Real-life career videos and ideas for your future
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Hi, I’m Lizzie.
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I’m the digital communications manager at Tritax in London.
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My role
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as digital communications manager involves managing the social media channels
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for our business and our listed funds,
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managing our websites, maintaining any changes.
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And I also manage the PR and media opportunities
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with publications, which involves, when there’s questions from journalists,
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going to the relevant members of the team, getting answers,
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sometimes wordsmithing them, and then sharing them with the journalists
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and then waiting for them to be published.
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The best thing about my job is the variety of the role, working
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with different members of the business.
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There isn’t one part of the business that I don’t work with, which means that
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I know everyone. Everyone knows me.
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The worst bits I would say, are probably
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how busy it can get. You’re juggling lots of plates
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and you don’t quite know which one’s gonna come next.
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In my role, I would
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say skills that are useful are communication. Organisation is especially useful
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because there’s lots of things that have deadlines.
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And a lot of people, you might give them, say, questions
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for a journalist to answer, and they won’t stay on top of that
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deadline of when they need
to get it to you by.
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So being someone who is quite willing to chase people on deadlines.
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I would say the subjects that are most useful for this role would be English,
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because of communicating with people,
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grammar, and maths is also really useful because in my role
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I do a lot of budgeting.
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So being good with numbers and knowing
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how to do a tiny little bit of accounting and Excel is super helpful.
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I loved school, I was a member of every single sports team going.
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My favoUrite classes would be English and then maths and science.
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I really wanted to be an engineer so my A-levels were maths,
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further maths, economics, chemistry and physics.
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My dad was an engineer.
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He helped with my A-levels.
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He had a good job that I thought was really cool,
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but then when it came to think about myself,
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actually sat in his seat doing that job, I couldn’t think of anything worse.
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So then I did
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the degree that did, business and event management.
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And then when I was there, I had a tutor who was amazing,
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like the best person I’ve ever met, and I sat down with her.
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She then suggested that I tried the uni placement scheme, so it meant that
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you took a year out of uni and you worked full time in an organisation.
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At school I worked at Waitrose for years so I was at Waitrose for my A-levels, for uni.
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I did a placement year, on my first two jobs out of uni I stayed at Waitrose,
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cause I loved it so much.
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And then I worked at London Zoo for a bit,
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so I’d get more experience doing event management stuff.
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And I did a placement year at uni at Vauxhall Motors, the car company, and that’s
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where I learned about PR, because before that I didn’t even know what it was.
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And then after I finished at Vauxhall, I went back to uni.
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Then I did some time in Volkswagen Group working on the car brand,
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and then I moved to Volkswagen Financial Services doing PR and internal comms
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for the financial services arms.
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I really, really wanted to work in London and I saw the role come up for Tritax,
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and I saw that the role was encompassing lots of different skill sets
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and lots of different things that I’d done before,
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and I didn’t know what I wanted to specialise in yet.
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And then once I joined Tritax and tried
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PR, internal marketing, social media,
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I decided that I really want to specialise more in the social media side of stuff.
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My role as
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social media manager was not around when I was at school.
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So when you’re thinking about what you’re doing in the future,
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it could be that you sit in this chair in ten years’ time
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and you say what you’re doing, and it could be something
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that you never even knew of when you were 14
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and you were sat watching this video.
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