On Woodside's Side

Hello everyone!

I hope you are all enjoying your internships. Well I'll give you a quick low-down on my placement...Sadly, I made the mistake of not handing in a form during my placement, so I only just got access to this blog. And rather than finishing my placement on October 12, I am actually finishing tomorrow! This is because I have acually done all of my time at my placement, and wont have a lot of work to do. So this may be the one and only blog from me :( I do apologise!

My placement is at Woodside Energy, which is Australia's leading oil and gas company. The building is at 240 St Georges terrace, and I'm on the 22nd floor of a 24-floor building - definately awesome. I am working in the Corporate Communications skill pool. The people I work with are great, and I have even made good friends with the guy I sit next to!

The company has been fantastic to work for. I have definately learnt a lot from the people I am surrounded by all day. I have learnt about Woodside's magazine Trunkline, written two stories for it and organised a photographer to take photos of the people involved in the stories - he was lovely!

I created 2 running schedules for the 2010 Staff Briefing in Perth and Karratha for two separate groups of people, starting with only a small amount of information. I have updated a number of media contact lists and Trunkline mailing lists.

I sent emails out to people in Corporate Communications to inform me of any questions that they are frequently asked, followed by the answers so that I was able to send them to IT to update on the internal "How Do I?" site using keywords.

From looking at last year's staff briefing presentation, I created a staff briefing presentation for this year. The presentation is similar to a powerpoint presentation that contains facts and statistics to play with photos while people are entering the venue for the annual briefing. I sent out emails to people all over Woodside to collect little snippets and facts of information that could go into the presentation, then found photos in the image archives to compliment the fact or figure. Once I had created this in powerpoint, another team member finished the presentation off in Flash.

At the beginning of my time at Woodside I was involved in an Emergency Response Exercise which is an exercise for crisis management - certain people in a room all day dealing with the pressure, phone calls, media, releases etc that come with a crisis. What a fantastic experience! For half the day I created an action log of everything that was happening in the room.

I also watched a Fremantle Dockers press conference with Mark Harvey and Matthew Pavlich, as Woodside are proud supporters. Who saw the GO FREO sign on the Woodside building? That was my manager who came up with the idea, and the guy who sits next to me who organised it to go up! It covered all the windows in our area plus more! This was an absolutely fantastic was to generate media covereage - had some fantastic response.

I have also learnt how to use programs like DRIMS and more of Microsoft Outlook, such as creating meetings in collegues diaries and sending out invites etc.

There were also great little perks too, like getting to watch the Freo v Hawthorn football game in the Woodside corporate box - and it was an amazing game! I also got to attend a corporate breakfast for the "Leadership Matters" program, at which Bernie Brooks, Myer CEO, gave a speech.

I'll finish the overview here with what I had been doing today. Over the duration of my placement I have been collecting information on a number of Woodside's main sponsorship partners, being called 'case studies'. At the end process of all of it, I have created 4 fact sheets that will hopefully be published within the next year.

There is so much more, such as attending corporate comms meetings, meeting Woodside's CEO Don Voelte and so on, but I do believe that I have covered the main learning experiences. Any that I have forgotten will be posted tomorrow.

I would love to hear from any of you if you have done anything similar to me in your work placement!

I hope this post sees all of you well and enjoying yourselves!

Verity xxx