4.2. The LAMDA Graduate Experience

4.2.2. The First Year After Graduation Can Be Decisive

The insights into the first year after graduation have been particularly revealing. LAMDA is well aware that this can feel like a ‘cliff-edge’ to students, who can feel vulnerable after the safety of their time at LAMDA. For acting students, this is further complicated by the changing dynamics of the cohort, who become divided between those who have secured agents and are getting auditions, and those who have not. It was described to us as a “divisive” year, with embarrassment from both sides and discomfort with the level of competition that they faced. The irony is that just at the time when they needed the support of their classmates more than ever, they found that in many cases, it rapidly disappeared.

From the stories we were told, the experience of this first year will determine whether graduates remain in the industry or take an alternative route.

4.2.3 Financial Constraints Exist

Not surprisingly, many graduates make early career choices based on their financial circumstances. These included location – leaving London to return to the parental home, for example – and accepting non-creative jobs for the security of income, even if this meant struggling to find the time to prepare adequately for auditions or industry interviews.

We intentionally spoke to alumni who had been active in some way in creating their own work since graduation, so they are unlikely to be representative of the wider group. We found that those people who had previous industry experience before joining LAMDA were particularly open to creating their own work from the start, whereas it was sometimes less deliberate for others.

In most cases, the graduates had started to create their own work for one of the following reasons:

1. as a way to increase employability and chances of securing other paid work; either by promoting themselves or to further develop their skills. 2. for the creative satisfaction, because the type of work they wanted to do either didn’t exist, or wasn’t accessible or available to them at the time.

However, it seems that graduates rarely made their own work with the primary intention of creating a commercial success. This applies even to those who have experienced subsequent financial security from their ventures.

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Instead, the lack of finance was quoted as a barrier to creating their own work. Not everyone has the financial luxury of giving it the time and investment that it might need. Many originally juggled paid “jobbing” work alongside their own projects, a task that was described to us as “like getting a dog and a baby at the same time”. In other words, these two routes can sometimes be in direct conflict with each other.

4.2.5 Alternative Work Routes Are the Norm

The alumni shared that a significant proportion of their classmates – often around 80% or more – were no longer in the industry in any way. They may be working in related industries, or using some of the skills that they developed at LAMDA, but it is only a very small proportion who have managed to make a financial living in the way that they had originally intended. In many cases, those that classified themselves as “jobbing” actors also had other employment to sustain them financially during quieter periods.

In terms of the non-acting routes that have been followed, there were numerous mentions of education in various formats (e.g. teaching, tutoring, or after-school activities). Some were offering services to the industry such as marketing or software. Others had linked their passion for performing arts with interests in other areas and were working in socially-engaged work (e.g. youth centres, prisons) or discovered that their performance skills were equally useful in a range of more commercial settings (business, sales, corporate work).

The following is the full list of jobs that were mentioned by alumni, either because they had done them or had LAMDA alumni friends who were doing them:

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Little Shop of Horrors, February 2020. Photography by SRTaylor Photography.

It was noticeable that the alumni were generally reluctant to talk in detail about many of these roles, especially those that were perceived as being unrelated to the industry. They would brush over them very quickly and dismiss them as unimportant, suggesting that there is a significant stigma attached to following a different path.

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