Kaye Tilbury, Graduate Associate Administrator
Kaye Tilbury, Graduate Associate Administrator in the Organisational Development (OD) team, talks about her experience of job shadowing with the Staff Internal Communications Team. Kaye, who studied Media Practice BA at Sussex, joined the OD team in February 2022. She manages the department’s communications including the OD Termly Newsletter, and promotes OD events and services via social media.
I wanted to get a sense of the bigger picture. Many of the tasks that I was doing for OD were new to me, and I had taken the initiative to learn more about them as I felt they would benefit my team; for example, monitoring and recording analytics around our communications. It was exciting to be able to explore what was possible and be empowered to implement changes, but I wanted to get a sense of how comms work at an organisational level and how to present my work in a way that aligned with our brand identity and house style.
I’m a kinaesthetic learner, meaning that I learn through doing. I like to understand how things work from beginning to end and why they work that way. I felt that I had achieved a lot through self-directed learning, but the Internal Comms team had a wealth of knowledge that I felt could benefit not only me but also my wider team.
My experience of job shadowing has been a very positive one overall. I’m glad that I made the time to do it and prioritised my development, which can be difficult to do when faced with a heavy workload and competing priorities. Initially, I was quite nervous about working in a different office and with different people, but everyone was friendly and welcoming.
Job shadowing came about as part of a discussion with my line manager. We talked about my development and what I wanted to achieve in future. At an introductory meeting with the Internal Comms team, I explained what I hoped to gain from job shadowing with them and the skills that I would like to develop. We agreed how much time I felt that I could commit without impacting my day-to-day responsibilities and I decided to do half a day every week.
I work in the Internal Comms office on Monday afternoons and typically, we’ll start with a loose agenda. Sometimes I will attend their team meetings to get an overview of current workstreams and how they operate as a team. At other times, I will sit with an individual member of the team to learn about a specific aspect of their work such as how they create tactical communications plans to meet a specific objective, or how they analyse and interpret their analytics data. I also benefit from using this time with Internal Comms as an opportunity to get their input and feedback on comms projects that I have been working on.
I now have a better understanding of how the work I do contributes to all-staff communication and engagement. I also have a good overview of the processes in place within the Internal Comms team, which has helped me to implement similar processes within my own team and improve the impact of our communications.
It has also been useful for me to have a point of reference for best practice to guide my work moving forwards and to establish a working relationship with colleagues with more experience and a wider depth of knowledge in my field; people that I can reach out to when I’m unsure about something.
The long-term benefit is that I am more confident in my role. Before I started job shadowing, I think I had imposter syndrome. I wasn’t confident in my knowledge and skills in a professional capacity but working with Internal Comms has diminished that anxiety, as I’ve learned that their ways of working aren’t dissimilar to mine. The challenges that I was coming up against in my role were challenges that they were also trying to navigate. This gave me some reassurance that I was on the right track and that I do have the skills and aptitude for a career in marketing and communications.
If you’re unsure if job shadowing is right for you... Well, you don’t know unless you try, right? I think that there is a lot of benefit to be had from taking advantage of the specialist knowledge and experience that we have at the University and getting to see how things work from a different perspective.
It’s also important to remember that job shadowing is a flexible arrangement which means you can agree beforehand about timings and goals, and keep monitoring and adjusting once you’ve started to make sure it helps you achieve your aims.