Time out with: Kerry Nicholson

What is The Returnship programme?

As a team, Brand Champions are striving to make a difference in the advertising and marketing world. We understand that we have our part to play in ensuring our ‘world’ is a more diverse and inclusive one. The Returnship is a way of us helping people return to work who might have been away for any period of time, due to having children or suffered a loss etc. We often find when people to return to a role, especially a marketing role, they realise so much has changed – the aim is to offer them support.

What does the training entail?

For six months, you gain access to our online platform that contains a wide range of modules, including any new content we develop. We have over 200 years of marketing experience and you’ll be given a mentor from our team based on your area of work. That person will spend time talking with you to figure out what you want to focus on e.g. if you’re looking for a new job, it could be helping you with your CV. It’s all about helping people come back to work with confidence and new skills.

Can you tell us more about the modules?

There are two types of modules available. The first are for your personal development – it could be around your influencing skills or personal effectiveness. Then we’ve got marketing skills, which might focus on writing a killer brief or communicating with your audience. The modules are short and informal and afterwards we ask you some questions and there is a workbook with scenarios and exercises for you to work through in your own time.

Then every quarter, we get everyone together that has finished that course and conduct a live session where we talk about what you’ve learned. We think that’s the big difference for us, not only is the training online but we still give you that face-to-face contact. 

How do you think this training can be beneficial to pharmacy teams?

I think from a pharmacy team point of view, there is a lot of marketing involved, especially if you’re in a small pharmacy whereby you do your own marketing. 

We predominantly work in healthcare, so we understand a lot about what the pharmacy team are trying to achieve out there and how important they are – especially since Covid. We want to be able to give those people the opportunity to work with us from a healthcare point of view, we can really zone in on how we can use these modules to grow your pharmacy and be confident when you come back to work. 

What are your future goals? 

We want to make sure that we are helping people where we can with the knowledge that we have. We have huge plans for our overall training offering to keep adding in new and exciting modules, alongside growing the bespoke training we also offer to our clients in healthcare marketing teams to help them with the brand strategies, launches and plans. 

How can readers find out more?

Visit our website or send us an email at: skills@thebrandchampions.com.