Introduction

Forge LCEP’s Young Associates mentoring programme ran from May to December 2025. I worked on arts marketing mentoring with two recent graduates, Jack and Fleur. The mentoring had a clear objective to build Jack and Fleur’s experience of arts marketing activity, and I wanted to give them experience of the kinds of skills and tasks they would be doing in marketing jobs. I thought a lot about what would have been useful to me at that point in my career - but, to be honest,  marketing is such a rapidly moving field, we could all probably use something like this at any point! We extended things beyond Summer because both Jack and Fleur were both busy – Fleur completed her mentoring in October, and we extended Jack’s to December because he was keen to dig deeper into digital infrastructure work. This flexibility seemed to work well.

We started the mentoring with induction meetings, looking at where Jack and Fleur were both coming from. Jack’s a musician and interested in music production and promotion, while Fleur’s background is in performance. We looked at how we could connect their real life experiences to the marketing skills that are needed in arts jobs, like what a marketing plan actually is, why you need one, and how to make it work in the real world with limited time and budget. We had a joint session about who we thought was doing cultural marketing really well, and who isn’t – and had some great opinionated discussions about authenticity in the arts. I was so pleased that Jack and Fleur used these skills we’d discussed to create some really compelling social media content for Forge!

We did some training sessions too, on more practical skills – website management and content creation, making real usable content for Forge in Squarespace. I signposted them to some tutorials to use at home, so we could use our time together for discussion and problem solving. They made some great content based on research they’d done independently. We also talked about different types of content – like video interviews and creating graphics using a brand identity.

In the later sessions, their careers were moving forward so we incorporated some practical careers advice into the later sessions, like CV clinics and job interview preparation. I really enjoyed working with Jack and Fleur and I hope they’ve come away with some skills they can use in their careers. They certainly gave Forge a lot of help over the summer and created some really useful resources we will continue to use!

Tessa Norton, Mentor, Young Associates 2025

Examples of our Young Associates’ work:

A write up of the LCEP Connect Event in Bradford
Guides to Further Education and Higher Education courses in North Yorkshire