External Affairs Intern

**Contract**: 12 month placement, 37 hours per week

**Closing Date**: Sunday 10 July

We have a brilliant opportunity for a graduate starting out in their career to join our Strategy and Communications Team for a 12-month internship supporting our external affairs work.

You will be our ‘eyes and ears’, keeping on top of what’s going on in the housing, policy and political world. This is a varied role supporting our external affairs, stakeholder engagement work and providing support on a variety of projects, campaigns and events.

You’ll need to be a true team player - someone who can get stuck in and help with team-wide projects.

This is a rewarding, fun and varied role with a friendly, innovative and hardworking team - an ideal opportunity for a hard-working and enthusiastic individual looking to gain experience and develop their career in communications and external affairs.

**Main responsibilities include**:
You will assist with telling our story, promoting our brand, and sharing the good work we do in transforming the lives of our customers and communities.

Provide political monitoring and intelligence gathering across national, regional, and local government, with a focus on policy issues most relevant to the housing sector

Provide research and information to support the development and delivery of key activities.

Develop biographical and policy briefings on key industry and policy developments for senior internal stakeholders, including conducting research to inform these documents

Assist the team with stakeholder management, including research, mapping and engagement strategies

**We are looking for someone who has**:
An interest in and good understanding of current affairs

Excellent literacy skills

A can-do mindset, engaging demeanour and team spirit

Willingness to learn and ability to pick up things quickly

Educated to degree level

What’s in it for you?

In return, you will receive a competitive salary, 27 days annual leave (plus Christmas shut down), a defined benefit pension scheme, health cash plan, a range of shopping and leisure discounts.

We are output focused and flexible and believe in giving colleagues the right balance of autonomy and support to enable them to work to their full potential. Despite the high expectation for performance and delivery, we are committed to ensuring colleagues have a healthy work-life balance and able to work in agile ways which support them.

About us

Our People Strategy presents a clear picture of how we will achieve our Corporate Plan aim, ‘Be an exceptional place to work that attracts, develops and retains talent’. The Strategy focuses on three key themes that help us support our colleagues to make a difference to our customers, the communities we serve and to themselves.

It is important to us that we have a diverse workforce, representative of the communities we serve. Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) to us means colleagues living our values, dedicated to doing the right thing and exercising good judgement. This will encourage a culture where all can thrive, acknowledging that everyone is different; what matters to us is that everyone can come to work and feel comfortable to be themselves.

We are proud to be accredited as a Disability Confident Employer and ensure that disabled people and those with long term health conditions have the opportunity to fulfil their potential and realise their aspirations while working with us. We want to make it clear that we welcome disabled applicants for all our roles. If in doubt look out for the Disability Confident logo.

We will ensure that our recruitment process is inclusive and accessible, and we will interview applicants with a disability if they meet the essential criteria for a role. We will also support existing colleagues with a disability or long-term health condition enabling them to stay in work, making reasonable adjustments if necessary.

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