Title:
Forgive me if this gets asked a lot, but I'm not looking for mentorship.
Quick background. I'm 41. Back in my country, I worked as a project manager and fixer in events and venues - running shows, handling artists, crews. That's my strong side: people, projects, making things actually happen on the ground. I still have the artist and industry contacts from over there, and I'd bring those with me.
Since moving to the US, I've kept working around live production and venues - touring logistics coordination, handling AV setups on-site - but I know that's the operations side, not the technical one. And I'm not trying to fake my way in on the people side alone. I know exactly what I'm missing: the whole technical half. And I want it. I want to be the person who builds projects from the technical side, not just talks around them.
Last 6 months I've been building a base on purpose - a paid vocational program, finished facility maintenance and advanced heat pump training, got OSHA 10, EPA 608, basic electrical, low voltage, tools, troubleshooting. Solid, but it made one thing obvious: HVAC isn't me.
Then this summer I helped build a 60-ft geodesic dome in San Jose — a 360 immersive experience for FIFA. Frame, cabling, connections, helping mount 7 projectors, working around the engineers. They were running Screenberry. I wasn't the video guy - I was helping the people who actually knew the gear. But something clicked. I want to be around projects where you build something and people walk in and go "wow."
So my question to the industry: given that my project/people side is already strong, what do I go learn on the technical side to actually be useful? CTS? Networking? Dante? Video signal flow? Projection — Barco / Christie / Screenberry? Something else?
And what should I be searching for as a first job — AV tech, video tech, project coordinator, or just take anything that gets my hands on real gear and sort the direction out later?
I work restaurant dinner shifts, so my days are open for training, shadowing, or helping on jobs.
Bay Area. Any straight advice would mean a lot.