Life as an Digital Marketing Intern

The weeks continue to fly by as I intern at JT thanks to the Internship Programme run by Digital Greenhouse which offers summer employment to post-16 students passionate about digital.
 
Being an intern under Toby Rankin, Marketing Officer, has been a unique experience that has allowed me to synthesise the abundance of information I’ve received in the classroom and see how it is applied in the real world of Marketing.
 
Additionally, working with a team that covers several locations has introduced a whole new array of topics that have been helpful to learn.Now before you start rolling your eyes, it wasn’t a walk in the park! What is?

Overcoming my Nerves

I quickly learned that you will get support when you need it, but don’t expect to get your hand held from start to finish

Actually, starting my internship plunged me into a daunting world of new systems, processes, and tasks that I wasn’t sure I could do. I quickly learned that you will get support when you need it, but don’t expect to get your hand held from start to finish. I did at the start and quickly realised that I needed to get on with things and stop asking for permission, I needed to apply what I was learning.
 
The smallest things made me incredibly nervous – last minute panic that the website had mistakes in the orientation and proportion, once I updated the page; however, I was determined and persevered and managed to fix the issue in hand.
 
I was invited to meetings about potential projects and was encouraged to contribute to the campaign, my opinions were important to the team. I was individually assigned projects that I then had to get ready ahead of launch, and I was left feeling a bit overwhelmed. Those feelings soon disappeared as I grew in confidence and became better at my tasks.
 
I began to appreciate that I wasn’t spoon fed, because I developed the skills and knowledge much quicker – simply because I had to! It all paid off as I was able to see projects progress from the early design stages through to completion, and it’s an amazing feeling!
 

Social Media Audit

 

 
During my Internship, I’ve helped JT by carrying out a social media audit, which is a way of measuring, understanding & reporting, improving an organisations social and ethical performances. A social audit helps to narrow gaps between vision / goal and reality between efficiency and effectiveness. It’s a technique to: understand, measure, verify, report on and to improve the social performance of the organisation.
 

How Being an Intern Helped Me

The key thing about being an intern at JT is that you’re valued as part of the team

I have made fantastic contacts through JT, and though the work could be frustrating at times, I love working with projects and helping JT reach their goals. The key thing about being an intern at JT is that you’re valued as part of the team, not ignored as someone who makes the coffee. So, you can expect responsibility, and high standards, but that’s just the real world for you and there are so many benefits, I gained: experience, contacts, skills, personal achievement. Not to mention simply a job I enjoyed!
 
It was truly a pleasure to be a Digital Marketing Intern with JT. The culture of the organisation is welcoming and amiable which will make it that much harder to say goodbye to everyone. However, I know that my experience at JT has set me up for future success as I look forward to my A -level results and apply for jobs out in the real world.
 
There are not enough words to describe how thankful I am to Toby and all of the others at JT including Black Vanilla PR Agency for giving me the opportunity to learn so much in only a few weeks. Thank you JT!