Above is a slideshow that acted as an introduction and conversation prompter for a panel discussion at Barcamp Cork, entitled It Beats the Dole: Career Paths in New Media. The panel was designed for Bernie Goldbach’s students from the Tipperary Institute, who will at some point in the next few years be venturing out into the big wide world seeking jobs doing… something.

So I thought it would be useful to pull together a panel of people working in diverse jobs in “new media” and look at what we do and how we got there. I was very lucky to get Mairan Murray, John Henry Donovan, Fiona Dixon and Donogh MacCarthy-Morrogh to panel with me and while I could have been a lot more organised about moderating (not my best thing), I think it was a good panel.

Some data points I found interesting, although I imagine the students found them less so:

• When I was putting this panel together, not a single one of the five of us really had a definition for New Media or ever use that terms ourselves. It’s 2008. It’s just… media.
• Two out of five of us had no professional or educational training whatsoever.
• Four out of five of us said that more than 75% of the skills and tools we use in our day-to-day work are self-taught.
• All of us said the most important part of getting a job is having a portfolio, even if it’s just class projects or a fake site or fake video for Acme Widgets. The portfolio outweighs the degree or the qualification by miles.
• For learning independently, all of the web people said Lynda.com.

Earlier in the day, I did another session for students as well, looking at a website they’re developing as part of their course. We looked at developing personas, planning content for a specific audience, and building traffic. The most interesting part was at the end, though, where I passed out PostIt notes to everyone and asked them to write down how much they would charge an actual client for the site they’d produced.

The first year students had the low-ball bids; the third year students had higher bids; the student who graduated last year and is out working in the world and paying bills had the second highest bid; and the teacher with the wife, the kid and the mortgage had a bid that far outstripped any others.

I think that reflects a learning curve about pricing. It really isn’t about how much you think the end product is worth to the client, but how much your time is worth to you.

Overall, it was a great Barcamp, absolutely heaving with fabulous people. The fabulous people part would explain why I spent six hours standing in the hallways gabbing instead of getting my arse into the session rooms to attend, you know, Barcamp sessions.

Oh well, there’s always next year!