Creative and Content Director
Livity: Youth Engagement Agency

CALLUM McGEOCH

00:06

My name is Callum M and I am creative director of Livity.

00:09

Livity is a youth engagement agency and we help thousands of young people gain skills, get back into employment every year.

00:21

I met this guy Sam once I think and he called me up and I don’t think I’ve ever had such a persuasive person on the phone. He said, I’ve just been awarded a contract to start a magazine for teenagers, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ve never run a magazine, I hear you rough, you sort of know what you’re doing can you come and help. So then I decided to get to know a bit more about what Livity was and, what it was trying to do. At one minute we could be making a TV show, the next we might be making a magazine or a website community or an ad campaign.

00:52

My role goes across every part of the business.

00:58

I think like most teenagers I had no idea that anything like the job I do no even existed. I knew that I liked writing, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that that could be a career. I also loved science and nature, and always loved music. But when I was finishing school, the science side of things was sort of, had had the edge, so I did, applied to do a degree in marine biology.

01:25

I had visions of myself on a beach in the Caribbean looking after turtles and sharks and things. I thought, yep, great. Probably about two terms into my degree up in Newcastle university, although I was enjoying it, I realised that there was a few things in between getting to that point as a career. You have to first of all spend five years studying whelks in the Shetland islands, and sifting sewage before you get to go and do any of that fun stuff. I started DJ’ing, I started, I put on, I started a regular club night, sort of doing a commercial dance radio show in the middle of the night when I should have been sleeping, preparing for my lectures. And I started writing for the local paper.

02:10

I think I was very lucky because I think a lot of my friends had fairly traditional parents or, or certainly parents who had traditional ambitions for them and that was never really, not really sort of ever, I never felt that pressure it was very much up to me, my parents were from fairly non traditional careers type background. In fact my mother’s career was in helping people into careers, so she, she set up the first ever recruitment company for graduate girls in the 60s. Definitely felt encouraged to become whatever I wanted to become.

02:46

I walked into my local recording studio near where I lived, luckily they took me on as a receptionist and my job was to make sure that Eric Clapton’s stalker didn’t get in the building and that the Spice Girls had fresh fruit every morning. There was a little management company based out of there and they took me on, so then I found myself working in music management for about a year and then I got a letter from The Independent newspaper and I’d completely forgotten that just before I graduated I had had a moment where I decided I wanted to be a journalist. Do I keep this job, wasn’t particularly well paid, but it was money coming in, or shall I take the work experience at the newspaper. And so I went and did, took the one week work placement at The Independent. Immediately within, within first few days of getting a taste for journalism I loved it much more than anything else I’d done before.

03:36

And then eventually I managed to get an editorial assistant job at Dazed and Confused magazine so I spent eight years at Dazed and Confused magazine, which was absolutely fantastic from editorial assistant then fairly quickly became staff writer and then front section editor and music editor and deputy editor and then editor after about four years.

04:03

You should be making your own path through your own passions, having a passion for a topic and immersing yourself in that and becoming and letting your passion for it make you an expert rather than having to work hard at being an expert will put you in much better stead. For me and my peers and my friends knowing, pursuing our own passions and dreams is actually, you’ll find your own degree of success that way.

04:29

End  of Callum M