Panel, Conference Presentation
2016 CA Summit - New Skills at Work: Preparing a 21st Century Entertainment Workforce
Milken InstituteKari Dohn Decker, Jillian Arnold, Chris Erwin, Ze Frank, Matt Horton, Patricia Ramos
- A Milken Institute and JPMorgan Chase partnership will release a study on national middle-skill gaps and sector-specific jobs later, expected to reinforce the need to guard against global workforce competition while cultivating holistic digital ecosystem roles.
- The Southern California entertainment industry is projected to shift from traditional to digital platforms, creating an emergent core of higher-skill jobs requiring new technical competencies and specific data handling capabilities.
- Mission Critical Media will provide data education for video engineers in high-pressure environments, focusing on integrating information from hardware manufacturers and developers to prepare workers for rapidly changing production workflows.
- BuzzFeed intends to cultivate multi-hyphenate workers capable of adapting to emerging platforms like Facebook video, Snapchat, and Instagram Stories, while prioritizing company experience over traditional certificates for resume validation.
- Santa Monica College plans to launch an interdisciplinary bachelor's degree in interaction design covering web design and front-end development, co-located with KCRW to serve as a hub for nearly 500 west side tech companies.
- The California Pathways Trust has invested $2 billion to align K-12, community college, and university systems, while the JPMorgan Chase-funded L.A. High Tech Initiative connects eight community colleges and 40 high schools to improve sector alignment.
- A widening disparity is expected between the cyclical freelance project economy and new media spaces demanding full-time labor and fixed asset growth, prompting a potential decline in the value of traditional Hollywood training pedigrees.
- Big Frame plans to engage career centers and academic departments to refine curricula, matching foundational skills with growing demands and enabling film professionals to retrain as web engineers.
- Initiatives are underway to encourage diversity in technical fields, including reaching out to production assistants interested in playback, while unions anticipate a continued rise in women in executive and leadership roles within camera, editorial, and sound departments.
- The media landscape is expected to become rapidly global with permeating platforms across territories, driven by efforts to democratize content creation and cultivate diverse voices from shy or different backgrounds using technology.
- Challenges persist regarding a lack of continuous employer engagement and job placement beyond project-based sourcing, as well as the difficulty of articulating training needs for the next generation amidst fast-changing constants in production workflows.
- High housing costs in California exceeding median incomes are anticipated to remain a pervasive barrier to workforce access, despite the state's continued prioritization of career technical education funding in the higher education budget.
- Awesomeness TV expects to continue staffing up to meet significant digital spend growth, having recently reached 800 full-time flex contractors, while market rationalization is projected to benefit consumers and companies during industry evolution.
- Future workforce models will require data reinforcement and resources to prevent disconnected individualism from hindering career growth, with a specific focus on training for tomorrow's data-driven occupations at the middle school level.
- The New Skills at Work initiative aims to improve data signals to educators to train for future jobs, while further studies with the Milken Institute will address previously unexplored issues to sustain industry growth.