Trainee Tales is a series of blog posts in which Silvia, PR & Content Marketing Trainee at ABCD Agency, talks about her journey, explaining what are the opportunities and challenges of a career in public relations and content marketing.
Starting a professional career is never easy. Getting the so-called "foot in the door" and entering in a completely new field is for many, especially young university students, a difficult hurdle to overcome.
My public relations journey began in 2020 when I attended an introductory PR course at university. I soon realised that this could be the area I wanted to specialise in, and so I started sending applications to different PR agencies with the goal of finding an internship.
After a short 3-month internship at another communications agency during the 2020 summer break, I had to figure out what to do with my life: on the one hand, I wanted to stay and work in public relations, but on the other hand, I didn't know if there would be room for a working student in such a professional environment. I still wanted to finish my studies in Berlin.
I used to think that to work in public relations, or in marketing in general, you had to be available to work full-time and the training path was very standard and rigid: you start as an intern, move to trainee and then become a PR consultant. This made me insecure about looking for a job as a working student in this field.
Out of curiosity I started sending out a few applications to different agencies, until I stumbled upon ABCD's homepage and discovered that they were looking for a working student to join their growing team.
The fact that ABCD was looking for working students was something I really liked—as an employer, they were open to giving everyone a chance, regardless of their hours, availability, or job title. It takes time to professionally train a person, so their willingness to do this is something I liked about the agency right from the start.
After a nice interview process with Frederik, Robin and Susanna, I joined the team and started practically from zero to work first as a PR and content marketing working student, learning the basics: writing landing page texts, press releases, pitches, creating media lists, and contacting editors. I learnt from a team of extremely competent people, experienced in the field and willing to share their knowledge and skills with new team members, regardless of their experience level.
I like to sum up my ongoing experience here at ABCD with a quote from Lao Tzu: The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. And I am very curious about the next steps!