Being punctual and maintaining a professional attitude and appearance go a long way when it comes to professionalism. This makes employers more likely to recommend you or use your services again if they know that you are punctual and reliable. Punctuality is key to keeping an employer happy as you are being paid for your time, if you are late you are wasting that time.
Maintain a calendar or diary to keep on track with deadlines and all ongoing projects that you are undertaking. This allows you to make sure that you do not miss any deadlines for clients, as this can get confusing if you have multiple clients on the go at one time. Alongside keeping a diary and calendar it is also a good idea to keep track of accounts especially if you are freelance or self-employed. This saves you from doing it once a year and it takes a very long time.
To stay knowledgeable in an ever-changing industry you have to constantly update your skills to make sure that it is up to date with the current industry standard. This could include learning new techniques or learning new software. This is relative to both practical and technical skills. Without doing this, you will fall behind and be less desirable to possible clients as you won't be able to do some of the things which other industry professionals can do.
By contributing to team projects, you are improving your credibility within the industry. Working within a team allows you to gain valuable contacts (networking) along with proving to possible future employers that you are a good team player with a good skill set. Contributing doesn't necessarily mean the set job role you are doing, it could mean putting forward creative ideas and getting involved with other creative decisions.
Communication skills are very important to have when working in the media industry as they are needed to communicate with members of your crew (colleagues) to achieve an efficient workflow and a good final product. If members of the crew are not communicating with each other this leads to mistakes in different areas leading to reshoots or a failed production if you are on a limited budget. If working for a client, bad communication could lead to missing the deadline for the project and this would lead to the loss of the client and a loss of profit. If another person then asked this client for recommendations for a production team, they would recommend them to not go to you and to go elsewhere, this impacts the image of the company negatively. Communication with the client before working with them to ensure that you know exactly what they are wanting is also important as if this is not done, you could produce very good work but it wouldn't be what the client wants.