After graduating from UEA last year, I started my internship at PolicyBee in September. They were looking for someone to help with their marketing, and although I started as an intern, I now work here full time. PolicyBee is an online insurance broker specialising in arranging insurance for independent professionals and small consultancies.
After earning my 2:1 in English Literature, I knew I wanted a career involving writing. However, knowing writing jobs can be difficult to find, I decided to broaden my job search to those involving social media and marketing. Even these roles were pretty scarce, especially in Suffolk, so I’d been job hunting for several months before I found my internship advertised on the UEA graduate website.
I actually didn’t get the internship I originally applied for. This was a role working on the company’s email marketing campaigns and I definitely wasn’t well suited to it. However, PolicyBee also needed a lot of content for their new website, and since I had a lot of writing experience, they decided to offer me a different internship. When I applied, I never imagined it could work out so well. My current role is much more relevant to my skills and interests.
As you’d expect, I spend most of my time writing. Each week, I create several posts for the blog and online insurance guide. The blog usually covers small business news and events, such as relevant competitions and tax reforms. I also write copy for the website, emails, guest posts, as well as some social media and design work.
Before I started, I knew nothing about insurance or small businesses. It took me a while to get my head around what the company does, but now I can write about the main products quite easily. Being the most inexperienced member of a team can be daunting. However, you shouldn’t be afraid to attempt new things. Your employers won’t expect you to know everything, but they will appreciate willingness to try.
Copywriting is very different to any writing I’d done for my degree or in my free time. As well as being more concise, everything I write has to be appropriate for the customer who’ll read it, and match our company personality. Since I’ve been here, my writing style has definitely improved; the help provided by the rest of my team has been incredibly valuable.
I’d advise anyone interested in marketing to familiarise themselves with tools like Hootsuite, Wordpress, and Google+. I use these on a regular basis, so I’m glad I’d at least looked at them before I started. It’s also worth getting a basic knowledge of SEO. Every piece of online content I write is optimised to appear higher in Google’s organic search results. Although there are people here more specialised in that, it’s good to have an idea of what they’re talking about.
Another important thing I’d recommend to graduates looking for jobs and internships is not to overlook positions in a sector you don’t necessarily want to work in. Even un-sexy industries like insurance need people to do their marketing. If you’re part of a helpful team, you’ll be learning the same skills as you would in a specialist media or marketing agency.
I’ve been incredibly lucky as I managed to get an internship that I liked even more than the one I applied for. Not only that, I was offered a permanent position off the back of it. My work has improved noticeably and I’m continuing to learn new things all the time. I’d recommend a UEA internship to anyone looking to gain career experience.
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