Last week I spoke to about 100 students and managers at the IOD Guernsey Management Shadowing Awards – the reason I was chosen as the guest speaker was that I was the winner of the Management Shadowing programme way back in 2001. For you mathematicians out there you will have worked out that was 10 years ago. My presentation therefore was appropriately titled ‘what a difference a decade makes’….
I was lucky enough to do my placement with someone working in PR – those few fun but hectic days and then winning the Management Shadowing Award gave me a keen interest in the industry, some confidence in my ability and most importantly a direction.
It was a funny old process writing down and then talking about all the things I have (and haven’t) done in my PR life during the last ten years, from the early days at CMA PR and Event Management to my four years spent studying PR at Bournemouth University – hopefully a useful tale for the students to hear about.
Oddly it only took me about 10 minutes to whizz through the highlights of the last decade which included: PR theory study, running a host of client events, many many press drops to London’s finest beauty journalists, a PR dissertation, my first stint at Orchard PR as an account executive, my time at Clarion Communications and then back to the Orchard family as a consultant in 2008.
The main point I hope I passed onto the students, six of whom also stood and made excellent presentations about their shadowing experiences, was that whilst a bit of luck and good timing can help you build a career at the end of the day no matter what industry you go into it is mostly about hard work.
I may have needed to go between the Guernsey and London PR worlds a couple of times to work out I would finally end up on the little rock rather than in the big smoke but my industry experience is certainly richer because of these moves.
That hard work thing I mentioned to the students doesn’t just happen at the start of your career: as we all know it still happens every day so when the evening was brought to a close with the following quote from Steve Jobs, I realised that I am very lucky to love what I do:
‘Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.’
Best get on with some of that hard work…
Posted by Brooke.