Building a career in Digital Media at Usha Martin University

We are living in the middle of information era where digital media skills are in great demand. Like any other career options, a great career in digital media requires skills, experience, interest, networking and appropriate education. If you take a look at the statistics, there are 4.62 billion active digital media users globally, equating to 58.4 per cent of the total global population. This makes digital media a gigantic industry in the world. Over the past twelve months social media user numbers have seen strong growth with 424 million new users joining social media during this pandemic.

Building a career in digital media is flourishing far better than a career in print or broadcast media. Digital media provides a vast array of career prospects such as digital advertising, social media marketing, web and app development, graphic and game designing. The Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication of Usha Martin University helps build a successful career in digital media with its expert faculty members and fully equipped media lab. The instructors at the university train the students in having deep understanding of the subject areas related to digital media as well as content development on digital media. Along with this, the students are trained in developing skills required for starting a career in digital media, which includes:

Communication: The University’s Journalism and Mass Communication programme is designed in a way that the students are trained in both Hindi as well as English as the media market demands. Along with the traditional communication skills of reading, speaking and writing coherently and clearly, the digital media also requires the ability to communicate to the camera and capture videos, reach out to a wide community of people and receive their ideas and feedback, and to share information appropriately.

Independent work: Most digital media content developer needs to work independently and create striking content for their viewers. For this, one needs to be involved in an ongoing process of knowledge-based work where the audience’s choice of content is changing every minute. At UMU, the students are trained in handling new equipment and its uses in creating digital media content for starting their own endeavor. Besides this, they are also trained in knowing the people involved in such jobs so that the students are better guided.

Critical thinking: This is the most important of all skills required for building a career in digital media. Creating original ideas, strategizing to establish a product or service, reaching out to larger audiences and problem solving are the standard processes which tend to become automated. Rather than following standard processes, digital media entrepreneurs need to be strong problem solvers as there are new challenges every day.

Digital skills: Another important skill required for building a career in digital media is heavy dependency on use of technology. However, the key issue is that these skills need to be embedded within the knowledge domain in which the activity takes place. With the use of its fully equipped Media Lab, the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication, UMU train students in using all sorts of modern technologies used in the digital media business.

Ethics and responsibility: With power comes responsibility and digital media is getting powerful with each passing day. The most important skill required to work on digital media is to build trust among the other players in the market as well as the audience. False information is doing rounds on social media. As responsible citizens, along with building an entrepreneur, one must not put their ethics at stake. At UMU, the Journalism and Mass Communication programme is designed in a way that the students are made aware of the nuances of fake news and misinformation on different digital media platforms so that students don’t fall prey of them.