As a part of 184MAPA, I have learnt a variety of important skills required to become a media industry professional. One of these skills which I feel as though I can improve most upon is organisational skills, as I currently face difficulties with projects mainly based around my planning stage not being organised in an efficient way. As mentioned by one of the guest speakers I listened to, being organised and prepared allows for work to be completed in a time-effective manner and can even allow new projects to be started whilst others are finishing, thus allowing more work to be completed without losing a high standard. In addition, I found it interesting to hear personal experiences from a professional within public relations, an area I am thinking about training for, as it gave me an insight into how an aspiring professional such as myself could operate in this environment.

In terms of practical work, I attempted to engage with multiple different areas of media. This was attempted through two written projects with different formats, one video project, and a photo editing project. My reasoning for this was, as suggested by one of the guest speakers, it is important to have experience in multiple fields to face any challenges a project may bring. One aspect I am looking to improve upon from these projects is collaborative work. Only one of my projects was created with a group and, due to limitations, our collaboration was short lived. Teamwork is a crucial workplace skill in the media and therefore I feel as though more experience with this is of the utmost importance. 

Over the next year, I will be looking into placement opportunities in local media industries as this will help me to not only develop my professionalism but will also help me to start shaping my future career path based on what I was most interested by. As well as this, I am going to attempt to build my portfolio further so that I have a variety of projects to display to potential employers.  A technical skill I will look to improve is audio editing as my lack of skills in this area restricted me from creating any projects based around this. To do this, I will look into creating a short bi-weekly podcast to give me an opportunity to regularly test my ability on software such as Adobe Audition. This improvement will coincide with my current regular practice in other fields such as photo editing so that I can attempt to have a strong level of skills in each area that I may potentially work in.