Over the past couple of months I’ve been pulling together my annual ‘150 PR internships and graduate schemes‘ list.
Something was different this year. Several of the agencies specifically said about their internships that interns would not be expected to make tea, and one said interns aren’t sent to do the coffee run.
Recently the Learning and Work Institute commissioned a consultation with the Department of Education which revealed there is some confusion over “what effective practice in work placements looks like”
When talking to employers in the PR industry, my experience is that they are keen to offer work experience placements to school aged children, and internships or apprenticeships to school leavers/graduates. Employers know that to secure the future of their industry they need to invest in junior talent and encourage the next generation to get PR experience. Continue reading
I’m currently mid-way through delivering the current Taylor Bennett Foundation programme. We’re also about to publish our impact report, which spells out in stark figures the outcomes we’ve achieved over the past nine years including this astonishing statistic: 93% of our alumni are employed – 81% of which are working in PR & communications. That’s pretty good going.
James at Graduate Job Podcast interviewed me recently. We talked about what graduates need to do to get a job in PR (and the best kind of tea to drink). He asked me lots of the questions that graduates ask – what’s a good CV? What skills do you need What’s a decent cover letter? How important is work experience? – so it’s really worth checking out if you’re applying for PR roles.
You can hear the full interview here. If, like me, you don’t like the sound of my voice, there’s a full written transcript there too so you can read that instead.
Head over to Comms2Point0 where I’ve blogged today about the skills you need for a career in PR.
Jan 2016: Please note that the 2016 version of this list is now available here.
One of the things I’m most often asked about is the importance of internships. Do you really need experience to get into PR or can you go straight onto a graduate scheme? In my experience, it’s absolutely vital that you have previous PR experience before applying for an entry-level job in communications. One of the things I often advise those job hunters to do is to look at the PR Week top 150 agencies and start looking for work experience, internships, apprenticeships and graduate schemes offered by those firms.
So to kick 2015 off in style I’ve done the hard part and trawled through websites to bring you the top 150 companies’ internships, apprenticeships and entry-level opportunities in this handy list.
For an detailed look at careers in the PR industry including how to write a decent CV and cover letters buy my book: How To Get A Job In PR
Hot on the heels of my 50 PR Blogs Chosen By Graduates blog post, I asked the current batch of Tayor Bennett Foundation trainees to each list their ten favourite PR people on Twitter. Links to the grads’ Twitter accounts and blogs with their reasons for their choices are below, followed by the full list (which you can follow here). I gave them free reign, so absolutely no guidance in terms of who I rate on Twitter. There’s also this handy list of PR influencers by Lissted – which I also didn’t tell them about before they put their lists together.
Interestingly in this and both the PR blogs list, there are few geographical boundaries. The PR practitioners chosen are based not only in the UK, where the graduates are, but also North America, Australia and Asia. Perhaps a sign that entry-level pracitioners don’t care where you are if you have something interesting to say, and that they already value global opinion and ideas.
By the way, these six (really fabulous) graduates leave the Foundation’s PR training programme in mid-November and are about to start job hunting so if you need bright, well-trained grads to join your PR agency or in-house comms team give me a shout.
Filed under Graduates, PR, Social Media
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