How to become a media assistant: Hayley's story

Hayley Ford - Media assistant

My job is essentially helping the media manager in any tasks that they need. It could be match reports, it could be running up information from a press conference, it’s also about engaging with fans, getting ticket prices out there, travel information for away games. We also do a lot on social media so Instagram stories on matchday, build up on Twitter, things like that.

One of the things that I do here which I’m really excited about is a thing we call DDTV which is essentially YouTube videos that are for kids that star kids. It’s about creating a moment of magic so the kids come in, they meet a player, we also do some silly games. So my role within that is to get everybody together, get the plans ready for the actual filming day, then I film it with the help of a few other people around the club. After that, I would edit together and we put one out every Monday at 4pm.

I didn’t really realise that this was a job that I could do until I was about 25. As soon as I was in this one I knew that that this was what I wanted to do but it took me a really long time to find it even though for me it seems like the obvious perfect choice, I was really into media, I was really into writing and I was really into football so yeah, it took a long time to find it but now I’m here I’m really happy.

Some of the skills that you need for this job, the main one being communication, obviously communicating with the fans is our main role, a lot of that is written so really good written technique is really important. Other skills are hitting deadlines, there’s probably nothing more important in media than trying to hit a deadline, so that requires a lot of organisation and being on top of things, planning, getting work done early in the week if you can, because the end of the week’s crazy leading up to a matchday.

Volunteering gets you into a club or gets you into a business; it gives you really good skills. I did a lot of that in the past and even when I didn’t think it was going to be relevant, it came back years later and was really relevant and actually something I did at uni, a bit of volunteering I did at uni that I didn’t even think anything of, I think seven years later got me a job! So yeah, take any opportunity that comes to you and keep, just keep at it, just keep at it, yeah.