Here is the next installment in our "A Week In The Life Of" series!

My name is Laura and I work for FareShare, a food charity which takes food from suppliers, like supermarkets and farmers, and redistributes it to charities and community groups all across the UK. You might have heard of FareShare recently because we are doing a lot of work with the Manchester United Footballer, Marcus Rashford.

My job role at FareShare is PR and Marketing Officer which means I work with the media on articles about the charity. I also speak with the charities that we supply food to about the work they are doing to help people in need in their local communities so that I can write case studies about their work – this is so that we can tell people how important the food we redistribute is. I also write a lot of copy for our website and social media channels, work closely with some of our retail partners, including Tesco, Asda and Waitrose, and help to produce marketing materials like posters and leaflets.

I studied film at university, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, but as you can tell I don’t actually work in the film industry. What university did teach me though is how to write well, and I do a lot of that now in my work at FareShare. I also had a lot of jobs before my role at FareShare, including working as an assistant manager in a café, a call centre for a bank, and at a PR agency.

I love my job because FareShare does such wonderful work and it allows me to do something I love – writing – while helping to raise the profile of the charity and the people it supports. So many people need help at the moment, particularly those who have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, so it’s important that we showcase the vital work that FareShare is doing.

I don’t have any specific qualifications for my job but I did gain a lot of experience before working at FareShare, particularly through working at a PR agency where I was involved in a variety of different projects for different clients, from an estate agent to a bus company.  So, if you think you might be interested in this kind of job, you could look at doing an internship with your local PR agency as the experience would be really useful in helping you get a feel for this kind of job.

I live and work in Sheffield, and I would normally travel to London most weeks, but due to the pandemic I have been working from home since March. It was quite easy to adapt to working from home and FareShare has been busier than ever since the beginning of lockdown, meaning there was a lot of work for me to do.

While a career in PR and Marketing might not currently be on your radar, there are lots of opportunities in this line of work and so many places you could work. From the adverts you watch on TV, to social media posts from your favourite brands, to the wording you see describing a pair of trainers on a website – all of these things were written by someone in a marketing team.

My one piece of advice for getting into PR and Marketing is to practice writing. This is one of the most important parts of my role and there will be times when you need to write for different kinds of audiences, whether it’s a briefing for the media, a blog for a website or a social media post. A few years ago, I had no idea how to write a press release but now I do it nearly every day – I started out by writing some practice news stories, as well as taking on feedback and keeping up to date with the news to see how other people write.

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