Faye Oakey PR.

Placement’s, or work experience if you prefer, are a helpful means of proactive learning during study, or I would say even essential in the current economic climate. Employers are much more interested in what you’ve done, not simply what you’ve written an essay on.

As part of my PR degree at Leeds Met we are assessed on a submitted portfolio of real experience, so for us placement opportunities are a fantastic way to gain that relevant work for real clients and learn the industry on the job.

Recently however there seems to be a lot of speculation around the topic. Not only is there the whole; paid / unpaid debate, but the issue of applications as well. 

It seems that other PR students have set a pretty bad reputation for us, sending out impersonal, uninformed and sometimes really negative emails to apply for work experience. Every PR practitioner I’ve come across so far has mentioned the poor calibre of applications and offered advice on how to approach people for placements, which a lot of the time I feel are simply common sense.

For example, the reoccurring pointer I’ve found is, not to address your email ”Dear Sir/Madam”. Well, its just polite to at least know who you are talking to. It’s easy to research -in particular - a PR agencies employees; most have a profile, or at least a picture and job title of each on their company website. 

So, I’m all for us student’s being offered advice to be more creative when trying to secure placement opportunities and stand out amongst the dozens of other ”I need work experience for uni” emails. But I can’t help but feel that a lot of agencies expect just a little too much. I found one company’s advice before applying for an unpaid placement there asking for us to be offering them new business clients, campaign ideas for their current clients, and to get ourselves coverage in three different types of media in the space of a month. A little extravagant?

My own story to securing my position involved a lot of hard work and creativity, but the application process itself was all great experience, and the end result was a paid position in a creative agency. An incentive to work hard for.

Two Birds One Stone created the ‘Student Apprentice’ as an interview process for positions within the company. Here was the process:

• PR students, and design students from both Leeds University and Leeds Metropolitan University were given the chance to express their initial interest via an email application form.
• Successful applicants were then asked to prepare a speech and take part in an interview process which was recorded by Met TV.
• 15 of us were then arranged into groups of three, and given a brief. We were asked to come up with a PR campaign for a real client: King of Shaves. 
• This was then judged by a panel and the winning team given the opportunity to be part of the TBOS team

The panel was made up of the two founders of TBOS: Adam Burns & Gerard Savva, plus Nathan Lane - the managing director of Ptarmigan Bell Pottinger and Becky Edlin - the creative team leader at Magpie. Shane Castle - Marketing Director of King of Shaves and Alex Epstein - BBC Apperentice 2010 contestant, also sat on the panel.

So as you can see, it was a lengthy process but each stage was amazing practise for each applicant. Not only did I practise writing and presenting a speech, interview techniques, being in front of a camera, networking with industry professionals, preparing a PR campaign from a brief and pitching to a client, but at the end I managed to secure a paid position in a fantastic agency, and I’m continuing to learn a lot through my experience here. 

As I already mentioned, over the past two weeks I’ve been taking part in a competition called Student Apprentice to earn a part time placement at Two Birds One Stone.

Friday arrived: pitch day. The morning began with a press meeting with online student magazine Behind the Spin, I took part in the interview as a contestant and student representative alongside members of the judging panel; Alex Epstein, BBC Apprentice candidate 2010 and Shane Castle, business development manager at King of Shaves and Adam Burns, co-founder of Two Birds. I was very excited and intrigued to take part in this, it was a brilliant experience, insight and practice for me, both on conducting an interview and being the recipient.

Next came the pitches, my team: Early Birds get the Worm, presented third which was probably a slight woe for me personally. I was very excited for the final and looking forward to sharing our campaign ideas until the actual day when I began feeling pretty nervous! I was keeping up to speed as the day progressed via Twitter and the hashtag #StudentApprentice and seeing how high the standard was set made me feel apprehensive, luckily I had every faith in our idea and my team so when our time came to present I decided to just go with it and enjoy the pitch. We received a pretty hard grilling post presentation and managed to spark interesting discussion which looking back now probably gave us an edge as we had the opportunity to give answers and reassurance on any issues the panel could see with our campaign. During feedback comments at the results later in the day we received in my opinion the best compliment I could have wished for, they said what was most apparent from our pitch was our passion for our idea which is really the angle we went for. We decided what the panel were looking for from us as students was creativity and ideas not a business pitch, we all knew our idea by heart from all of the preparation so we didn’t memorise a script we went in there with a clear view of our ideas and discussed them, and it paid off!

The final chunk of the day came that afternoon with results at 5pm, which went amazingly for us with the result we were all hoping to achieve. Early Birds get the Worm are the student apprentice for Two Birds winners, amazing considering there were initially 89 competitors! I for one am extremely eager to get going and learn first hand how to work in PR. Jonny and I will be beginning our placement positions for the company in the Bell Pottinger office whilst Ben gets going with design at Magpie Comms. I’m sure updates will follow. This was also a great chance to network and get to know the panel, the Two Birds team and the other contestants, great fun and overall the whole process was fantastic! It really was the best experience, and brought out the enthusiasm and creativity in all of us.

The Leeds Met TV team oversaw and documented the entire program so I’m sure all teams will gain some great exposure, I can’t wait to see the finished product!

Of course all of the Early Birds were feeling celebratory and enjoyed a bottle of champagne, great start to the weekend!

:)