DECIBEL INVESTIGATION


“


Denial is about


destroying colour. Being colour blind isn’t about tolerance. Tolerance is about allowing people to be different and acknowledging that we all have different stories


Ravi Mirchandani


”


how to get a job in publishing WE HEAR FROM TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE ABOUT THEIR ROUTE INTO PUBLISHING Priya Dutta works for Pearson Education as a graduate trainee


“I grew up in Wood Green in north London but went to a private school in Elstree. I studied English at Oxford, but it wasn’t until my second year at university that I fixed on publishing as the career for me. I went to the careers service to investigate what careers I could go into after university and I found out about publishing there. I did lots of research and applied for work experience in the summer. I did a few months at Macmillan, which I arranged by contacting a former Oxford graduate who worked there. The careers service had given me a list of alumni who were working in publishing and willing to be contacted by undergraduates. Finding work experience was actually really easy. I’m not sure what it’s like for other people but that extensive list of contacts from the careers service made it fairly easy for me. When it came to job hunting I went to the careers service again because they have a lot of information about how to apply for jobs and what’s available. Initially I applied just for the Macmillan graduate training scheme but was rejected from that so I worked in a bookshop for six months and then re-applied for Macmillan and also Pearson Education and Penguin.


I didn’t get an interview for Macmillan but I was proceeding with the Pearson scheme.


The Pearson scheme was quite an arduous process involving a preliminary interview, a day-long assessment and a final interview so it was a mixture of interviews and practical skills. I was offered the only place. I’m not really sure about the numbers of people who applied but I think it was 800.”


Interviews: Claire Simpson 12 MARCH 2004 IN FULL COLOUR 9 Cathy Atkinson works at Boardworks as an editor


“I went to a normal comprehensive school in Farnham in Surrey and did a degree in English at Leeds University. I thought initially about going straight into publishing but wrote to companies asking for work experience and didn’t really get anywhere. I heard about the courses through my careers service and that seemed like a sensible route. I picked the MAat Oxford Brookes and while I was doing the course I did work experience. Being able to say that I was on the course made it a lot easier than my previous attempts to find work experience. Before the course started, I spent a month at Quarto children’s books. And then, while


I was studying, I spent one day a week working at OUP and two days a week at Harcourt Education. I got the work at Quarto by writing to them and the OUP position through the course. Oxford Brookes has a jobs database and links with local companies. Everyone I knew did some sort of work experience, if they wanted to. I got the Harcourt


job through someone I knew at the Society of Young Publishers. I asked her if there were placements available and she employed me for one day a week. While I was working part-time at Harcourt they were advertising vacancies. I applied for a post there as an electronic editorial assistant, which was the area I was doing work experience in, and I got offered that job, which began a couple of months before I finished my work experience so I didn’t have to job hunt much. I think I was really lucky because I had written to Harcourt the year previously asking for work experience and I didn’t hear anything. It was only when I had somebody’s name that I really did it.”


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