Elevating Expertise with Continued Education
As students head back to the classroom this fall, it’s important to remember that learning never ends. In fact, it is key to growing and evolving a well-rounded communications skillset.
As an account executive in Adfero’s Health Practice, I have quickly learned that to be successful at an agency, you must become an expert on your clients’ priorities and goals. This means expanding your knowledge to deeply understand their key issue areas and how to best share the right messages with their audience to incite change. Continuous learning and education is a critical way to help you stay in the know about current events, shifting public policies, media conversations, public sentiment and key players impacting your work.
This continuous learning takes many forms inside and outside the office. Attending professional development events, conferences, lectures and seminars are some ways Adfero team members take advantage of growing in their respective practice areas. Adfero supports and encourages staff members to attend these events, by sharing opportunities every month and keeping a pulse on the types of professional development that would be beneficial to the team. In addition to these opportunities, graduate school is another way in which I’ve decided to further my communications education.
How I’ve Harnessed This Opportunity
When I joined Adfero’s Health Practice, I knew I wanted to continue my education outside of work by pursuing a master’s degree in public health. I found programs to apply to that focused on communications and marketing in the health space, complementing and expanding upon the work I do every day. When I brought up this opportunity to my colleagues, the managers and leaders at Adfero went full steam ahead to support my journey. Whether through schedule adjustments, days I needed to take off for final exams or helping me balance my workload to support course work, they consistently supported me.
Adfero’s core purpose is to create opportunities for people to do what they do best, and by valuing team members’ continued education, they know that what you learn from a classroom can strengthen and elevate the work you produce in the office.
In the first year of my graduate program, I took classes on how to apply advanced communication theory to public health campaigns. Key takeaways included how to use concepts like Social Marketing Theory to entice an audience to take action to learn and speak out about public health issues. Tactics, which I was already familiar with from my client work, included leaning into audience research to better understand their goals and priorities, targeting them through digital platforms and measuring results to determine if you’ve moved the needle on certain health issues.
Day-to-day at Adfero, we use all these tactics to execute dynamic communications campaigns advocating for our clients’ priorities. We research and measure what will capture the target audience’s attention and optimize our messaging and channels to achieve the strongest results. I feel motivated when what I learn in school directly translates back to the office, and I can utilize outside academic research, as well as findings from experts in different areas of the public health space, to help inform our strategies and approaches for clients.
For me, having an employer who fervently supports my desire to take advantage of outside learning has been crucial in helping elevate and expand the ideas and solutions I bring to the workplace.
The Adfero POV
Supporting teams in their outside education, certification courses or professional development allows individuals to expand their expertise, share the skills they learn and achieve stronger communications results.
