Recently I had an amazing opportunity to work in-house at one of the global leaders in wireless and broadband communication. As you can imagine, working on a global account in an agency, liaising with different countries is already a challenging task, so working in-house means there is a lot of work to be done, if not very different set of tasks.

While on rotation in Technology, I was based at the head office of one of our major clients outside of London, which involved some travelling and living away from home from time to time. (And yes, I did secretly enjoy living out of a suitcase despite my frequent mini disasters when travelling.)

Working in-house is very different to working in an agency. For starter, you are only doing PR for one company instead of working on a range of different accounts at one time. And there are advantages and disadvantages on both sides.

Generally speaking, in-house is more focused in terms of what you communicate to your audiences and knowing the messages for just one company. Agency work often means working across different accounts at the same time so time management skills are essential in order to get all the work done to a high standard and on time. As the saying goes, there is “no rest for the wicked”… or in this case, those who work in PR……

Internal communication is more prominent in-house comparing to agency work. Working with the in-house team, I was pulling together a range of materials including:

• producing presentations on their 2007 campaigns and PR strategies for meetings;
• writing the internal newsletter aimed at top tier senior management and ensuring that the content, language and style are all relevant;
• joining in conference call meetings with their customers in different countries (the customers are other departments in the company such as the sales team, product development team, etc); and
• liaising with other departments to put together the company’s sales call calendar for the year.

In fact, all the tasks I did while based in-house are not what the team at Edelman covers, which makes sense of course. Following on from the presentations, sales call calendar and internal meetings, which outline the PR strategies and campaigns, the Edelman team then ensures the messages are communicated to the target audiences. At the agency we focus on external communications and media relations, while liaising with the in-house team to find spokespeople for interviews, commentaries etc.

There is a lot more to it, of course, but these are what I gathered so far from the two weeks I was working on this.

Working so closely with the client is the best opportunity to get to know the account and getting an insider view on the key issues concerning the company’s PR needs. It is also a very good opportunity to build a relationship with clients. After all, PR is all about building relationships and having a good working relationship with your client is certainly a good starting point!

I have to say though; these two weeks are by far my most challenging part of the grad scheme but I have learnt a lot more about client servicing, time management with improvements to my own way of working, which has to be a good thing!