Learning and development

The Refresh Academy

We’re dedicated to helping our people grow and achieve their potential. That’s why we set up The Refresh Academy – a bespoke in-house training programme of structured learning and development, created and delivered by expert PR practitioners and trainers. Our unrivalled programme – which all of our employees have access to – provides you with all the skills and knowledge to help you to become highly effective in your role and progress your career with Refresh.

Training is bespoke to each job level and designed to help each person achieve their potential. With appraisals every six months which focus on future aims and ambitions, those seeking promotion can use The Refresh Academy to achieve the next step in their career, while those happy to stay in their current roles can fine-tune their PR skills with support from the Academy.

Whether it’s social media marketing modules for our managers or leadership and commercial training for account directors, we make sure that Refresh develops the best talent available. In turn, this ensures we can offer our clients the best strategic, no-nonsense advice via a team of highly trained consultants.

Refresh’s Young Talent Scheme

We’re also really proud of our Young Talent Scheme, designed to find the sector’s brightest young talent. As part of this, we invest vital time, knowledge and development into the north-west’s next generation of PR superstars.

Working with schools, colleges and universities across the north west, each year the scheme attracts hundreds of applicants. We take just 4-6 forward to our assessment day before we choose at least one suitable candidate.

Successful candidates are then given their unique personal development plan and get to work immediately with the rest of the team. And if there’s one thing for sure, our young talent isn’t doing the brew rounds and sorting the post out – we think it’s really important that they get stuck in from the start!

External resources at our fingertips

We’ve been members of the Chartered Institute of PR and the Chartered Institute of Marketing since our inception. We value both organisations for the training that they provide to all our team members.

We are also members of Manchester Digital which provides Refresh with a wealth of information about the tech sector across the North West, and The Glass and Glazing Federation, which allows us to understand the impact of trade legislation on our clients in the glazing and wider construction sector. Through both we are able to access more training and resources for our team to support their development.

As members of the Greater Manchester Good Employment Charter, we had the opportunity to take advantage of their Good Employment Week. We launched a paid placement initiative to give the next generation of PR pros the chance to gain experience in Tech PR and marketing. You can read more about this on Kaitlin’s blog, as she joined us for a week of work experience.

Let us support you

Want to grow your business, change direction, shout louder, boost your sales leads, or keep your brand out of the news? Our door is always open. If you think we can help, get in touch.