.
If you are in the world of development, in whatever capacity, then building up your networking skills might be a central part of your future employability. And I’m not talking TCP/IP…
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