Internal Communications Manager Career Guide UK

An internal communications manager is the person an organisation turns to when it needs to say something to its own people — and then make sure they understand it, trust it, and act on it. Where a marketing manager works outward toward customers and a PR or external communications manager works outward toward the press, the internal communications manager works inward: the leadership message delivered before the all-hands, the intranet story that explains a restructure, the “what to say if asked” briefing that keeps every colleague consistent when customers start calling, and the two-way channel that turns a one-way announcement into an actual conversation.

This is a role that is easy to under-rate from the outside and more demanding than that suggests from the inside. It sits close to the centre of the business, it runs through HR, the executive team and the moments when things change, and it is increasingly treated as a discipline of its own rather than an inbox that a wider comms team occasionally checks. This guide explains what the work actually involves, how it differs from the external communications roles it sits beside, what UK employers look for, the realistic routes in, and where the career can take you next.

What an internal communications manager is

At its core, an internal communications manager owns the employee-facing half of an organisation’s communication: what the organisation tells its people, how it is said, and how two-way engagement works. That breaks into three overlapping jobs.

First, the story: building and keeping the narrative the organisation tells itself current — who it is, what it’s doing, where it’s going — and the tone of voice and messaging that make sure it sounds like one organisation across a thousand people and multiple sites. Second, the channels: the intranet or portal, the email and newsletter, the leadership updates and town halls, and the internal social or collaboration channels that carry day-to-day news. Third, the loop: the listening, the feedback, the pulse and the measurement that tell you whether people are actually informed and aligned, rather than assuming a message that was sent is a message that was understood.

The defining difference from the external side of communications is the audience. The people you’re speaking to already work there, already have their own view of the leadership, and will read what you put out as a signal of how the organisation treats them. That makes the role both more direct — you’re not persuading a third party to give you space — and more sensitive, because a clumsy message to your own people rarely stays internal long.

Scope depends heavily on company size and where the function sits

In a small or growing company, an internal communications manager is usually the entire internal comms function: the intranet, the all-hands, the leadership emails, the culture and engagement work, and often the bridge to employer branding. In a large group the title is one seat inside a communications or people team: you may own an internal comms programme, a portfolio of business units, or the leadership-communications thread that runs across the enterprise, with a head of communications or a chief people officer above you.

In UK practice the function commonly sits within a wider corporate communications or PR team, with a meaningful share placed under HR and People and a smaller number running it as a standalone discipline. Where it sits changes who you report to and which stakeholders shape the work, so it’s worth reading the advert to find out which world you’d land in.

What the work actually looks like

Here are the main workstreams you’ll find across UK posts, with a sense of what each involves in practice.

The story: strategy, narrative and tone of voice

A large share of the job is deciding what the organisation needs its people to understand, and how you’ll know they’ve understood it. You’ll translate a business priority — a new strategy, an acquisition, a shift in values — into an internal story: the theme, the messages, the audiences, the moments when the story lands, and the channels that carry it. In a mature organisation much of this work is protecting and evolving an established narrative; in a newer one you build the messaging framework from scratch. The skill being tested is judgement: knowing which message matters most, sequencing who hears it first, and holding a consistent tone across email, intranet, slides and a CEO’s own voice.

Internal news, the intranet and the everyday channels

This is the steady, unglamorous work that holds the role together. You’ll source the news, commission or write pieces, keep the intranet or portal current, plan and edit the monthly newsletter, and decide what the team channels carry. In practice that means an editorial calendar, a content pipeline, an approval route that keeps senior sign-off working without slowing everything to a halt, and the small daily work that keeps the channels alive rather than letting them go stale. The quality bar on this work is lower-drama than an external launch but just as visible: this is where colleagues judge whether their employer keeps them in the loop.

Leadership communications and the executive conversation

One of the most distinctive parts of the job is writing for, with and on behalf of the leadership team. You’ll draft and edit executive messages, prepare talking points and Q&As for town halls, help leaders prepare for a difficult announcement, and ghostwrite in a senior voice when the room needs it. Equally important is the advisory side: flagging when a message won’t land, when a leader is over-promising, or when the tone is at risk, and advising the executive team on what to say, in what order, and to whom first. Strong internal communicators are the ones who earn a seat at that table — the person the chief executive calls before the room does.

Change and transformation communication

A real number of posts carry this explicitly, and it’s worth knowing before you apply. Where it’s in the remit, you’ll support restructures, mergers and acquisitions, integrations, new ways of working and leadership transitions — the work of telling people what is changing, why, what it means for their day-to-day, and what happens next, while managing the uncertainty and the trust that come with it. This is often the most senior and sensitive part of the job: getting the sequence right (who hears before whom), keeping leadership consistent under pressure, and staying readable when the facts are still moving.

Employee engagement and the two-way loop

Modern internal communications is less about broadcasting and more about conversation. Expect to build the loops that bring employee input in — surveys, pulse checks, Q&As, feedback channels, suggestion and advocacy programmes — and to feed what people are saying back to the leadership and back out to the wider team. A growing share of UK posts describe the internal team’s job as facilitating employee voice and two-way dialogue rather than pushing polished messages out. The instinct being tested is empathy and organisational reading: understanding what a particular group of colleagues is actually feeling, and communicating in a way that reflects that.

Events, town halls and the moments that matter

The visible heartbeats of the role. You’ll plan and run all-hands and leadership updates, prep the leaders and the material, agree the format that suits the message, and make sure the follow-up lands with the people who couldn’t be in the room. In many posts this extends to the engagement programme — celebrations, events, recognition and the smaller rituals that make an organisation feel like one place rather than a set of teams. The skill here is production and judgement under a fixed clock.

Working across the business: HR, People, legal and external comms

Internal communications is a coordination role as much as a writing role. You’ll work closely with HR and People on engagement, change and the employee experience; with legal on what can be said, employee data and the approvals that come with it; and with the external communications team to make sure the story a colleague hears internally matches what the world hears. Where union or employee representatives are in play, briefing them before a wider announcement is a real part of the job in the UK. None of these relationships is one you can order people through — it’s influence, timing and trust, every day.

Measuring what’s working

Credible posts have a measurement thread. The metrics differ from external communications — reach, read rates, town hall attendance, pulse-survey sentiment, engagement with the intranet and channels are the usual set — but the discipline is the same: build a baseline, track it, and tell leadership a true story about what moved and what didn’t. The skill is being comfortable with the numbers and honest enough to report a disappointing result without dressing it up.

A day and a week in the role

Days are shaped by what’s close to a leadership moment, but a composite picture from a typical UK post looks like this:

Morning: checking the channels and the inbox — a draft executive message awaiting sign-off, a story that needs a fact-check with a subject-matter expert, a feedback thread from last week’s update.
Mid-morning: a working session with a leader on an upcoming announcement — agreeing what to say, what to hold back and who hears it first — or a review of a piece of intranet content with the content or design partner.
Midday: the internal update or town-hall slot driving the week, a stakeholder meeting on an HR or change programme, and the approvals that keep sensitive material on the right side of the line.
Afternoon: producing or commissioning content, preparing the next leadership talk, then a slot for measurement — putting the week’s reach, read rates and engagement into the readout and drafting the update.
Close: planning tomorrow, and the odd evening when a major announcement or a sensitive conversation doesn’t respect office hours.

On the weekly rhythm you’ll see recurring leadership touchpoints, channel upkeep and the steady push forward on the engagement calendar. On the monthly or quarterly rhythm: the leadership readout, the pulse or survey cycle, and the planning for the next major internal moment. During a restructure, an acquisition or a leadership transition the whole tempo inverts and the day is built around the decision, the leader and the message sequence rather than the routine — and that’s the heart of the role, not an exception.

This role versus the roles next to it

The job market uses several titles that sit close to internal communications, and candidates are often unsure which to target. Here’s how they tend to differ.

Internal communications manager versus PR & communications manager. A PR and communications manager owns earned and external communication — the media relationships, the reputation work, the disclosure and the story the organisation tells the outside world — with the employee-facing half as one workstream alongside it. An internal communications manager makes that employee-facing half into the whole job: the audience is the people who work there, and everything else hangs off that. If an advert is heavy on journalists, coverage and share of voice, read it as external first; if it’s heavy on the intranet, the all-hands and the leadership conversation, read it as internal.

Internal communications manager versus copywriter. A copywriter produces words to a brief — the headline, the page, the email, the script — usually across campaign or client work and judged on the writing. An internal communications manager owns the channel, the story and the programme that the copy sits inside, and may well write a real share of it themselves. One builds the asset; the other owns the place the asset lives and why it was said.

Internal communications manager versus social media manager. A social media manager owns the external channel programme — the platforms, the calendar, the community, and the sponsored amplification of organic content. An internal communications manager runs the internal surfaces — the intranet, the team collaboration channels, the newsletter and the town halls — with engagement and alignment rather than external reach as the aim. The instincts overlap, but one audience is your customers and the other is your colleagues.

Internal communications manager versus brand manager. A brand manager owns the brand platform — its positioning, identity and the standards every piece of communication has to sit inside. An internal communications manager keeps that brand consistent inside the organisation — the tone of voice, the values in practice, the way the story is told to the people who carry it — without owning the brand itself. If your instinct is to protect and grow what a brand means over the long run, the brand track suits you; if it’s to make an organisation’s own people understand and align with what it’s doing, the internal track does.

Internal communications manager versus HR and People (a working relationship, not a rival role). This is worth being clear about, because the two are so close that some organisations place internal communications under HR or People. HR and People own the employee lifecycle — hiring, pay, performance, policy, benefits, discipline. Internal communications supports that work by making sure people understand and align with it, and by carrying the engagement, change and culture messages. They sit side by side and hand work to each other constantly, but the seats are different: one owns the policy and the process, the other owns the story and the conversation around it.

One practical warning that holds across all of it: a job title is not a scope statement. An “internal communications manager” at a thirty-person company may be the whole people-facing communication function, while the same title in a national group may own one business unit’s internal programme or just the leadership-communications thread. Judge any advert by what it actually asks for — the channels owned, any crisis or change remit, the external-comms overlap, any direct reports, and the reporting line — rather than by the headline.

How the job changes with the employer

The title travels across very different contexts in the UK, and the context changes the job more than the channels do.

Technology, SaaS and AI is a heavily represented home of the discipline. The work leans on translating a fast-changing strategy into a narrative people can carry, running high-attendance all-hands and leadership forums at scale, and keeping a distributed, multi-office, often remote workforce aligned. Several roles here are explicitly “builder” roles — setting up the channels, cadence and metrics baseline from a low base as the company scales — and a real share ask for comfort using AI tools to produce and personalise communication at speed.

Financial services and fintech use the title for broader internal ownership — leadership communications, change and integration messaging and employee alignment inside a regulated business where what can be said, and when, is tightly constrained. The work leans on judgment, consistency under pressure and close coordination with compliance and legal, and a more formal tone than in a consumer brand.

Higher education, academies and charities sit at the heart of the discipline in the UK. Here the centre of gravity is engagement, belonging and mission: keeping colleagues and volunteers, often across a spread of locations and with a strong line-manager channel, connected to a purpose-led story. The skills are recognisably internal communications, but the commercial line is impact and belonging rather than a sale, and a warmer, more editorial, more two-way instinct is often the one that lands.

The public sector pairs internal communication with a strong engagement mandate. Government guidance frames the job around visible leadership, equipping line managers to do the talking, creating genuine employee voice, and closing the gap between what leaders say and what colleagues see. Internal communications is treated as the mechanism for strategy alignment and trust, not just information distribution — a framing that has quietly spread to the private sector too.

Consumer brands bring a culture-and-experience tilt: the internal comms programme, the events calendar, the hard-to-reach audiences (retail staff, itinerant or field-based workers, customers facing teams) and the effort to make people across sites feel part of one brand rather than a set of locations.

Professional services run the role around advising senior partners, translating a complex firm-wide story into what each office and each group needs, and keeping a large, distributed, professional workforce informed — often with a law-firm or consultancies flavour and a strong advisory, less production-heavy bias.

Agency versus in-house cuts across all of these. At an agency the internal communications specialist works across a portfolio of clients — a consumer brand one week, a tech company the next — applying the same craft, the same cadence and the same measurement discipline to a different business every week. The pace is fast, the client-facing muscle is constant, and the ladder runs through account and discipline leadership. In-house, you get depth with one organisation: closer to the strategy, the leaders and the people who make it, and the standard ladder of officer to executive to manager to head. Agency experience is a recognised feeder into in-house internal communications, because the breadth you’ve handled maps straight onto a single organisation’s whole remit.

Company size tilts the balance too. In a lean team you are substantially hands-on — writing the emails, running the intranet, preparing each all-hands yourself. In a large group the role is coordination, standard and judgement: a bigger budget, a team underneath, more stakeholders between an idea and its launch, and more of your time spent advising the executive table than producing the material. Neither is better by default — the smaller-company version builds range faster, the larger-company version builds depth and senior standing faster.

Skills and tools

Employers don’t expect the same toolkit from every candidate, and the advert will usually make clear which world it’s hiring into. But the pattern across UK posts is consistent: a short list of core communication skills, plus tools that vary with the role.

The core skills — commonly required

Writing and editing — clear, accurate, plain-English prose across email, intranet, speeches and the internal update, in the organisation’s voice; the near-universal foundation.
Leadership communication — drafting and shaping executive messages, preparing leaders for high-stakes moments, and telling a senior person what won’t land, in a way they’ll hear it.
Stakeholder management — influencing HR, legal, the executive team, subject-matter experts and colleagues, usually without formal authority over any of them.
Strategy and planning — turning a business priority into an internal communications plan with narrative, audiences, moments, channels and measures.
Change and transformation comms — sequencing sensitive announcements, managing uncertainty and keeping the message consistent when facts are still moving.
Empathy and organisational reading — understanding what a particular audience is feeling and communicating in a way that reflects it; the skill that separates an aligned workforce from an informed one.
Influence without authority — getting a leader to say the right thing, on the record, at the right time.
Project and deadline discipline — running an all-hands, a restructure or a sensitive announcement without dropping the ball.
Data and measurement literacy — reading reach, engagement, survey and pulse results, and telling leadership a true story rather than a flattering one.

The tools — commonly seen, versus specialist

None of these are exam subjects — employers want working familiarity, not certification, and no two employers will expect the same stack:

Commonly seen: the intranet or portal platform the business runs (SharePoint, Microsoft Viva/Office and a team collaboration tool like Slack appear most often in UK posts); the internal email, newsletter or content-management system where the everyday updates live; the town-hall or presentation tooling where you’ll prepare leader-ready material; and basic design basics — Canva and the Adobe Creative Suite — in roles where you produce some of your own material, particularly in smaller teams and professional-services settings.
Where the role is change- or culture-heavy: employee-listening and pulse-survey tooling, an engagement or advocacy platform, and the reporting that shows whether a message landed — the requirement in a post like this is always “comfort with the loop,” not mastery of any one vendor.
Specialist, where relevant: enterprise internal-communications and advocacy platforms in larger organisations; employee-engagement and wellbeing platforms; and the measurement or analytics stack a particular business uses to track reach and sentiment across its internal channels.

The honest read of that list: the tools that matter to you are the ones inside the role you’re applying for. A posting that names an intranet, an executive-communication thread and a change programme is hiring for the leadership-and-change shape of the job; one that names an engagement platform, a pulse survey and an advocacy programme is hiring for the two-way engagement shape. The concepts — narrative, audience, moment, channel, message — are what interviews really probe, and they travel across any set of tools.

Worth noting: a growing number of recent vacancy postings now explicitly ask for comfort with AI-assisted workflows — using them to draft at speed, personalise by audience and streamline production — with the judgement, the tone and the final edit staying firmly with the communicator. You don’t need to be an expert, but being able to say concretely how you’d use one in your own internal work is a genuine differentiator right now.

What employers actually ask for

Across UK posts the shape of the ask is consistent, even where the sector isn’t.

Experience. Most manager-level internal communications vacancies sit in the three-to-six-year band, with the senior and group-level seats asking for more and a handful of earlier executive seats hiring at the two-to-three-year point where the candidate has supported real internal work end to end. What reliably opens the door isn’t the year count — it’s a specific, defensible result: a restructure or announcement you ran end to end, a leadership conversation you prepared, an intranet or engagement programme you built, a measurement baseline you set up and can read out, and an agency or team you held to a standard.

Sector experience. It matters where the job names it. Financial-services, professional-services and regulated-industry posts will state the subject fluency or tone they need; consumer and mission-led posts will look for the cultural and engagement instinct. If you’re coming from outside the sector, find the transferable core — writing, leadership communication, stakeholder management, change sequencing, measurement — and say plainly where it lands.

Degrees. A degree in communications, PR, journalism, marketing, English or a related subject is common in the background of internal communications candidates and appears in some posts, but a good many roles don’t specify one and routinely accept a degree in another subject where the internal-comms experience fits. By the time you’re applying at manager level, the conversation is about what you’ve delivered — the announcements, the programmes, the engagement — not what you studied.

The evidence that moves shortlisting tends to be specific: a leadership update you prepared that you can talk through, a change you supported with a straight account of how it went, an engagement or alignment outcome you measured, and the cross-functional relationships — with HR, with the executive team, with external comms — that show the role is a trust seat, not a task seat.

Qualifications and routes into the role

This is one of the more open communication titles in terms of formal entry requirements, but it has a professional route that is more developed in the UK than most candidates expect — because there is a dedicated profession body for the discipline.

Degrees

A degree in communications, public relations, journalism, marketing or a related subject is the most common formal route and appears in some posts, but a significant number of roles don’t require one and routinely accept a degree in another subject where the internal-comms experience fits. If you’re choosing a degree now, a placement year is the single most employability-relevant feature, and a focus on internal, corporate or public communications signals intent to a hiring manager. A postgraduate route is a legitimate pivot for people with a degree in another discipline.

Professional qualifications — the IOIC route

The Institute of Internal Communication (IOIC) is the only independent professional body in the UK dedicated solely to internal communication, and it runs the discipline’s recognised qualification ladder, delivered in partnership with an accredited university. The progression runs from a Foundation Diploma for those early in the field or moving in from another discipline, through an Advanced Diploma aimed at practising professionals ready to deepen their strategic capability, to a postgraduate master’s-level qualification for those operating at a strategic, leadership level. Alongside that, the IOIC sets out a profession map that frames the capability levels the profession expects, and grades of membership that a candidate can work toward. None of these is usually a formal entry requirement for a manager role, but they are a credible answer to “how have you been developing yourself?” in an interview, and they close a credentials gap if your CV is experience-heavy. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations and the Chartered Institute of Marketing both run adjacent programmes that are a recognised fit for the external- and marketing-facing edges of the role.

Apprenticeships

Public relations and communications have a genuine apprenticeship base in the UK, from a foundation-level starting point up through a higher apprenticeship, and internal communications is a natural stream within that — developing in a role while you complete the training and assessment. It’s a legitimate path into communications for people who’d rather earn while learning than take a degree, and for employers a structured way to develop a junior communicator from the inside.

The routes people actually take in

The external communications or PR pivot. Probably the most common. PR and external comms bring the writing, the tone, the stakeholder relationships and the sense of what’s sensitive — the step up is learning the organisational side: the strategy, the leadership trust, the engagement loop and the audience who already works there. A natural and well-trodden move into internal communications.
The HR or People communications background. People with an HR, people-operations or employer-brand background already understand the employee lifecycle, the change work and the line-manager channel — the step up is widening from supporting policy to owning the narrative and the programme.
The corporate or newsroom journalism graduate. People coming from a journalism or press-office background bring the research, the deadline fluency and the instinct for what a story is. The step up is the organisation’s side of the relationship: the messages, the sequencing and the trust with the leadership.
The marketing executive broadening out. A content, copy or general marketing background brings the audience read, the channel fluency and the production muscle — the step up is the internal audience and the leadership-conversation side that external marketing rarely touches.
The career changer. A real share of internal communications seats are filled by people arriving from adjacent careers — HR, training, operations, customer-facing leadership — whose experience with people, writing under a deadline and handling a sensitive conversation maps directly. If that’s you, lead with the transferable core: how you’ve built a relationship, written under pressure, and communicated carefully with an audience that already had a view.

Agency versus in-house: which to choose

Both sides of the market hire internal communications professionals, and the choice shapes the first few years of your career more than the title does.

In-house internal communications gives you depth with one organisation. You sit close to the strategy, the leaders and the culture you’re trying to shape, and the career ladder is the standard officer → executive → manager → head track. The trade-off is variety: your people, your change, your narrative are those of one business.

Agency internal communications gives you breadth and pace. You’ll work across several clients and sectors, applying the same craft — narrative, cadence, writing, engagement, measurement — to a different internal world every week, and the ladder runs through account and discipline leadership. The client-facing skills transfer directly to any in-house role later, and the pressure to impress the client is constant.

There’s no objectively better starting point, and a commonly sensible path for early-career candidates is a couple of years of execution-heavy work in either setting, then a role where you own a defined internal-comms programme end to end, and then a deliberate call on whether you want the breadth of agency or the depth and senior trust of in-house.

Where the career goes next

The standard ladder above an internal communications manager runs: senior internal communications manager → head of internal communications or head of communications → communications director or head of corporate communications, with the chief communications officer (CCO) track at the top in larger organisations. In agencies the ladder instead runs through client services: specialist → lead or account manager → account director, with the possibility of moving into a senior in-house role or running your own practice later. Titles vary; the substance is scale — bigger teams and organisations, more sensitive and high-stakes moments, a wider audience map and a stronger, more trusted seat at the executive table.

What typically unlocks the next step up:

Owning the internal narrative and the engagement programme across multiple business units, not just a channel
Advising the executive team on the moments that matter, not just preparing the material when it’s asked for
Running a genuine change or transformation communication end to end, with the room still steady
Building a measurement and listening baseline and reading it out honestly to leadership
Being trusted with the most sensitive internal conversations — the restructure, the transition, the “what to say” moment
Helping set the standard for a team of communicators and the managers who do their share of the talking

Off the main ladder, the role opens several lateral doors that many people find more interesting than going up:

Corporate affairs and reputation — for the candidate whose favourite work was the senior, sensitive, high-stakes conversation and who wants the full internal-plus-external comms scope.
Marketing and brand — the audience understanding, the tone and the messaging instincts carry straight over, and many organisations run combined communications-and-brand tracks.
People, culture and the employee experience — a natural move for the internal communicator whose instinct was always the person, the change and the culture rather than the channel.
Agency, consulting or interim work — offering internal-comms leadership to multiple clients, permanently or on a fixed-term basis, which a portfolio of change programmes, engagement work and leadership communication supports directly.

Candidate questions, answered

Is internal communications the same as PR or corporate communications? Not quite, and the distinction matters when you’re reading adverts. PR and corporate communications concentrate on the external — the media, the reputation, the disclosure — and usually treat the employee-facing work as one element alongside it. Internal communications makes that employee-facing work the whole job: the intranet, the leadership conversation, the change and the engagement. In a small business the same person can do both, and many roles blend them; but if an advert is heavy on journalists and coverage, read it as external first, and if it’s heavy on the all-hands and the intranet, read it as internal.

Do I need a degree to be hired as an internal communications manager? It’s common and helps at the start, but it isn’t the only route that gets people hired. Employers regularly accept a real track record of internal comms work — an announcement you ran, an engagement programme you built, a change you supported — in place of a degree, and the professional qualification route builds the same base while you work. By the time you’re applying at manager level, the conversation is about what you’ve delivered and the result it produced.

How much experience do I need before applying? Most manager-level roles expect roughly three to six years of communications or internal-comms experience behind the title, with senior and group posts asking for more. In smaller organisations, two to three years of solid, end-to-end delivery can be enough if you’ve owned an announcement or a programme. What reliably opens the door is a specific result you can describe in detail, not a year count.

Can I get into this from PR, HR, journalism or marketing? Yes, and it’s a recognised route from all four. PR and external comms bring the writing and the stakeholder instinct; HR and People bring the change and the line-manager channel; journalism brings the research and the deadline fluency; marketing brings the audience and the production muscle. Your CV should lead with the outcomes — the programmes, the announcements, the engagement — and be explicit about the internal-comms skills you’ve used, whatever your previous title was.

Do I need to know the tools before I apply? Working familiarity, not exam-level mastery. You’re expected to be able to manage an intranet or portal, run the email and newsletter channels you’ll be extending, and read the engagement or survey numbers the business uses. The specific enterprise platforms and engagement tools are requirements of particular roles, not of the title generally — the concepts, not the vendor names, are what interviews really probe.

Is change communication a big part of the role? In a meaningful share of posts, yes. Where it’s in the remit, you’ll support restructures, acquisitions, integrations and leadership transitions — telling people what’s changing, why, and what it means for them, while managing the trust that comes with the uncertainty. If an advert mentions sensitive moments, transformation or “the change agenda,” read it as asking for exactly this muscle.

Is this a remote-friendly career? A meaningful share of UK internal communications roles are hybrid or remote, particularly in technology, professional services and agency work. The part that isn’t remote is where the work is relational in the moment — a town hall, a leadership meeting, a difficult one-to-one, an event — and in those you’ll be expected in the room. Check the location line, but also read the responsibilities: a role that leans on in-person engagement and executive presence will expect you out in the world regardless of what the hybrid line says.

Do I need an IOIC or similar qualification to be competitive? It’s not a requirement in the majority of vacancies, but it’s one of the most recognised markers in the UK internal-communications profession, and the ladder runs from a foundation diploma up to a master’s-level qualification, alongside membership grades. If your CV is strong on experience and light on formal credentials, an IOIC qualification — or the adjacent CIPR route — is a credible way to close that gap while you work.

Take the next step

If you’re ready to start looking, it’s worth having your profile in place before you see the job you want: The Hidden Market offers free candidate registration and a matching-led marketing jobs area, so you can be set up and ready to move when the right role appears. You can create a free candidate profile at https://www.thehiddenmarket.com/candidate-quick-register and browse the marketing jobs area at https://www.thehiddenmarket.com/jobs/marketing.

Whatever stage you’re at, the single most useful thing you can do this week is write, in one paragraph, the best internal communications work you’ve done — the moment or the change was, what you owned, how you got the leadership’s message across and kept the room aligned, and what it was worth to the business. Every application, interview and conversation in this career starts from that paragraph.