Shonagh Manson
Theatre AdministratorBrief overview of you and what you do here?
I am an administrator for a small company called Fuel, who are a company who produce physical and experimental theatre and installation work.
Are you a graduate?
I did a degree in Art & Visual Culture.
Did you have any work experience before you graduated?
I’d done voluntary work in festivals with design crews and stuff, and I’d done a little bit of tutoring, and had mostly worked in pubs.
How did you get the freelance work?
Through word of mouth.
The work you did at festivals, working with design crews you said, what was that?
I knew some festival organisers who recruited volunteers within the college. We’d go down and do the Eclipse festival in Plymouth and decorate the arenas. We worked with treeclimbers to hang exhibits through forest walks and things, so quite random stuff.
When you left university what was the first job you went to?
For a year after I left I worked in a pub. I imagined, “oh I’ll just do this job while I look for other ones” and was kind of applying constantly for jobs within all sorts of areas, like publishing just because I liked the sound of it, and getting constant knockbacks. I don’t even think I had a job interview that year, it was really depressing!
Where did you move on to after that?
I went away for 6 weeks to Thailand with a friend, and came back and decided to move in with my parents in true post-uni style – with the intention of saving some money to be a diving instructor. I got a job almost instantly working in a big pharmaceutical company. It was a temp job which paid better than any job I’d ever had before in my life, and within about 3 months they’d offered me a permanent job. I ended up getting promoted every 9 months or so, and before I knew it I’d been there 4 years.
What was that job?
The first job was export customer services, making shipments to clients all around the world. Then it turned into a planning job within the business strategy department. So completely unrelated to anything I’d studied or anything I’d done, but it was really logical and such a huge challenge and I think that’s what kept me there for so long. I learned as much in those four years as I did in four years studying at university, and the two of them were perfectly matched because it filled in the gap of everything I didn’t know about the working world, and how to get a job, just so much about your life.
What made you decide to move on from there?
I’d decided I would use the job to eventually come back to the arts because it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I started a part-time Masters in Arts Policy and Management and within 3 months I’d gotten a job here at BAC - I guess it was purely having shown that commitment to bringing all of that together. Even just from three months on the course I was able to talk with just this mountain of knowledge that I didn’t have before so it was a really good move for me.
How much of what you learned at university can you apply to your job now?
A fair amount indirectly – having studied creatively I find it easier to work with artists. We support theatre and visual artists and musicians so it would be really hard to do that if you didn’t understand what it was like to make work, so it was really useful.
It was a while between you leaving university and coming into this job, so you were working on something quite unrelated in between, do you use a lot of your skills from that unrelated job or do you go back to what you had at university?
No, I would say much more from having worked in business, because so much of what we do is about planning for the future, contingency planning and financial management. In my first year at BAC I worked as a fundraiser and now I work in production, where organising skills are key. Both of those roles relate back to financial planning, and strategy which is really useful. And all the admin skills are really useful in this job.
Up until now, can you describe your experience of this industry?
It’s endlessly frustrating and endlessly rewarding and it’s not for the fainthearted. It’s not like a boring office job, there’s so many things that make you passionate like whether it’s the work that’s being made or the lack of funding.
What is a standard day for you?
There isn’t one. Which is what I like about it. You can plan your day but you never know what’s going to happen. It’s an office-based job with loads of admin like mailshots and marketing. You could be helping put a tour together - booking accommodation, promotional stuff or writing funding applications or you could be going to see shows – it’s just totally varied.
If you had to think about something that you would have done differently, is there anything?
I would have got more work experience while I was at university. And I would have forced someone to tell me what I needed to do in order to get a job in the arts sooner – although I wouldn’t change what I did because it enabled to do everything that I wanted to do – it doesn’t feel like a setback but my career is financially behind where it would have been if I’d been able to go straight into working in the arts.
Is there any advice that you could give students coming out now?
It’s really tough. There’s a massive trend in the arts for people to go straight into supporting themselves whilst they’re doing internships and I find that kind of rankles a little bit. The industry needs all of that voluntary work to survive because it’s so badly funded. But I also feel that once you’ve left university you should be entitled to being paid in a job even if it isn’t much, so I would say try to get as much experience as you can, or try and get any administrative work in any way connected with the arts while you’re studying and then probably face the fact that you’re going to have to do more of that when you leave!
I had such a limited idea of what careers were like, and didn’t know in what way you could fit into that without just being an artist, or what the administrative paths were. It’s really interesting reading about career paths in Arts Professional and see how the arts is one of the most exciting areas to work and you can have a creative career and can do this funny zig-zag thing and because there isn’t a set course for it. There are also a number of entry-level jobs that can be really useful in giving you the skills you need to get somewhere else.
Whatever you want to do, make sure you know lots about it. If you’re into visual arts, see lots of it, if you’re into theatre, know who the companies are, go and see work - expose yourself to it and have a preference about it. Be able to express what you like and what you don’t like and be passionate about it and that will come across.
