PSA

PSA: THE BIGGER PICTURE

TPI BUSINESS LEADERS SURVEY 2019

We all have opinions; some share theirs more readily than others, some need no prompting to do so and some opinions don’t always tally with your own. Then there are numbers, a really useful way to record things like health, wealth, success. Some share their numbers more readily than others, some need no prompting to do so and some numbers don’t tally with your own. With opinions and numbers, you don’t tend to get enough at one time to make great comparisons, it’s only when you get enough samples from a wide selection in a similar field that you can start to paint a picture, get a measure and publish some interesting and useful data.

To get enough opinions or data, you need to start with a big enough group of people to ask, something like a magazine readership or a trade association membership, which is why we teamed up with TPi Magazine to design and implement the most comprehensive research into opinions and figures from the live production and wider entertainment technology sector.

From the PSA perspective, we’ve experienced significant growth in membership; we thought it was high time that we took time to assess our audience in order to spend our efforts effectively. From the TPi perspective, it’s the opinions that count, a measure of where industry leaders see the sector evolving, developing, growing and where the threats may lie. Back in May, the PSA undertook its own member survey, looking mainly at the workforce, measuring average day rates, work/life balance and diversity statistics. December saw TPi undertake its own Business Leaders Survey, polling opinion on performance, recruitment, threats, trends and opportunities. Both surveys were encouraging in terms of both engagement and results, some of which were shared at the recent PSA AGM and the Daytime TPi event that followed. We’ve taken a little look at some of the results:

[Fig 1 & 2] Optimism of both the industry’s prospects and that of individual companies is high; a similar survey of business leaders in the bar and restaurant sector found optimism hard to come by.

[Fig 3 & 4] That optimism isn’t just good for product sales. We all know that technology isn’t much use without people to assemble and operate it; little surprise then that so many responders are looking to recruit, with technicians at the heart of that recruitment drive. It seems that the publication of the Live Event Technician apprenticeship was very timely, something that we helped to assemble with member employers and a great example of how research can better inform us about the work we need to be doing.

[Fig 5 & 6] If we do need to force the point home that it’s a people industry, this backs it up. Retaining good staff is essential but there’s also our reliance on self employed subcontractors, freelancers if you like. It seems, though, that certain roles don’t lend themselves to outsourcing. [Fig 7 & 8] A little difference here in how responders perceive their reliance on self employed workers compared to the wider industry. It’s important for us all to understand the employment status landscape as Government resolves to reduce ‘false self employment’, especially as the

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PSA: THE BIGGER PICTURE

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majority think that the flexibility offered is an advantage. With far more results than we have space for here and a whole deck of data from the PSA’s own workforce survey, the recent presentation of results at the Daytime TPi Event and the PSA’s AGM delivered a picture of average pay rates, visions of future trends and an interesting overview of future purchasing plans. For those that missed the presentation, research results can be found at www.tpimagazine.com/tpi/ TPiBusinessLeadersDeck.pdf

To conclude, this was a good start and a solid benchmark for comparisons to next year’s survey. More response will mean better data, more engagement at the point of delivery will mean more response, which then builds a better picture. TPi www.psa.org.uk www.tpiawards.com/daytime-tpi/

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