A successful De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) Media Production graduate is setting up his own radio station thanks to a pioneering employability scheme.
DANCE: Demon Dance founder Ashley with girlfriend Laura Bradley
Ashley Williams, who received first-class honours in Media Production, is preparing to launch Demon Dance – a sister channel to award-winning radio station Demon FM – later this month thanks to a Graduate Champions placement.
The innovative Graduate Champions scheme offers recent graduates the chance to take up a six week long internship with a leading UK company to enhance their CV and help them stand out from the crowd in a furiously competitive jobs market. The champions are paid the living wage by DMU and work 18.5 hours a week.
For DMU graduates, these placements bring sought-after opportunities to gain valuable insight into graduate-level work that is relevant to their chosen degree and the career path they wish to follow, while business people have free access to some of the brightest and best young talent in the UK today. Those on the scheme are paid the Living Wage by DMU.
Ashley explained: “The idea came about in October last year as a final year project for my course. It was all about answering a question about the online market of radio Leicester and seeing whether there was a space for something new – and there was.”
Ashley soon took the project on outside of his studies and made use of Frontrunners and Graduate Champions placements to be able to devote more time to the venture at the same time as getting paid.
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“When it comes to Graduate Champions I am sort of a special case as I am not tied down to an [external] employer and it has been more of a self-employed style of working. It has worked really well,” he explained.
“I was in a lucky position to choose my hours, which are very flexible. I will sit down to work on it for eight or nine hours and end up sat in the Queen’s building at 11pm realising I should probably go home!”
The station, which will exclusively play dance music, is set launch this summer. And while Ashley’s placement finishes five days later, he will oversee its transition when students return in September.
He said: “When it was just my final year project it was difficult to decide who to work on it with because I didn’t want to hamper my grade.
“But the plan is, come September, there are people who want to get involved and we can get a management team in place.”
Ashley says he envisages the new station as a ‘training ground’ for Demon FM and says that his own experience on the station, plus his Frontrunners and Graduate Champions positions, have helped him no end. “It really opens your eyes up to the possibilities that are there and to things that I never thought were possible,” he said.
“This is really how I have learnt, through trial and error and through actually doing it. I had an interview at Kiss FM two weeks ago and they were really interested. They said my CV is to a professional a standard, so hopefully I can get a position there.
“Graduate Champions is a fantastic experience with industry professionals and it has been really good. It is paid work in what you want to do; it is a great opportunity.”
The applications for the winter round of Graduate Champions, to be completed in December 2015 and January 2016, will open later this year. It is available to those who graduated from their undergraduate degree at DMU in summer 2015. Keep an eye on the DMU website for details.
Posted on Tuesday 21 July 2015