CREDIT: CORNELIA KLIMEK
About 110 staff members, including roughly 30 Fanshawe College graduates, work in the downtown Voices.com London office in departments such as sales and information technology.

About a quarter of staff at Voices. com graduated from Fanshawe. Voices.com, which recently moved to 100 Dundas Street, is a top voice over marketplace that provides job listings and opportunities for 200,000 voice actors from around the world.

Around 110 employees work in the open concept office in departments from sales to information technology. About 30 of those employees graduated from Fanshawe, with about 20 more graduating from Western University. Some staff members graduated from both institutions.

Three Fanshawe grads said that their education at the college helped them land a job with Voices. com.

Jerome Faulkner graduated from both the Internet applications and web development and computer systems technician programs at Fanshawe and now works as a web developer.

He said both programs provided him with skills and experience that tie into his current job.

“I learned a lot about networking, setting up servers, working with virtual machines (VMs), which is a large part of web development,” Faulkner explained. “Not only writing the code for the application but also managing the servers and being able to set up your development environment, which is actually one of the first things we did when I started working here.”

Music Industry Arts (MIA) alumnus Brandon Lee, a sales manager, was interested in working for Voices.com after hearing positive feedback about the company from people he knew.

“I initially started to investigate to see what this company offered, and then found it was very close to a lot of the training I had received at Fanshawe.”

Lee added that Fanshawe taught professionalism and emphasized its importance, including meeting deadlines and pleasing professors. He also said the MIA program taught him about business, recording and studio acumen that he applies to his current position.

According to Lee, David Ciccarelli, CEO and co-founder of Voices. com, was a recording engineer before starting the company with his wife and chief branding officer Stephanie Ciccarelli.

Project administrator Jessica Ellyatt, who graduated from Fanshawe’s marketing management and business administrative marketing programs, also said her education at the college prepared her for her job at Voices.com. She said she has nothing but good things to say about her time at Fanshawe.

“We had so many different courses that covered so many different industries and so many different levels of professionalism and different sales programs, that it just all seemed to fall into place with your skillset,” Ellyatt said. “The professors really wanted to see you succeed and you could feel that in the environment from day to day.”

Lee said that he feels “new opportunities” from Voices.com and other new media companies will shape London’s economy and decrease the city’s unemployment rate, which according to StatsCan, rests at 6.3 per cent as of January 2017.

“Hopefully, these organizations are growing exponentially to a rate that will start to improve the mass unemployment that we have, but it’s great to see there’s lots of opportunity,” Lee said.

Ellyatt added that Voices.com offers a variety of jobs and that she feels the hard work from the company and its growth “is really starting to pay off. The company is really starting to shine in a city and in an industry that is ever growing. It’s quite impressive what we’re all able to accomplish.”