Twelve brave MEC staff have stepped forward to take on the IPA Foundation Certificate challenge. There are candidates for the certificate from every team within MEC Manchester, which gives us a great opportunity to encourage and support our fellow candidates.
The IPA Foundation Certificate is an online learning programme for new starters in the advertising industry. Many of us in the group are specialists within a particularly area of media so doing the foundation certificate gives us the opportunity to see the bigger picture and gives us a good grounding.
As someone with a background outside of media it’s really helping to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. It’s working to provide a solid understanding about the premise of communication plans – the whys and hows of what we do in our jobs.
It’s easy to feel confident the course material will deliver a good grounding to the industry because the syllabus and content has been designed by industry experts based on their own experience and they even appear in videos throughout.
The learning material is always varied and interesting, using background readers, videos of expert views, key and background readers, quick guides and discussion boards. Most of the activities take between 10 and 20 minutes to complete, which means we can dip in and out of the material when the opportunity arises. The context is always relevant to our roles and includes theories such as behavioural economics and choice architecture, as well as more practical guidance such as how to determine the effectiveness of a campaign. We’ve been given three Gold award winning case studies to learn for our exam – Peperami, Audi and John Lewis so we’re not short of inspiring material.
So far the course has equipped us with an invaluable understanding of the inner workings of the industry. Using detailed case studies from different companies and industries, we feel more ready than ever to face the challenges we may encounter in our current role and as we progress at MEC.
This year is the 10th anniversary of the IPA foundation certificate so fingers crossed they don’t make this one especially difficult. Our exam is on February 24th, so wish us good luck!