One day with… Jamie, Marketing Communications Assistant

A few months into his placement in Marketing for the Engineering department at Uniper, Jamie got moved to the Communications team during a restructure to work on the new corporate website. What felt like a curveball at first, has been a huge eye-opener for the 21-year old Londoner living in Derby. “There is stuff I didn’t even picture I was going to be doing when I started that I’ve really thrown myself into”, he says. 

His work on the Engineering website, which consisted mostly of case studies, agency-made content and a bit of e-mail marketing, has enabled him to know what to expect from Uniper and starting slowly into the website as a massive project. Now, the majority of his work revolves around stakeholder engagement: speaking to stakeholders, seeing what they need – whether it’s small edits or new pages made for a specific project – and how to implement these requirements as best as possible. The work is never the same and there’s always something new to be doing, which he likes.

Now, after more than a year of working at Uniper, Jamie feels like he’s grown a lot, both personally and professionally. The placement being his first job working from home in any capacity, it took him a few months to feel comfortable in this new situation. Having a routine helped him with that. On a professional level he’s retained many skills without even noticing it. To him, it felt like he just woke up one day and realised he knows how to do different things. 

“Now I’m back at uni I can really see the benefit of that – I think about marketing in a much different way to before, where I had next to no experience. Because I’ve seen the process in action and seen how the finished product manifests itself”, he says. Having gained the experience at Uniper, Jamie thinks he is in a good position to go in any direction he wants to after finishing his studies. He likes the corporate environment and stability of workflows of the company. “It gives me a lot of clarity of things that I should be doing. So I think I want to retain that – being at Uniper or another company. That’s what I really like”, he explains.

Going back to university a couple of weeks ago and transitioning from full-time to part-time hours has been interesting for the Marketing Management student. Jamie mostly worked from home and only saw his colleagues in person once every two weeks during his placement. While he thinks Teams is great and was always able to call someone when he needed anything, nothing can beat real life interaction in his opinion – so he’s glad he’s got that element back. But even remote, he feels like the teams he’s worked in were able to collaborate in the best way possible and to get work done quickly. The student also made friends at Uniper he could talk to and who supported each other. “I really like the culture of this place, everyone is really friendly, even people who I’ve never spoken to before. I never really have negative responses to anything I need help with”, he says about his work at Uniper.