WEEK 1: Introduction to Professional Practice - 29/09/15

Welcome to my Professional Practice blog!

This reflective blog will be used to record all my ideas, impressions and reflections from our lectures, guest presentations and the current news items relating to the industry that I am interested in getting into which is the creative industry. This blog will give you the progress of the understanding I will get from this module. 

Today, we had our first Professional Practice lecture which was an introduction of our module. We've been introduced to the module structure and the module assessments that we will be undertaking. We have also looked at the creative industries and its facts, statistics and trends. From what I learnt, the creative industry is a highly competitive industry as it employed 1.9 million people in the UK last year.This therefore has made me realise how tough it will be to go into this industry and you need to make yourself to stand out from others in order to be in this industry considering that there is a tough competition. Also, I have learn that 24% of the people that work in this industry are actually freelancers. As someone who desires to work in a macro-level(large corporation), I am still unsure about going into freelancing, however learning that there is actually a large percentage of freelancers in the industry, I feel that I need to learn more about freelancing and I might even consider going into it. 
In addition, we also have learnt about the trends that are currently growing fast and these are: mobile apps, games and film/TV industry, all of which are the things that I am interested in professionally working on in the future.  
Lastly, we have also been briefly introduced about the year in industry; we've been explained the requirements and benefits of the year in industry, although I have already been interested in doing the year in industry from first year. However, learning more about the creative industry, this lecture has made me get the real picture of how highly competitive this industry is and I need to start considering where I would apply for next year's placement.

-Yvienne Ribao