Career Development
A career in music can take on many different forms.
Whether you’re looking to build a teaching business, make music a full time job or just get more gigs, I can help you to shape the career you want.
What is Career Development?
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It Starts with a Discussion.
The first step is to talk about what you’d like to achieve. From there, I help you to form a plan based on my experience, advising on how best to approach what you’d like to accomplish.
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Form a Plan.
Our plan may just consist of a simple few steps or it may be a series of goals to complete to ensure that you stay on track.
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Meetings.
It’s unlikely that we’d need to arrange weekly or fortnightly meetings to discuss progress. Instead, casual sessions seem to work best for most people. This may just mean that we ‘check in’ on a regular basis to see how things are going and deal with any questions along the way.
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In the end, it's up to you.
Whatever your aims, it’s down to you to decide how they may fit in with the time you have available. Think carefully about what you want, how that would fit in with your current commitments and I’ll use my experience to help you get there.
Take a look at how I’ve helped a few of my students, past & present use my guidance to get closer to their goals.
Case Studies
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Adam T
Adam was keen to make teaching music his full-time occupation. We started with a plan based around improving the core of his business; focussing on what he excelled at as a tutor, using that to market himself and then examining ways to improve his actual teaching ability. We then moved towards looking at how best to promote his existing business, prioritising the use of the free platforms available: local Google listings, local listings on free sites and we then moved our attention to building his website and maximising it’s effectiveness through targeted SEO.
Adam worked incredibly hard and he has since left his job and he now works for himself as a full time tutor. I was delighted to help him form a plan to help him get to where he wanted to be. -
Hannah W
Hannah wanted some help in preparing for an Jazz Guitar Audition at one of the UK’s music conservatoires and needed some guidance on audition preparation and general pointers on Jazz Guitar.
Hannah’s plan needed to of course be fairly focused on guitar playing and practise; alongside the learning of the material, we looked a lot more at establishing what sort of player she’d like to become and how we could ensure that this came across in her audition.Together we were able to form a structured practice routine for Hannah so that she could fine tune elements of her playing, whilst working on any weaknesses that we identified.
Hannah nailed her audition and got offered a place, she’s currently working hard towards a post-grad in Jazz Guitar Studies
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Marc G
Marc had recently started a function band when he got in touch. He wanted to increase the number of gigs for his band, playing events as well as promoting himself as a freelance player, eventually hoping to be asked to ‘dep’ regularly with other similar bands.
First of all, we looked at Marc’s playing, discussing the importance of versatility and ensuring that he had the necessary skills in place to be able to be considered for regular gigs. We developed a number of elements he needed to include in his regular practice to ensure that his playing was going to be good enough.Next, for the promotion of his own band, he needed to create a high standard of promotional material that he could use to approach agents to ensure that he and his band was well represented. This included the creation of a quality audio and video mix which showcased their songs, along with a neat website with effective SEO to display it all.
From there, we started to talk about building a network with other musicians. Many Facebook groups provide the opportunity to apply for dep gigs and from there you meet other musicians, building the trust needed to be asked back for gigs.
Marc now enjoys a busy diary as a guitarist, even asking me to dep for him a couple of times!