Careers
Friday 13 November 2020
This week Crest had the opportunity to deliver a ‘masterclass’ to the latest cohort of graduates at the Taylor Bennett Foundation.
As the trainees hurtle towards the end of their eight-week programme at the Foundation, our Director of Communications Charlotte and Director of Development Jon shared some of their experiences of communicating in the complex arena of public inquiries.
The Taylor Bennett Foundation (TBF) is a charity that encourages black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) graduates to pursue a career in communications through their award-winning PR training programme, and internship and mentoring programmes.
The six Taylor Bennett Foundation trainees taking part in the eight-week PR programme
Charlotte and Jon hosted the presentation, alas in a virtual (Covid friendly) world and used the time to share their (varied!) communications backgrounds with the TBF graduates. The presentation largely focused on how independent communications differ to the more traditional communications routes – with a number of base rules for how to effectively deliver communications which help to maintain trust and confidence in a public inquiry or another independent arms-length body within a tight and potentially constraining legal framework. To finish off, Anna Bennett, Assistant Communications Officer, offered her insight into starting a career in communications and her experience of working with public inquiries to date.
Charlotte said:
“Crest has recently begun working with the Taylor Bennett Foundation, and personally I find sharing our experience and mentoring for the Foundation a really important strand of work for me. Hopefully, we get to pass on a bit of knowledge - but the magic is that it works both ways, I now have a much better idea of what news channels, podcasts and blogs a 21-year-old gets their news from and that's just for starters! It’s definitely a two-way relationship and great to be helping the Foundation deliver their work of making the communications industry more diverse".