This year marks the seventh Times Young Photographer of the Year competition with the coveted prize of a six-month stint working as a photographer for The Times. The six previous winners have all gone on to become professionals, several of whom worked full time or part time for The Times. They consider a stint on the paper to be one of the most valuable training grounds available.

To work on The Times, as this year’s winner will discover, a young photographer needs to function well under pressure, and have the grit to take pictures of people who do not always want their photographs taken. The role requires stamina, endurance and determination. Photographers need to be prepared to stake out their subjects. They need to deal with threats and possible violence. They must be ready to drop everything and go anywhere at the shortest notice; and they have to be able to work fast and deliver results to tight deadlines.

The rewards, however, are legion. Young photographers have a chance to pit themselves against hardened professionals of many years’ experience. They will hone their eye for anticipating and catching “the picture” that will appeal to their editor. And they will be given access to some of the most important and powerful people in the country. It is a glamorous job and, for a young person who is happy never to know what tomorrow holds, it is surely one of the best jobs in the world.

Winners have come from all backgrounds, but interestingly six of the seven prizewinners, including this year’s winner, graduated in press photography or photo journalism courses from the prestigious Norton College in Sheffield.

The first winner, Katherine Batchelor, now 29, spent a week during her stint with The Times, touring Louisiana with a team of food writers. She is now based in York and works for The Press newspaper.

Christopher Pledger, 25, who won in 2006, scored his first front page picture within weeks of starting his six month stint at The Times, with a shot of Tony and Cherie Blair at the Labour Party Conference.

Other winners include Clara Molden, 25, who won the competition in 2005 and now works for another national newspaper. She says: “On some jobs, no advice in the world can help, like when you go to take a photo of an important QC and he arrives an hour late and barks, ‘I’m a busy man and I don’t want to be here doing this, so get on with it’. It’s hard in those situations to get the picture you want.” In time, though, with a combination of experience and honed instincts, a photographer learns how to get through such situations successfully.

Thousands of great photographs have been taken over the years for The Times, such as the shot of George VI lighting up in Suffolk in August 1937, or the silhouette of an Afghan man drinking tea, taken by Richard Mills in Khost in March 2006.

With luck, the Times Young Photographers will go on to add to our archive of iconic pictures.