From AP to producer: how Sophie Baker got her best work onto the page

Fictional sample case study written in the voice of a fictional Creative CV Specialist - part of Tom Bomford’s ‘Your Creative Casebook’ service.

Sophie Baker has worked in Unscripted TV for twelve years. She started as a runner on a daytime antiques show in Bristol in 2014 and worked up through researcher jobs to assistant producer, where she has spent the last five years. Most of her credits are observational documentaries and factual series for National Geographic, BBC Two and Channel 4.

She’s freelance, and she was applying for around twenty jobs a week and hearing back from one if she was lucky. She wanted to step up to producer level, and was hoping for longer contracts.

The CV she sent me

Her CV was three pages, in a file called “CV final v3.” Most of the third page went on runner and researcher jobs from ten years ago. Below these sat a skills list, with important information. Halfway down it, between “Premiere Pro (basic)” and "Driver's license," (spelt incorrectly) was “Self-shooting: Sony FX6, Canon C300.” Her profile section was seven lines and opened with “Passionate and creative TV professional.”

The length of the CV was easy to fix, but under each credit, Sophie had written a paragraph about the programme - some of them five or six lines long. Then only one line about her role. The line “Researched and cast contributors.” appeared under six different shows.

The people who said yes

Before I set up Cue Card CVs I worked as a talent manager in broadcast TV. Series producers rang me looking for APs, and on docs and factual they mostly wanted to know two things: whether the AP could self-shoot and what access they’d previously secured.

Sophie had done this several times. On a BBC Two series about young carers, she’d found four families and kept them on board for nine months. On a Channel 4 documentary about a missing teenager, she’d been the family’s main contact for eighteen months, and they asked for her by name when the indie came back for a follow-up film. She’d got a camera inside an NHS mental health unit, which took five months of meetings with the trust’s comms team. And she’d self-shot the last three months of that film on her own when the budget ran short. Very little of it was on her CV.

On our first call, I told Sophie that the access she’d won was the best thing she had to offer, and that her CV barely mentioned it. She’d been underselling herself for years. Her CV listed the shows but said too little about the work that made them possible.

Drawing out stories is what Sophie does best. She spends her working life persuading strangers to talk about the worst things that have happened to them, and she can put a nervous dad at ease in ten minutes. It hadn’t occurred to her to do the same for herself and tell her own story.

Most of my clients at AP level make the same mistake.

What we changed

Sophie’s CV broke more rules than she realised.

The credits were the big one. I like the format of the production name in bold, then the production company and broadcaster, then your role, and finally the dates you worked on the production - with the same layout for each entry. Underneath, one line describing the programme, and two lines at most. Then bullet points of what you did.

Take her credit for Still Missing, a Channel 4 feature doc about a family whose teenage son disappears. It used to be a three-line summary of the film followed by “Researched and cast contributors.” Now one line describes the film, and after this bullet points highlight that she was the family’s main contact for 18 months and self-shot the final three months on FX6.

Sophie took a little longer to come round on the job title. She had put “AP/Producer” under her name, because producer was the job she wanted. However, your title should match the work you’ve done, and you shouldn’t exaggerate. A series producer who sees “Producer” and then finds only AP credits stops trusting the rest of the page. We changed it to “Self-Shooting Assistant Producer”, but mentioned in the profile section that she was looking for a Producer role. She hated it for about a day. Her experience makes the case for the step up, and it’s more convincing than a title she hadn’t held yet.

Her personal statement came down to two lines, naming her genre and her strongest skill: “Self-shooting AP with five years in observational documentary and factual, specialising in sensitive access and long-term contributor care.” The camera kits she uses went into a short key skills list near the top, above the credits.

Her training section had a line that said “Mental health first aid.” The specific course name and date were missing, so we made sure these were added.

Finally, we corrected the more boring but essential aspects. We renamed the file to her name, job title and date, so it turns up when someone searches a folder. We added the GDPR consent line to the footer and fixed the “drivers license.” spelling Sophie had two fonts, so we just picked one.

What happened

Between March and April Sophie sent fourteen applications. Six led to interviews.

In May she accepted a self-shooting producer role on an observational series for BBC Two, at an indie based at MediaCity in Salford, on a seven-month contract. It’s her first producer credit and the longest booking she’s had in four years. Her weekly rate went up by around £250. The series producer who hired her said the second line under the Still Missing credit was what put her CV on the shortlist pile. They spent half the interview talking about that family.

When I asked Sophie what had changed for her, she said, “I stopped describing the shows and started describing what I did on them.”

Do you think your CV is holding you back? Book a free call with Cue Card CVs and we’ll find out together.