communications coordinator Edinburgh, Scotland
Job description
UE07: £36,333.00 - £43,155.00 Per Annum
Communications and Marketing
Open Ended Contract - Permanent: Full Time - 35 Hours per Week
2 Posts Available
The Opportunity:
The post-holder will work in a small team responsible for enhancing and building on the University’s reputation with external audiences. The role requires balancing responses to media enquiries on key issues affecting University business, alongside the proactive promotion of University activities. The team works closely with the Research Communications and Internal Communications teams and supports their work if required.
The role requires strong organisational skills for devising, implementing and evaluating strategic media and communications activities across all platforms to promote the University’s corporate activity across a range of professional services, events and partnership projects.
A key function of the role is to respond to media enquiries from international, national, regional and local press in line with deadlines. Drafting media statements and advising senior management on how to respond on issues of reputational importance is an integral part of this role. In addition, it requires use of social media, writing for the web and working with the University’s audio-visual team, and external contractors, to create multimedia packages for online and other platforms.
The Higher Education sector, nationally and globally, is currently facing high levels of scrutiny on a number of topics, so the post-holder needs to be adept at switching between different issues. The post-holder will be comfortable working in a large and highly devolved environment, with many competing demands for their attention, and be able to demonstrate the appropriate levels of operational skills and experience that allow them to manage these challenging priorities. Both the proactive and reactive aspects of the role will require the post-holder to, on occasion, manage media or communications activity on site. Such activity could include, but is not limited to, managing photocalls; overseeing film crews; attending interviews; and managing press at key University events.
The nature of the job requires a flexible attitude to some out of hours work. The post-holder will be expected to attend some evening events and at times to respond to out of office enquiries and emergencies.
Your skills and attributes for success:
- Educated to degree level or with equivalent relevant professional experience
- Experience of a press/ public relations environment
- Keen news sense and knowledge of how the media operates
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Proven track record of advising colleagues at the most senior level
Click to view a copy of the full job description (opens new browser tab)
As a valued member of our team you can expect:
An exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work. We give you support, nurture your talent and reward success. You will benefit from a competitive reward package and a wide range of staff benefits, which includes a generous holiday entitlement, a defined benefits pension scheme , staff discounts, family friendly initiatives , flexible working and much more. Access our staff benefits page for further information and use our reward calculator to find out the total value of pay and benefits provided.
The University of Edinburgh holds a Silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our commitment to advance gender equality in higher education. We are members of the Race Equality Charter and we are also Stonewall Scotland Diversity Champions, actively promoting LGBT equality.
If invited for interview you will be required to evidence your right to work in the UK. Further information is available on our right to work webpages.
On this occasion the University will not consider applicants requiring sponsorship for this role. International workers will therefore only be able to take up this role if they can demonstrate an alternative right to work in the UK.
Key dates to note
The closing date for applications is 11th August 2023.
Unless stated otherwise the closing time for applications is 11:59pm GMT. If you are applying outside the UK the closing time on our adverts automatically adjusts to your browsers local time zone.
Interviews will be held 31 August and 1 September 2023 .
