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Today Nick and I spent some of the day at the Wired Sussex Media Jobs & Skills fair manning the Madgex stand.  This is a new event for me, having missed previous years, and I have to say I rather enjoyed it.  There was a good presence of local companies, and some good representation of support for freelancers (such as the Farm, the Werks and the Skiff), and of course Wired Sussex were out in force.

Madgex are currently only recruiting for a Global Sales Director and so we weren't really present from a recruitment perspective, more from the position of reminding the local community that we are still around and active, and to share our experiences of working in the media sector, and what the various job roles we have actually involve on a day-to-day basis.  Weekly, internally to Madgex (although hopefully coming soon to the lab site), I produce a newsletter listing all of the community events I've tracked down from around Brighton, Sussex and London which seem to be relevant to the team.  Today we produced a special list of these for the next 7 days to distribute to anyone interested, which allowed us to introduce people to some of the more active, and frequent local events like Flash Brighton, UX Brighton etc

I spoke to a wide variety of different people today, from sixth form college students, to people finishing their MAs in Digital Media, to java developers, to freelance designers, to Adam from Garage Studios (who taught my flash course), to one of the ladies from City College who oversees the NVQ I'm doing, to a business coach, to creative writers and film-makers.  I enjoyed talking to them all, suggesting events, or people that they could or should talk to, and I even managed to get a few plugs in for my Brighton Bloggers site, so am hopeful I'll see a flurry of new add requests soon.

All in all it felt like a good event, enabling me to practice my networking skills with a more diverse group of people than I usually meet.  Of particular benefit to me was the opportunity to talk to Sixth Form students, and BA/MA students and get feedback from them on how they see the world of media evolving and understand more about what their various courses actually involve.  Thanks Wired Sussex, I hope to be back next year.