Beyond redundancy: 6-point guide for creative people

Losing a job through no fault of your own can be hard. But redundancy isn’t the end, it’s the start of the next stage in your life.  I’ve been through redundancy (twice!) and have been training people how to set up on their own for 15 years. Below are some tips and advice. We cover

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Posted on 01 September 2020

Self-employed roles in production – updated ‘agreed list’

Just before Christmas 2019 HMRC published an updated list of the job roles that are typically considered self-employed in film and broadcast production. This is a welcome clarification, and has been the result of long discussions between BECTU and others. It’s been organised into handy sections such as ‘post-production’, ‘special FX’, ‘audio’, ‘production management’, etc..

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Posted on 13 January 2020

How do IR35 changes affect creative freelancers? (Q&A)

You may have heard that the government is changing the way that organisations determine the status of people they might hire to work for them – people like freelancers and contractors. This is commonly called the IR35 or ‘intermediaries’ legislation.

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Posted on 13 January 2020

Sole Trader Training for BBC Leavers

We’ve been hearing from a number of BBC leavers asking about what’s happening to our rather well-known ‘setting up as a sole trader’ course. This is because the BBC Careerlink service, which has been buying in our courses, shut 

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Posted on 01 March 2017

Free support for new businesses

When I started my business (8 years ago) I benefitted hugely from free face-to-face advice provided by Business Link, the government agency designed to help small businesses set up and grow. Business Link still exists, but now it's a website (albeit a good one) and much of the training and free individual business guidance has

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Posted on 03 October 2012

Hoorah for the King’s Speech – and the clever freelance

I tweeted yesterday that the King's Speech showed the value of the experienced freelance. Within a few minutes I had enough responses to demonstrate clearly that 140 characters are sometimes just not enough. So here' goes… There's a wonderful scene towards the end of the film where the King points out that Logue has no

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Posted on 16 February 2011

New kit for the roving reporter

Trying to keep up with technology is never easy. Just when you thought you understood the ins and outs of the latest flash recorder or editing software something else arrives on the market. Two things happened to me this week which got me looking into equipment and software for reporting and carrying out interviews. Firstly,

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Posted on 26 November 2010

BBC’s new challenges

In amongst all the talk of cuts to budgets and freezes on spending, my eye was naturally drawn to today's story (for example in the Guardian) about changes to the funding of the BBC.  Many papers (like the FT) have run stories focusing on the freezing of the licence fee for the next 6 years

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Posted on 20 October 2010

Dissecting the election: old media vs new

The always fascinating BBC College of Journalism blog has a couple of new posts about the recent election coverage. Much discussion by a panel of journalists and political activists about the role of new media vs old. Not many conclusions, but it seems that new media (Twitter & Facebook) furthered the conversation, but didn't start

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Posted on 15 June 2010

Viral whinging at the BBC

At this time of year it’s customary to look back and reflect on life while gazing into the middle distance (or into the bottom of a glass of mulled wine). But today I found myself nipping back about 15 years. I was transported by a fascinating – if depressing – article in the Guardian describing

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Posted on 19 December 2007