TL;DR
- “Evan Shapiro Amplified” is a new video series featuring media universe cartographer Evan Shapiro as he guides you through the current Media & Entertainment landscape, starting with a focus on personal career development.
- Shapiro provides a candid look at the current media ecosystem, highlighting the shift from Hollywood gatekeepers to big tech companies. This shift has significantly changed the industry’s dynamics, making adaptability and continuous learning more important than ever.
- Shapiro emphasizes the importance of viewing your career as your own business. He encourages continuous learning, retraining, and recalculating your place in the industry, as well as prioritizing personal needs and values over job titles or roles.
Get ready for a wild ride with media universe cartographer Evan Shapiro! In an era where disruption is the new norm and change is constant, Media & Entertainment professionals at all stages of their careers are challenged to adapt and evolve. Shapiro offers a lifeline in the first installment of Evan Shapiro Amplified, an exciting journey through the M&E landscape that begins with a two-part exploration into the business of YOU and invites you to SkillUP! and unlock the full potential of your career.
The Current Media Landscape
In this first installment of the series, “SkillUP! (EM)Power Your Career – Part 1,” Shapiro provides a candid assessment of the current media landscape. He describes a seismic shift from an era dominated by Hollywood gatekeepers to one where big tech companies have seized a significant share of the industry’s value, attention and mindshare.
“We’ve passed the end of the past era, which was one that was driven primarily by the big Hollywood gatekeeping community,” he says. “And as streaming became prominent, not only did the traditional media players lose a decent amount of their power, and, frankly, underlying economics, big tech really moved in and took a tremendous amount of the value, but also attention and mindshare, out of the ecosystem for themselves as well.”
The rate of change, Shapiro says, is increasing exponentially. He warns professionals to stay alert and continually learn, or risk being overwhelmed by the pace of change.
“Change is no longer something you can schedule once a quarter, or once a year, it’s something that happens minute by minute, day by day. And if you don’t pay close attention to the rate of change, and the change around you, if you don’t wake up stupid every day and learn something new about something new every day, change becomes like that niece or nephew that you only see at Thanksgiving, suddenly way bigger than you ever thought it could be,” Shapiro warns.
Career Sustainability in the M&E Industry
In the face of this rapidly shifting landscape, Shapiro offers advice on how professionals can build sustainable careers. He emphasizes the importance of continuous learning, retraining, and recalculating one’s place in the ecosystem.
“So really, for professionals in this ecosystem, the table stakes are learning, retraining, recalculating your place in the ecosystem on a regular basis, almost treating every day as a new set of curricula, to retrain your skill set and your point of view around where everything’s going,” he advises.
He underscores the need for professionals to view their careers as their own businesses, cautioning that those who don’t risk being left behind.
“I call it being CEO of your own s**t,” he says. If you don’t look at your career as a business, one that may have one client and employer at some times, but then at other times, may have multiple clients, if you don’t see your career as more than your job, then you are very much at risk of being left behind.”
Shapiro encourages professionals to take stock of their lives and careers, in order to identify and prioritize what truly matters to them.
“Investigating them, codifying these things, is part of taking stock,” he says noting that he’s found that “very few people are ready to admit to themselves the three most important things in their lives.”
Shapiro further emphasizes the importance of prioritizing personal needs and values over job titles or roles. “The greatest title in the world is not really enough to counteract a terrible boss,” he underscores. “All the new challenges in the world aren’t really worth it if I have to commute four hours to work on a daily basis.” The pandemic especially, he says, has “taught us that life is too gosh darn short to not prioritize the things that are important to us.”
Stay tuned for Part 2 of “SkillUP! (EM)Power Your Career,” where Shapiro returns to explain how we are more than our bios, and just how powerful that idea can be.
