Starting My Placement

Hi my name is Jordan, I am from the Curtin Bentley Campus in Perth WA.

I started my work placement at BHP Billiton over the break and am now up to day 6. Essentially I am working beneath the Nickel West Communications Advisor for Government Relations and Communications, but she is really so much more than that. It is amazing to see actual public relations practitioners in the workplace; my immediate superior, Alison is amazing at what she does and spends more time in the office than many of the other staff members.
One of the first things that I noticed when coming into this environment that BHP Billiton unlike many companies (or so we are told in the PR units at Curtin) has a communications advisor on the board of directors. Ford is Alison’s manager and he has an office alongside all of the presidents and vice presidents who are located in the Perth office. It is obvious that BHP Billiton take their public relations seriously.

As soon as I arrived I was, as they say, thrown in the deep end. Before I even received safety training about the Central Park Building (compulsory for all visitors and staff) I was delegated my major task that I would be taking on in my time here. For the next twenty days I will be working on a booklet designed to be given to associates from other countries that are coming to Perth for the first time. This document is very important and was allocated to me by the President of Stainless Steel Materials Jimmy Wilson’s assistant, Julie. The main reason that this document is being created is so that any BHP Billiton staff or associates coming to Perth for a meeting, conference etc. will have information about Perth that will aid them with anything outside of BHP Billiton jurisdiction. It is especially useful to those people who would like to see more of Perth and therefore extend their stay a few days but don’t know what to do and where to find that information.

I will be writing all of the copy for this document and accompanied by the BHP Billiton Branding Guidelines (A massive folder with the entire Do’s” and “Do nots” of branding for BHP Billiton authorised documents) I will also be designing the layout.
First off I had to have a briefing with Julie and Alison, as I was walked through the process of extracting information from a client, I realised that there are so many choices when designing a document that you need to have a very clear idea in your head of what the client wants. Things like binding, colour, whether the document will need to be printed or just emailed and more had not even popped into my head when thinking about the important questions to ask a client, luckily Alison was there to teach me.

After the briefing Alison explained to me that a ‘thankyou’ email must be sent to the client, detailing all of the things you had said that you would do and all of the things that they had said that they will do to aid you in the process, this way you and they have a detailed checklist of what needs to be done in the time period you have been allocated.

I am about halfway through writing the copy for this document at the moment, but with other things cropping up every day my progress is staggered and sometimes I only have a few minutes between jobs to write something down as I think of it.

I have been to several meetings with Julie and Alison – and even Ford has joined us when he is not too busy – to talk to event organisers at venues about different functions that will be held later in the year. Again I was surprised at the number of questions I would never have though to ask and the number of things that need to be taken into consideration when planning an event. Though we discussed it in other PR units I found that different situations definitely require different attention to details. The first time we went out was for a speech that was to be made and stand up cocktail drinks following. Though it will still be winter when this is done, Alison and Julie were both interested in out door areas where the drinks could be held, but it was important that they were weather proof so that the staff will be able to make use of this area. They also had to take into consideration the speech and speaker. Depending on the type of speech different rooms can be used, if questions will need to be asked it is better to have a wider, shorter room, but in some cases it is appropriate to have a longer, narrower room with plasmas, or some kind of screen set up midway so that people towards the back can see what is being presented.

Also, as BHP Billiton is a well known and large company they needed to make sure that when drinks are served people have access to water and food so that they do not get drunk and make a fool of themselves and represent the company badly. They decide to combat this by placing water stations with fizzy drink and (obviously) water that people could serve themselves in prime locations around the room. Venue staff were told to bring out large amounts of food at the beginning of the function which will ensure people have food in their stomachs when they begin drinking and will prevent people juggling food, drinks and conversation throughout the night.

My most recent task was to write and edit articles and produce a newsletter called the Grad Gazette, run by a HR manager that is sent out to the graduates participating in the Graduate programs available at BHP Billiton. I just today finished putting together the layout with all of the copy in place.
The client for this particular project, a HR manager, is a particularly busy lady who has little time to spend meeting and discussing briefs though she also has a clear picture of what she wants the document to look like. As she is an internal client I was able to contact her quite easily but I learnt that some clients need to be coached through the briefing process to extract all of the possible information from them.
I clearly didn’t ask enough questions though because the articles that I wrote had to be cut down by a minimum of 200 words.
It was a very interesting experience working with this lady and Alison told me that this was a very common issue faced by PR practitioners in “the real world”. I overcame all of the boundaries, and even though I spent most of the day trying to compress my articles I managed to produce a document that we were all pleased with.

I have learnt so much in so little time and I am really enjoying my time working with Alison at BHP Billiton. Later on this month I will be flown to the Mount Keith Operation in central WA to research and write a profile on the Community and Aboriginal Affairs Coordinator who works there.

Thanks for reading, Jordan.