A woman who ditched university has become a successful voice actor earning £114,000 a year, with her voice now heard in popular adverts for Google and WhatsApp.
Emily Jardine, a voice actor and coach from Reading, decided not to go to university and instead pursue her acting and music passions. After completing a BTEC National Diploma in business studies with a double distinction star, she initially picked up odd jobs until she found a project assistant role on Gumtree.
While in that role, she tried voice acting and fell in love with it.
From free jobs to major brands
Initially, Emily earned only a few hundred pounds a year and continued working admin roles to pay her bills. However, she worked her way up and earned £114,000 last year, with adverts for the likes of Coca-Cola and Milka.
The 37-year-old told Talk to the Press: "I was doing just normal admin and office jobs for a while after school but I had been a musician for years. I decided not to go to university because I have always forged my own path and broken tradition, without it being rebellion though. University just did not feel right for me."
She continued: "I started off in acting and things like that, but I had left it behind a little bit, and so back in around 2012 I went on to Gumtree to look for a new job. I became a project assistant in a studio and I started working with voice talents and casting. Then one day my manager asked me to do a quick voiceover."
"I got behind that microphone and I was so scared. I thought they could hear my heartbeat but I fell head over heels in love with it," Emily added.
Building a career
Emily said it wasn't plain sailing, and she spent one to two months doing free jobs before she started getting paid for her voiceover work. "At first in 2012 I would do jobs for free, which isn't great, but I would do it and then eventually clients would ask for me again and I started getting paid," she explained. "That grew and grew and grew, and suddenly I was doing huge jobs for companies like Vodafone and Milka chocolate."
Emily added: "I was then doing Coca-Cola, and just all of these massive, massive brands. It was amazing."
Examples of adverts Emily has done include world food company Danone, where she is the voice at the end of the ads, Bentley, Emma Sleep, Pantene, WhatsApp, John Lewis, HSBC, Babybel, BT, Barbie, Trailfinders, Google, Vodafone, British Airways, Amazon Prime, Durex, LEGO and Dungeons & Dragons.
Going independent and seeing earnings soar
Emily said in 2017 she went from working as a voice artist with an agency to a non-exclusive voice actor who works for herself. It was then that she saw her earnings "soar". She now has 51 agents in 24 countries.
"My earnings started off as absolutely nothing at all, and then it grew to maybe a couple of £100 a year for one or two years, and then by the time we got to year five, it went to maybe £4,000," Emily revealed. "Then I thought I'm going to essentially have nobody managing my diary and do it myself and literally overnight my income soared. I thought, okay, this is the way I'm going to do it."
As her salary went up by thousands each year, Emily said she splashed out on more extravagant holidays and bought a four-bedroom house. "I started saving and suddenly my holidays were getting nicer, I had nicer clothes," Emily said. "I bought my first house in 2021 and my income was just jumping and jumping and jumping. I was earning every single year, bar one, more than I did the last year."
"The first time I hit £90,000, I think, was about three years ago," she added. "The next year, it was around £96,000 and then last year was £114,000."
This year she predicts she'll make around the same. Emily said on a typical day she works in her own voiceover studio, which she built in her garden, from around 10am to 6pm, but every day is different.
"Let's say it's a nice busy week, I might do up to 10 voiceovers and I might coach two or three people," she said. "It's been lovely that I've gone from commuting and doing all these crazy things and my life being completely bonkers, to now I walk downstairs, I go outside and I have a fifty-two second commute. And I can work less for more money."
Advice on university and career paths
When asked about her opinion on university, Emily explained there are many avenues for a career which does not need qualifications.
"There are lots of industries out there that you don't actually need to go to university to get into," she said. "It's not even based on qualifications, if you're creative, and if you have a hell of a lot of drive, and find yourself in a position where you have something to offer that maybe nobody else does, it's quite likely, you'll be able to massively change your career.
"I'm not going to say it's easy," Emily added. "It's really, really hard being a voice actor, but if I hadn't been pulled down into that studio one day and taken out of my comfort zone and been pushed, I wouldn't have realised really how much I loved being behind a microphone rather than in front of it."
