The media industry is small – but we do need to attract talent from other disciplines

Recently undergraduate Jacob Hkeik penned an opinion piece about a lack of awareness of media agency careers amongst students looking for careers. Here Linda Wong from the Media Federation Australia responds. 

Two weeks ago we read an article by MGrad graduate Jacob Hkeik, saying media offers some of the most interesting career opportunities to graduates, but most of them don’t know media agencies exist.

The fact is, the MFA and our members put a lot of work in to educating lecturers and students about the opportunities in our industry and our most recent survey shows that in actual fact, more than 60 per cent of new recruits to the industry came from MFA-accredited universities.

Sure, this new talent may have predominantly come from communications faculties, but the fact is, these are the lecturers and students that are most engaged by the opportunities media has to offer. As the data and programmatic trading space continues to build, it’s important to get a foot in the door in the Finance, Pure Mathematics and Business faculties, but much like this is an education process for our industry, on the changing nature of roles and opportunities that exist – so too is our challenge at the university level.