BBC ENGINEER QUALIFIED, BBC ENGINEER QUALIFIED Options

[peternewman]

A little late to the party, but hopefully still some useful stuff. I finished the training scheme about three months ago now, although I still need to sort out some of the paperwork. AFAIK we were the last batch of BBC staff to go through, although I believe Siemens have still got some people on a later set of courses.

Go on the BBC run Wood Norton Courses - BEF1, 2 and IT, then a year later the BEC core, IT and specialist, then another year later be BEA.

They'd renamed the BEA to ABE (Advanced Broadcast Eng) by the time we got to it. Also the BEF IT was dependant on previous skills in that area, having done a Computer Science degree I did a BEA (? Broadcast Eng Access?) module in electronics instead; we also did an electronic maintenance module too, either before or after the BEC stuff, as well as some H&S bits and an AutoCAD course. However I believe the lecturers were saying that the structure of a lot of the courses was due to change fairly soon, so they might have new names if you look further, but terms like "engineering progression" are what you want to look out for.

BBC broadcast technology courses open to non-BBC staff are available here

(Though most will cost you a few license fees)

Yes, we looked at the "external" costs of some of our courses and found them rather scary.

since the engineering elements of the BBC have been flogged off to Red Bee / Siemens / SiS Live etc. employment within these organisations may be viewed as being equivalant.
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Rax - who is BBC Engineer Qualified by virtue of passing the 'C' Course examination at Wood Norton

There are still a few outposts of BBC engineering left, as others alluded to, the areas supporting News, Audio & Music and World Service for starters, but yes I believe given I know of Siemens people who've achieved it, that those areas are equivalent. They've also dropped the examination aspects of the later courses, we got assessed in other ways instead.

Overall the BBC training scheme is really great, I went from muddling through (as seen from my current point of view) with student TV at uni, as well as doing theatre and events stuff, to now dealing (hopefully competently ) with a multitude of broadcast kit on a day to day basis, the depth and breadth of stuff we covered was superb. My only concern with taking the courses externally would possibly be the price, and given the number, and the lack of actual path to the qualification at the end, cherry picking certain ones might be a better bet, but I'm sure the Wood Norton staff could advise. There were a few external people on some of the other courses when we were up there, so some people certainly go on them.