Having recently finished my marketing placement year and soon to start my final year as a Marketing, Advertising and PR student, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share my experience as an Aftersales Marketing Executive for a french vehicle manufacturer and hopefully give you a more insightful view on what a placement year entails.

I’ll be the first to admit that going from 8 hours contact time a week to 8 hour days did seem daunting. My new role was 8:00-4:15 for 4 days with an early 3:00 finish on a Friday. I was used to the long days during deadline periods, but otherwise had an inconsistent sleeping pattern and also seemed to be tired most of the time. 

It was safe to say that I hadn’t been prepared for what a (nearly) 40 hour week would be like. Fortunately, I soon realised that I thrived from having a fixed routine and solid structure to my week, despite the struggle of getting up at 5:30 every morning and having to commute nearly an hour to work and over an hour home. I knew that a new routine would be challenging but soon after the first 3 weeks, where I came home exhausted after trying to accustom myself to my new role, I found that I settled into my new routine quite easily.

Starting Placement

My first day entailed a full day of training and being reunited with some of the students whom I had shared an assessment centre. Fortunately, ahead of our start date, HR had emailed to ask if we were willing to share our emails with others starting placement, which meant that we could make a WhatsApp group and get to know each other ahead of our starting date. This helped to alleviate first day nerves for me and meant conversation flowed much more naturally.

I’ll be the first to admit that before starting my placement that I wasn’t overly familiar with the group I would be working for, nor automotive and especially not automotive aftersales. With offices around the world and head office in Paris, I worked at the UK head office in Coventry.

My Responsibilities & Projects

My role within Aftersales Marketing was varied; starting as car brand Aftersales Marketing Executive before working as the Marketing Executive for the group's independent garage network franchise brand (a network of over 4000 car repair garages in 22 countries and over 120 centres in the UK). 

When working within car brand aftersales I worked on making the accessory brochures suitable for the UK marketing and proofing the ‘juste apres’ assets, a system that involved sending marketing materials to customers who had just ordered a new car, to promote our accessory range. I found the roles involved in car brand aftersales wasn't overly challenging, so was overjoyed when a new role was offered to me.

Whilst working on the car repair franchise, the role was significantly more varied, including working on the brand's website and content management system, managing social media content, creating internal communications and coordinating the central inbox to respond to customers.

As a placement student, I expected relatively low responsibility in comparison to my managers, however, when there was work to be done I was relied upon to assist and was treated as an equal to the permanent staff. I firmly believe management took my opinions on board and listened to what I had to say., something that I perceived to be difficult to accomplish in a large international company with a well-defined hierarchy. 

I enjoyed the routine of placement because it allowed me to be flexible on the times outside of my 8-4 and use my free time as a time to relax. The routine also reminded me of the importance of weekends, something that didn't seem to exist during my second year as the weekends would blur into the weeks. 

The workload was reasonable and much better managed than my student life. Initially, I found the workload wasn't enough for me, that or I was getting through the tasks too quickly, however, once I’d plucked up the courage to make this known to management, my workload increased and my days felt much more productive. Some days were hectic, with my 8 working hours feeling insufficient to get everything done, but mostly my workload was balanced and well managed. Being under pressure allowed me to demonstrate my effective time management, stay organised, and be adaptable with work. I got better over the year at prioritising tasks that required much more immediate attention.

Working ‘Client-Side':

When it comes to selecting a marketing role, you’ll often have to make the choice between working client-side or working agency side. My placement involved working in-house for an automotive company, which meant working client-side. 

As a result, my day to day working routine involved working with a number of different creative and digital agencies, who would create the creative graphic design assets, social media imagery, emails and brand campaigns according to briefs that were provided by my team. The accounts we had with these agencies were complex and required high knowledge of the account to run effectively. This meant that a lot of my day-to-day role was liaising with the agencies and chasing up on creative projects. We’d brief in what creative we wanted producing, and the agencies would create the graphics. We would then communicate back and forth through an online platform called ‘ProofHQ’ to mark up where changes were to be made until we were happy with the outcome. 

Through a combination of Skype WIP (work in progress) calls, face to face status meetings and agency visits, I was able to establish relationships with key account teams at marketing communications and digital agencies, and network as a result. Working with a range of agencies has allowed me to experience how agencies can differ in their working styles, and how some form of working communications can work more successfully than others.

My productivity at work was sometimes influenced by the productivity of other stakeholders within the business and was also dependent on others delivering the materials correctly. To get some things done we'd have to go through a number of people which caused delays and frustration in the team, especially when it came to updating the website as requests would have to be made to the French team, which would only be acted on should it be seen in the global interest.

I gained invaluable experience on my placement year and have left the role having met great people, with broader knowledge and with increased confidence in myself.

Have you completed a year in Industry? How did you find it?

Enjoy reading? Look out for the next post in my placement series featuring the highs & lows and why you should do a placement year.