Hi all,
This is my first entry and I am already 16 days into my internship! I have been working in the 'Corporate Affairs' Department at Alcoa of Australia since 14 April. In the month I have been there, I have been working 9-5ish for four days a week. I have worked on several PR tasks with people in different positions. I have helped with sponsorships, writing News Reports for Alcoa Ltd’s national task force, collecting Relevant media clippings about Alcoa and producing hard copy files for executives , creating new sections for the intranet pages and website.
Some of the unexpected challenges I have faced while being at Alcoa have been the Hot Desking, trying to find photos on Alcoa's files (There are so many files!!!), finding high resolution advertisements (Again through the Alcoa filing system), answering the phone for Corporate Affairs, meeting deadlines and following up requests.
There is so much to elaborate on, so I will explain my first week to you. A week before I arrived I was told that I would be assisting with the intranet page, assisting with the briefing notes for the 2020 summit and with the partnerships value proposition. On my first day I was placed away from the team who were located in the West Wing with the corporate executives and I was placed with the scientists and advertising teams in the east wing of the floor due to undergoing renovations. This meant I had to walk about 100m to have a query answered. I started a little too late to help with the 2020 summit briefing notes, but I was able to help with the other ones.
My first assignment was to work on the Corporate Affairs page on the Alcoa intranet site. I had to gather information on all 42 corporate affairs staff on their job responsibilities, contact info and explain the value of sponsorship, media, issues management, community relations to Alcoa. I needed to collect a profile pic of each person which proved even harder as it has been a month and I am still waiting on one person's photo. It took much longer than I had anticipated. There was alot of phone calls and emails sent. All staff were extremely busy and many didn't have time to get back to me. I only just completed this assignment last week, a week after the proposed deadline.
I was also asked to gather all the information from the media (Press Releases, conference transcripts, radio, television and print) regarding a potential legal issue from a community surrounding one of Alcoa's West Australian sites. I then had to put this into a hard copy.
Whilst working on both these assignments I was also working on locating specific high resolution photographs for different departments in Alcoa. This was extremely challenging as they have 40 years of documents scattered on one drive and not well labeled files. I had sent the photos to certain people and asked Community Relations Officers from specific sites to see if they knew where the photos were. I got into a bit of trouble for this because a week later the photos we still could not find the photos.
Although it may sound like I had a lot to take in, I was extremely honoured to be given so many tasks and I think these assignments have helped with my media collecting, web design skills for the intranet site and looking for certain requirements for photographs. I now understand the importance of deadlines and I need to be more confident with persistently following up information from people in order to meet my deadlines.
1 comment:
Hi George,
You have an awesome PR opportunity there. Wow, the workloads are sure very heavy and something that could get you busy. I'm joyful to hear that you are content with your placement in Alcoa.
Alcoa is a very interesting mining corporate organisation. For people who work in the field of PR there have some good mining stories to be produced as press or media releases. The organisation gives cool networking opprtunities with both employees that work there and the local communities that live near Alcoa.
Go for it, George. You can do it. You will get lots of awesome work experience and work memories from your placement. It can be daunting sometimes to handle heaps of PR workloads. You'll make it all the way. I have faith in your work placement.
Well, I worked in a corporate environment like you but my field is tourism and hospitality. Yeah, a Shangri-La hotel in my hometown was my workplace. My hometown is known as Land below the Wind and, its most famous busineses are tourism and agriculture. The tourism and hospitality industry is growing strong every year. The arrival of many foreign tourists became one of the most famous press release stories that many five-star hotels always write to position as the tops of all tops in my hometown.
It is quite fun actually to work in the tourism industry if only I could get to work with people that just love cultures, languages, food and traveling.
The only unfortunate thing It is just about writing the press releases that aren't enjoyable. At mu work placement, I wrote my first one and it wasn't special. It never got published and it was for training purposes. Yup, talking about all the staffs in such a corporate work environment that are always busy. Anyway, the only good thing about the placement is meeting people, the taste of real-life workloads and how proud we are of ourselves for achieving good results for all our efforts in doing all our PR jobs and if they are successful.
Please share about the rock minerals or anything that are dug in Alcoa mines if you know any. It'll be interesting to gain a general knowledge about them.
Perhaps if there were new discoveries of rock minerals or anything that are not known around Australia or the world, they become very cool PR stories.
Here is an interesting PR humor I came up. As PR practioners, we speak corporate. The reason we speak corporate because corporate refers to work that is professional of senior levels.When I read books about PR, I came across the word "corporate" frequently that sounds interesting.
From corporate PR to any PR practises that go corporate. I learned that word from a book titled "Guerilla PR". The book was interesting and gave interesting insights about 'wired PR'. The book features interesting examples that could be used for recommendations section of the report.
Hope you enjoy your placement. Please stay in touch. I'm waiting forward to hear more stories about Alcoa. ^^
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