A day at GTI Media - the brand behind TARGETjobs

Loughborough student Lauren Leftley spent a day work shadowing with us this Spring. And here she is now letting you know what she learnt. 

With the help of my university I was fortunate enough to gain a place to spend the day work shadowing at GTI Media, where I experienced particular roles of an editorial manager. GTI Media is a company which deals with the TARGETjobs publications and website, both of which I’m sure most of you are familiar with. The purpose of the day was to help me decide whether a career in publishing would be suitable to me. I also wanted to find out first-hand what it would be like working in a professional working environment.

So, what tasks of an editorial role did I experience?  One of the first tasks of the day was to re-evaluate particular sections of the website. I and two fellow students were given different sections of the website to analyse. Whilst looking at the website we were looking out for what is appealing to students and what didn’t work so well. We were the perfect people for the job being the target audience ourselves. Once this was completed, we were asked to give feedback. This was a done via a group discussion of our findings from the notes that we made whilst looking through the website. Our ideas were listened to and discuss.

The next task was to create a blog piece based on a certain aspect of university life. This put our English studies skills to the test, where we had to create pieces which were written in a suitable manner to appeal to students whilst creating it under time restraints. After completion the blog pieces were looked over by our supervisor of the day and we were provided with positive feedback.

After lunch we started to look at a different aspect of the company; the design of the publications. This put our visual creativeness to the test and was very enjoyable, appealing to my art background.      

So, that’s what we did throughout the day, but how did this help us? The day helped to reveal further insight into what an editor’s role involves but also in a broader sense helped us to understand how the publishing sector works. The information and advice that I received from GTI employees was extremely helpful in helping me to decide whether this is the career for me and what routes there are in order to get into this career.

Due to the day at GTI Media I feel further informed about what a career in publishing entails, this experience was invaluable in helping me decide my future career path and I feel the experience allowed me to find out much more information in comparison to doing my own research through other means.

           

                                                                                                                        -Lauren Leftley