The Training Environment

You'll work with your instructor to schedule in-station training sessions that fit around your job schedule and personal time commitments.

Typically, apprenticeships last four to six months, and involve two to three sessions per week at the radio station. However, people don't always develop at the same pace. You'll be encouraged to proceed when you're ready, and move at your own pace.

First, because NBTN works only with current, employed broadcasters who WANT to teach, and secondly because he or she isn't being asked to do it for free. In fact, the lion's share of your placement fee goes directly to your instructor. They are literally hired to train you!

And while that extra income is certainly appreciated, it's a simple fact of human nature that people who teach, love to teach students who are excited about learning. As a NBTN apprentice, you can't help but be excited about working with a known professional, in a real operating station. In turn, your instructor feeds off that excitement and takes personal pride in your development.

Many NBTN apprentices are actually hired for part-time or weekend work at their station while their training continues.

In addition to the actual time spent at the radio station,

BTN apprentices spend considerable time working on their coursework and practice exercises at home. The writers of the actual curriculum spent a great deal of time polling Program Directors at radio stations from coast to coast, asking what kinds of exercises and assignments they wanted to see included in a comprehensive entry-level broadcast training program.

The result is a very successful curriculum focusing on the kinds of things broadcasters really do, rather than theory and rhetoric. It's a very unique training process written specifically for this program that assures the aspiring broadcaster the most realistic way to break into the broadcast industry, while solving a major problem for the broadcast industry itself.