Hollie Follett- Our Bournemouth University Placement Student

Meet Hollie Follett - Our Marketing Placement Student

By Hollie Follett, Marketing Assistant at Pro2col, 17 November 2022

I’m Hollie, I am a Marketing Communications and PR student at Bournemouth University currently on my placement year at Pro2col as part of the marketing department.  

Switching from the life of a student to working a 9-5 was a culture shock. Gone were the lectures, seminars and essay writing, replaced with morning meetings, conference calls, task lists and duties. In just 3 months, the skills I’ve gained have been invaluable, I've got a taste of the real working world, and learnt how much office workers love cake!

Pro2col is the UK’s leading Managed File Transfer consultancy, with over 18 years of experience in MFT, workflow automation and system integration. Having been thrown into the deep end of such a highly technical field, I have been overwhelmed at times with getting to grips with technical content, working with new systems, and adjusting to a new job. However, the team here have been excellent with the onboarding process and has really made me feel a valued part of the team in such a short amount of time. The team often have loads of fun with post-work drinks, weekly quizzes and social events for Halloween, and charity events supporting the local community. I am really looking forward to the Christmas party this year!  

I have been made responsible for revamping several pages on the website, pushing me to learn web design on a content management system, a widely used marketing tool. Having worked on these pages, a complete redesign of the careers page, glossary, ethos page and job vacancy templates have now gone live. Through this system, I also plan and regularly schedule social media posts across all our platforms, edit and update blog content. As I continue working on social media, I will be working with the Marketing Executive to do social media reporting and analytics on our content. Email marketing within the CMS is a tool I have also been using regularly, following our content calendar, and working with the wider marketing team to write, proof and target email lists.   

Content creation is one of the ongoing projects I work on currently, creating use cases and one-pagers for our channel manager to use as promotional material. Through learning these skills I have gained knowledge in design, using Canva and PowerPoint, and soon to have skills in photoshop. With my newfound design skills, I rolled out a Teams background that was pushed out to be used across the business whilst on calls with clients or partners.  

With my learning path being Public Relations at University, I have been able to put this theory into practice in the last few months. I manage the PR contacts and collated a ‘local business’ list for our press release to go out to when Pro2col announced a partnership with Axway, a French American Information technology company. I also regularly work with the CEO and tech team to complete onboarding presentations and put information into our branding guidelines.  

Coming into my placement, I knew I would be using systems such as Microsoft Office and didn’t realise how powerful tools like excel were to utilise in day-to-day tasks. To enable me to succeed, I was offered an online training course on Microsoft office essentials to provide me with some great skills that will come in handy in the rest of my placement and future career. As a cyber security company, it is also vital I have the correct training so have completed Hiscox cyber security training as part of onboarding.  

I am really looking forward to using this skill set daily in my work and mastering some proficiencies I can take into my final year at university and elsewhere.

Check out some of the pages I have revamped!