The brief
During both the 2015/16 and 2016/17 academic year Step successfully ran the IPA’s AdMission summer internship programme. The IPA is the professional body for the advertising industry, representing over 300 advertising agencies in the UK.
The aim of the AdMission programme is to encourage more STEM students to look at careers in advertising, an industry typically dominated by those with more creative skillsets. The IPA wanted to organise a summer internship programme aimed at STEM students that would be a launch pad for long term graduate careers in advertising.
As well as the recruitment for the internships, another target of the programme was to expand awareness of the advertising sector as a potential career destination for STEM students.
How we delivered the programme
We organised and delivered a nationwide promotional programme, which included delivering talks to students in employability sessions and at society nights as well as numerous careers fairs. We visited locations up and down the country including; London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds, Cambridge and more.
One of the challenges of the programme was dealing with multiple agencies instead of one central entity as would be typical in other graduate schemes. This involved liaising with many contacts across the agencies involved. We worked with larger international agencies as well as smaller SME agencies, each with their individual requirements and responsibilities for the candidates. This meant a lot of work went into preparation guidance for the candidates put forward as well as organisation of differing interview timetables, induction days, start dates and more.
The outcome
The programme was very successful both years, with a wide ranging response from students and a large number of internships organised between the 11 agencies that got involved in the programme. Many of the students placed decided to stay on in the advertising industry after their placement, having discovered a passion for data and analytics and thus the pipeline of STEM talent that the IPA was looking to established came to fruition.