Volunteer, Rise Up Academy

What is Rise? Rise is a global advocacy membership organisation that supports diversity in the broadcast media technology sector. Funded and supported by industry, its goal is to ensure that there is a gender balanced and diverse workforce across the specific areas of engineering and technical operations. Why is the Rise Up Academy needed? The broadcast media technology industry is facing a severe skills shortage and is currently not able to recruit the engineering and technical talent it needs. BT Sport, Sky, Gravity Media, dB Broadcast, ITV and the BBC are amongst many broadcast companies who clearly state they need more technical and engineering talent. Rises’ recent survey, in partnership with the IABM, showed that males occupy more C’level positions, women earn significantly less money and the industry is 83% white. Furthermore, there is a declining number of students applying for Media Technology courses at University, fewer apprenticeship programmes and a lack of diverse talent coming through the pipeline. Rise and its industry partners want to change this.

Rise Up is a hands-on outreach programme delivering broadcast engineering and technical workshops to primary school children, aged 10-11. The children get to build a broadcast studio from scratch in their classroom or school hall. Led by industry representatives, this interactive session provides children with an understanding of how their STEM curriculum directly relates to the workplace and specifically to the content they see on their screens. The children start with a fun and interactive short lesson, followed by the build. They are divided into 5 teams where under the guidance of a mentor they build a full working 4 camera television studio from components parts. The students finally use the studio they have built to film a fun quiz show: “Rise Up”. After the workshop, Rise stays in touch with the parents of the children to continue to let them know about further opportunities where their children can engage with industry again e.g. studio visits. The intention is to connect with the children, via their parents, until they start to make their choices about GCSEs and beyond.

The workshop itself is tied into the Key Stage 3 STEM curriculum and the event provides students access to broadcast equipment, where they can learn technical and engineering skills, and gain an understanding of how STEM subjects link with real world careers. Feedback we have received to date has been overwhelmingly positive: ‘I will definitely take up an engineering career’ ‘It’s amazing! The best day ever! Setting the technical stuff up has been great’ Rise Up Academy In late 2020, Rise started to develop a relationship with the UTC network and in early 2021 launched a pilot mentoring programme supporting 23 young women from across 5 UTC’s.

Rise and its industry partners would now like to develop a ‘Rise Up Academy’ which will build on the mentoring programme and progress on from the Rise Up Primary School workshops. The intention is to create a clear education pathway to #inspire #educate and #inform young people about the broadcast media technology sector and the opportunities available to them. From the primary school workshops through to 18-year-olds deciding on higher education and new entrant roles. The Academy will be an umbrella facility which will deliver activity across 10 UTCs, including a more advanced hands-on workshop, masterclasses, speed networking and careers fairs. Funded and supported by BT Sport, ITV and Discovery, Rise intends for this to be a longterm partnership that can support its aims of creating a fully gender balanced and diverse broadcast media technology workforce.

For more information, please contact Rise Managing Director, Carrie Wootten on carrie@risewib.com