Communications Officer

**Communications Officer**

**Full Time - 35 Hours**

**£24,000 - £26,255 based on experience**

**Permanent contract**

**Introduction**:
FIRST is an accredited learning and development agency specialising in enterprise skills for young people, early-stage founders, and professionals. We collaborate with educational institutions, local authorities, businesses, and community organisations to tackle high unemployment and low business startup rates. Our mission is to connect, celebrate, and empower individuals to explore employment, entrepreneurship, and professional development opportunities.

**Our Culture**:
The FIRST team takes pride in our fun, supportive and innovative approach to project design, delivery and evaluation. We are an optimistic and professional team of creative thinkers with the shared desire to disrupt the skills market to better suit people, the planet and our economy.

**Our work**:
At FIRST, we believe that enterprise skills are the keys to personal and economic growth and that learning doesn’t just happen in the classroom. Our motivation for our work comes from encouraging, developing and connecting early stage founders, jobseekers, students, graduates and professionals to their wider communities so that jobs and businesses are created.

**Benefits**:

- We offer a vibrant, inclusive, and diverse workplace, opportunities for professional development and career progression, and a competitive salary.
- A day off when your birthday falls on a weekday
- Extended holidays after 2 years of service.

**Your skills**:

- Event hosting
- Creative and report copywriting
- Digital Marketing
- Strong project management and organisational skills.
- Attention to detail & proof reading
- Communication, interpersonal and oral skills
- Relationship management
- Stress tolerance
- Decision-making
- Reliability
- Deadline-oriented
- Critical thinking and problem solving
- Delegation
- Teamwork
- Adaptability
- Multi-tasking in a target driven environment.

**Your experience**:

- 3+ years of experience in communication or public relations.
- Experience in managing social media accounts and engaging with followers on various platforms.
- Familiarity with media relations and event communications.

**Overall job role**

The Communications Officer will be responsible for executing effective communication plans to promote the organisation, its products and services, building strong relationships with all stakeholders.

**Key responsibilities**:

- Develop and execute FIRST communication strategy, promoting FIRST, its products and services to internal and external stakeholders.
- Ensure that the communication strategy is operationalised and implemented to achieve project and partner objectives and outcome statements and to monitor and evaluate progress in close cooperation with the Partnership Manager.
- Collaborate with various departments within FIRST to ensure that all communication materials are consistent and reflect the brand and tone.
- Manage FIRST's social media accounts and engage with followers on various platforms.
- Respond to inquiries from the public, clients and stakeholders, and provide them with accurate information about FIRST's products and services.
- Develop and maintain relationships with the media and provide them with timely and accurate information about FIRST's activities and events.
- Monitor and analyse the effectiveness of communication strategies and make necessary adjustments to improve results.
- Produce company-wide and project impact reports for board meetings, external stakeholders, and clients.
- Ensure compliance with all relevant laws, regulations, and policies related to communication.
- Work with the Development team to create content, tools and methods to engage partners, stakeholders and project participants to promote the uptake of project opportunities.
- Maintain high quality relationships with stakeholders and clients to ensure participant and partner needs are accurately assessed and met (for example, understanding what makes project outputs relevant, valuable and accessible to audiences).
- Attend all client facing events, utilising the delivery team and external services to provide technical and delivery support for communication purposes.
- Create in-house infographics and other high-quality content and as necessary, commission and project manage external agencies to produce high quality content.
- Perform additional tasks as needed to support our projects.

Pay: £24,000.00-£26,255.00 per year

**Benefits**:

- Company events
- On-site parking

Schedule:

- 8 hour shift
- Monday to Friday

**Education**:

- GCSE or equivalent (preferred)

**Experience**:

- Communications/Marketing: 1 year (preferred)
- Organising & Hosting Events: 1 year (preferred)
- Networking: 1 year (preferred)

Licence/Certification:

- Full Driving License (preferred)

Work authorisation:

- United Kingdom (required)

Willingness to travel:

- 25% (preferred)

Work Location: In