Careers in the Creative Industries

While still at school, Andy took part in Glasgow School's Youth Theatre as well as performing with Scottish Youth Theatre. After finishing school, he attended Fife College where he completed their 1 Year Theatre Studies Diploma Course. From here, Andy gained a place at R.S.A.M.D (now known as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) where he obtained their 3-year acting diploma.  Andy was then taken on by a London agent and had a 15-year acting career working on stage, in television and also theatre in education.  Following these 15 years as an actor, Andy decided to go back to university where he did a 1 year conversion course to turn his acting diploma into a degree. This was followed by a further year gaining his PGDE teaching in Drama.  Fresh out of Edinburgh University, Andy moved to Aberdeen and completed his Drama teaching probation year at Aberdeen Grammar School before moving to Robert Gordon’s College (RGC) in 2008 as a Teacher of Drama. A year later, Andy...

While studying for her Bachelor of Education degree, Sonja realised that teaching wasn’t going to be for her in the long term – yet she loved writing the essays with their deadlines! After working as a teacher for six months, Sonja applied to do sub-editor’s training at Aberdeen Journals and was offered her first job as a journalist. After two weeks of intensive training, she was thrown into a busy news desk and learned from her mistakes. “I worked in the days before page layout on the computer cutting back stories. I went on to do a spell as features sub-editor, where I became one of the first to use the new Apple Mac computers.” Sonja worked on the Evening Express and Green Final, and every day was different, busy, noisy and lots of fun for her. After having children, Sonja returned to work the night shift at the Press and Journal, she was very busy, planning 60 pages a night. But it did take a year to get used to working until 3am! In 2016, while still working n...