August 2023

Supporting The BBC Apprentice Scheme

By Steve Craddock

For the last 10 years, dock10 has worked with the BBC Academy in supporting their Broadcast Engineering Apprentice scheme. This excellent scheme takes post A-Level students and provides them with a three-year course of study and work placements leading to a BEng degree awarded by Birmingham University. The aim is to ensure the future supply of well-trained broadcast engineers for the BBC and the wider industry.

dock10 supports this initiative by providing work placements for apprentices on the course, usually for about 3 months. Over the years, we have provided work placements for around 30 apprentices with great success: we have recruited BBC apprentices into our own teams.

We also support some students with their final-year dissertation. We provide them with all the resources they need to complete a dissertation that researches, reports on, develops and proposes solutions that could help improve technology operations at dock10. In previous years these have included studies into the feasibility of moving to IP signal routing, studio talkback over IP infrastructure, virtual studio production methods and centralising virtual studio resources.

This year we supported Sophia Fielding's research into working simultaneously in UHD (Ultra High Definition) and HD (High Definition) for live productions. As part of the project, we re-configured one of our studio's vision mixers to work in both UHD and HD for a weekend so that different methods of working could be tested. We also enlisted the help of Andrew Cotton and Simon Thompson of BBC R&D, both leading figures in this field who chair International Broadcasting Standards committees. The dissertation proposed a method of working for future simultaneous UHD and HD productions

Sophia Fielding, (front row centre), was awarded a First Class Degree with Honours at this year's Graduation Ceremony in Birmingham. Also graduating were 11 other apprentices, including Emily Hunter (front row right) who completed a placement with us last year.

dock10 wishes all the BBC apprentices the very best in their careers.

Share article