15. The Hardest Job of All—Finding a Job

Anyone who has ever tried to find a job in the film industry, or any other industry for that matter, has experienced the Catch-22 of job hunting. Put simply, you can’t get a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job. It is a revolving door of missed opportunities. Yet somehow, people still manage to get that first job. It is not impossible—merely absurdly difficult.

When I started looking for work, back in the early Stone Age, my formula was to line up about 10 job possibilities in order to get 1 job. With the increasing availability of editing tools and the larger number of people who have taken up editing, the formula has changed to 1 in 20 or 1 in 25. (This formula holds true ...

Get The Film Editing Room Handbook: How to Tame the Chaos of the Editing Room, Fourth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.