Career Assignment

Personal

Sommelier

Career Description

A Sommelier has various duties to perform, he has responsibilities that range from training staff in spectacular wine service to suggesting which wine would go well with a particular meal all the way to owning a wine cellar and getting rich off of the gargantuan profits. The main thing you have to learn to get to this sort of position is that you have to know your wines by heart. You also must have an extreme appreciation for wine and also have finely tuned wine instincts.

Training Required

A good thing about this job is that you don't have to go to college to get yourself this wonderful sophisticated job. Although you do need to take courses to get your certification as a sommelier they do not take that long the length ranges from a 4 week course to a more advanced 20 week course. The pinnacle of the sommelier education system is taking the three-part program that the Court of Master Sommeliers offers, after you complete that you can become a master sommelier, a title which a scant 40 hold in the United States.

Salary

Starting out you make in the range of 30000-40000 but if you are smart you can work your way up to getting a cut of the restaurant's wine profits and potentially being extremely rich.

Location

Most likely you would have to move for a job like this, unless you already live in a big city, obviously a city like Regina with its lack of fine dining would not be a great place to go if you were looking for a job as a sommelier.

Other General Information

Something I haven't mentioned so far is the drawbacks to being a sommelier, well it's hard to believe but there are some, one is long days and even longer nights, most restaurants don't close until well into the evening, and you have to be in there all the time advising the clientele. There are some perks that I haven't talked about yet either, you get to taste some of the finest wines on Earth as a sommelier even if you get hired at a small restaurant as you craft the wine list you must taste these exotic breeds of wine. The pinnacle of the sommeliers is to buy an estate and construct your own wine cellar and then sell the wine to extravagant restaurants.

Audio

Recording Engineer

Career Description

A recording engineer is also known as a sound engineer or an audio engineer. Recording engineers do a lot of tasks, but mainly they are responsible for the technical aspects of a sound recording, generally they also work closely with a record producer or director. Nevertheless, the audio engineer's role is very similar to one of the producer. It seems as if audio engineers need to do a lot of things as they handle almost every aspect of a recording studio or a similar institution that houses audio equipment. So I would assume that they have to learn how all those objects work.

Training Required

Surprisingly, there is no real concrete college courses that are required to work as a sound engineer, but that does not mean it is a menial job, you must be very in tune with the latest sound systems, they must above all be able to adapt to the newest computer sound technology. Therefore there is a lot of self-training that needs to be done.

Salary

According to the 2003 Alberta wage and salary survey. Recording engineers earn anywhere from 20,400 per year to 55,500 per year, although when you get more experienced you can expect to earn up to 60,000 dollars per year which isn't too shabby a living.

Location

This seems to be a job that is available wherever there is clubs or places that use sound as their main attraction, therefore a discotheque type place or a studio would be an example of a place that could use a recording engineer. So it would mostly be a big city, Regina might be a pretty good place because of the several clubs in town plus there is a small local music scene that may be advantageous for engineers.

Technical

Equipment that you would expect to use in this field are bountiful. Recording engineers can expect to operate mixing consoles, microphones, signal processors, tape machines, digital audio workstations, sequencing software, and speaker systems. As you can see engineers really have to know their stuff in order to be able to master all those different types of sound equipment.

Video

Director

Career Description

Now there are several different director positions but for our purposes we will just take a look at what is arguably the most well known of the director slots and that is a film director, some of the most famous people in the world are film directors, who on Earth hasn't heard of Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, or Francis Ford Coppola. What being a film director entails is pretty much making sure that the vision of the writer of the screenplay or project is completely fulfilled. Also they manage small technical details such as helping develop the score of a film or telling the cinematographer where to position his camera.

Training Required

There are no absolute requirements for becoming a film director but you must have knowledge in the field and that can be much more easily obtained if you take a course somewhere, most universities offer some sort of film program that is heavily recommended if you want to become a successful film director. Filmmakers need a good understanding of all the different aspects of moviemaking. They should also have great knowledge and appreciation of films.

Salary

Salaries in the film industry vary considerably due to the fact that most big-time directors work on a contract basis and the pay on that is all around the page. As well, the small-time directors are mostly just looking to get their big break and become a big director so they may take whatever project they can get, or even create their own project. Based on the 2003 Alberta Occupational Survey film directors