My VO Journey: Transferable Skills

What skills do you have that you can apply to your VO business?

When you change careers, you very rarely start from scratch. I spent over a decade working in Marketing, Advertising and Social Media before making the leap to VO, and I’ve seen a lot of fellow VO Artists with a wide-ranging career history. 

Don’t let that put you off though - not all VOs are trained Actors or experienced Radio Presenters; if you’re just starting out or looking to make the move to VO, one of the first things I’d recommend is working out what transferable skills you’ve developed that will help you build your VO business.

I get a lot of people interested in breaking into VO contact me via email and social media to ask me how I got started, etc, and I had one recently who thought Marketing was quite different to VO - which I must admit, shocked me. The thing about VO is a lot of it IS marketing. I think if you understand how to market yourself/ your business, you can make almost any business work. It really isn’t about having a ‘nice voice’ - which is almost always the first thing someone says when you tell them you do Voiceover work for a living.

Perhaps you have a copy-writing background - perfect. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll rely on that skill when preparing for making demos or if you have to edit scripts. Or maybe you have a medical background? If so, you’d be a shoe-in for medical explainers/ e-learning - some of that medical terminology is REALLY difficult to get your mouth around if you’re not used to it. 

The trick is to use what you know to give yourself a leg up in the VO world. Feel free to fire me any questions, or let me know what your background is and how you’ve applied it to your VO career.