HAVING WORKED IN ALL SECTORS of the TV industry over a number of years, one of the trends that was always in the back of Mitch Nadon’s mind was employee and executive training, recruitment and skill development.
The founder of MediaINTELLIGENCE has worked in production and post production, animation (Nelvana), and broadcast (CTV and TVOntario) in various roles, from management to production to regulatory. She has experienced how excellent companies, bosses and employees work and how lesser ones don’t work as well.
It’s a company’s employees who have the most direct effect on the bottom line and Nadon (pictured below), through her company which launched in 2003, now uses her experience to provide strategic solutions for recruitment, development and retention for the cultural and media employment markets.
She recently chatted with Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien on those trends in the Canadian cable, radio, television and telecom fields. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: You’ve seen every side of the industry, it appears.
Mitch Nadon: Absolutely. I’ve seen every side of production, every side of business and I’ve also had a very healthy sampling of the policy sector by having virtue of having worked at CTV for that year.
So, it was while I was at CTV that I started to get really, really interested in the area of professional development. At that time, I joined Canadian Women in Communications (and) their steering com
mittee, Toronto Chapter. And, myself and two colleagues on the steering committee, put together a small networking event, that actually was one of the most successful things ever with the CWC that was called “Power Alley”.
It was designed to bring together and make an equal opportunity for everyone – a free opportunity for individuals like myself, persons with lower status in the industry, for higher status in the industry – to get together and really network their brains out.
So things are coming along swimmingly at CTV. I’m working on the CWC Steering Committee, and I’m getting more and more involved in all the professional development aspects of the industry. When I left CTV, I was a little bit stymied. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do in terms of work. I knew I wanted to work in professional development. And I knew, first hand obviously, how difficult it was to get a job and keep a job in our industry.
So, I took a year off and went around to all of the executives in the industry – and god bless them, they were so kind to me – and they said: “Listen, we’ve always talked about a recruiting agency for our industry. If we were to build one, what would it look like? What do you need? What do see? What kind of price points can you afford? Because, of course, we know that recruitment in broadcasting is all based around the price points.
GOB: What about existing headhunters?
MN: They charge far too much and they take far too long. So, I did the analysis for a year… and put together the idea for Media Intelligence, built a website and went public with my first offering. We launched it in January 2003 and the very first day, I got a call from an executive in the industry who gave me my first assignment immediately.
GOB: What are the main differences in this industry compared to others, that a staff searching agency like yourself is required for?
MN: Media is very, very different than any other industry. It goes well beyond a different jargon, or a different vernacular. It’s a company culture. It’s a way of doing business. It’s a melding of creative people in a professional industry. It’s creative working in a professional industry. We’re not creating widgets. We’re creating something that we all really bought into, which is Canadian content.
So there’s a real deep and meaningful tie-in to the product that we’re creating. We’re not just selling ads. And also, it’s a really a very small industry (which) carries a lot of history. Everybody knows everyone. The broadcasters who went out there and built our industry from scratch. Well, it’s their progeny that’s now running the Canadian broadcasting industry.
And there’s a real need for people to understand that. That’s why — people coming outside the industry are really quite handicapped if they don’t know who Jim Shaw is, or if they don’t understand Ivan Fecan’s trajectory from the CBC over to CTV.
GOB: Is there a shortage of good, skilled people in the industry?
MN: There is a very clear shortage of executive management training, financial management training and career management training.
We do have very capable and very skilled people straight across our industry. But again, they tend to come in based on the creative merits of our industry and they don’t necessarily bring the hard-core MBAs, the hard-core financial portfolios that are what are required in order for our industry to actually grow now. Because our industry has actually matured, in order for it to do better, we have to do better at the business of our business.
GOB: Is it a tight job market in this industry?
MN: It is a highly competitive industry and the standards for employment are increasing all the time. You know at any given broadcast house, people are multi-tasking; they’re wearing several different hats. It’s not enough to have just a core competency in our industry. You have to also have a healthy mix of related knowledge areas. We’re now really looking at collectors of skills – at clusters of knowledge.
GOB: This is why your movie director needs to be an MBA as well.
MN: They need much more than to be good at programming. And the hard core knowledge area is still the hard skills. (But) also, there are soft skills. There’s how to handle yourself in the workplace. There’s industry protocols that individuals need to be aware of. You know, how do you handle yourself at a CAB convention or conference versus, simply participating at networking event.
You know how your financial portfolio is supposed to be diversified, because it just makes good sense, right? Well, your professional portfolio should be equally diversified.
In doing so, when you diversify your portfolio, you have your core knowledge and then your surrounding knowledge areas. Then, at least you have a fall-back, in case you do need to leave a job. You have another related area that you can move into without any undue stress.
GOB: There are so many different places where TV programming goes and comes from now that executives have to know the international scene.
MN: Absolutely. And we’re looking at different vehicles for distribution now, like mobile… all kinds of Internet applications and what not. So, it’s not enough to know how to make a program anymore. You really need to know how to sell it on the new vehicles and you need to know that at the front end of production and not the back end.
GOB: As an executive, you need to know get good stories created, but then you also need to almost be a wireless telephony expert as well, to figure out where it’s going to go beyond television or the Internet or wherever else.
MN: You do indeed. And this is another area where our industry is lacking. Your front line management don’t necessarily know about all the technology, let alone trying to get their content launched. Then, the question is how to get that content in the conduit in a meaningful way for the broadcasters.
GOB: You’ve got shows now that are being shot, you know, two or three times, at the same time, so that they fit different screens – different resolutions, different sizes, you know?
MN: Absolutely. And that’s core knowledge that our industry is currently lacking.
GOB: Tell me about the training aspect you do and what you’ve learned about the industry from doing those training sessions.
MN: Well, with TV 101, we were invited by Bell ExpressVu – which has a lot of management that comes to them from outside of the industry – or they have just telco background – and they don’t understand TV. So they came to us and asked, "Can you create a course that would be able to instruct individuals at the senior management level on the broader aspects of broadcasting… what it means to be in TV?
We sat down and we tailored curriculums for their senior managers. And the beauty of what we do there is that, not only were we able to provide them with information around the scope of the market and all the important aspects of television, but we also were able to – in the curriculum – develop it to support their strategic pillars.
We were successful in delivering it somewhere around 60 times this summer, both the Ontario and Quebec markets. And we were very well received – we have an 85% satisfaction rate.
GOB: Now, what do you tell companies when they’re looking to attract really good people? What do they have to do to get them? I mean, obviously, it’s not just money, which is a big part, but not the only thing.
MN: Yeah. One of my favorite lines – and it’s on our business cards – is: “Remember, the reputation of your workplace is your most valuable recruiting tool.”
So, how do they attract them? Well, they offer good jobs at decent wages. They also have to – especially with the Y-Gen, the X-Gen – have to start looking at different, softer factors like a flexible work environment, and quality of life balance. These factors are starting to come into play and those are very, very important to attract the upcoming generation.
GOB: What about keeping the good people that they already have? You know, the people companies need to hang on to.
MN: Offer them very meaningful and relevant professional development opportunities that allow the individual to expand their own repertoire within the company. Also… there’s a zillion committees out there that people could be working in. And that again, is a very, very valuable way, of not only developing your staff, but retaining them, because you’re giving them the opportunity to climb in different areas.
GOB: Right. And you’re talking to, like about CWC, or WIFT-T or CTAM and all those organizations like that?
MN: Absolutely. The Alliance for Children and Television is another. Giving individuals opportunities to expand their professional skills and their professional acumen is important. And then, of course, the greater they become out there in the industry, the more valuable they are as employees.
GOB: It’s the curious people who are the sort who really succeed – who want to know what’s going on other than just in their own little section of the world.
MN: And those people are called leaders… The people who are going to succeed are the ones that do actually develop their portfolios for their own – in keeping with their own values and their own personal goals – but also in keeping with the mandate of the organizations that they are in. They are the ones that are going to succeed.
