The Job You Always Wanted... But Never Knew Existed

Many successful applicants to the WPP Fellowship admit that they discovered the scheme by accident. New recruits frequently describe it as “the job I always wanted but never knew existed.”

WPP created the Fellowship more than 20 years ago in 1995 as a way of developing new generations, and new kinds, of leaders for our companies. As our business became more and more global and the boundaries between marketing disciplines became less and less clear, our clients wanted to work with the sort of people who were as comfortable handling a PR account in Beijing as they were developing an advertising campaign in New York.

The idea was to recruit top graduates and give them the unique experience of working across different fields of marketing communications in different business cultures around the world. Over three years, Fellows work in three WPP companies, often on three continents.

Today, two decades later, WPP is the world’s largest advertising and marketing services group, and the Fellowship is the industry’s most sought-after graduate programme.

Our policy is immediately to give Fellows (whose first rotation is always in either London or New York) the kind of responsibility that scares them, and scares us. At the same time, we make sure they are extremely well supported, with mentors in the operating company they’re working for, at WPP (the parent company) itself and drawn from the ranks of former Fellows.

As they work through their three annual placements, they have the chance to experiment and decide what kind of specialism and business they’re best suited to. Without exception, Fellows take on a senior role when they graduate from the scheme, and many go on to become heads of departments, directors and CEOs.

The programme is relatively unknown, beyond our industry at least, because we don’t (ironically given the nature of our business) advertise it widely. Statistically, it’s already harder than trying to enter Harvard Business School, with around a dozen Fellows appointed each year from up to 2,000 applicants.

But would-be Fellows shouldn’t let the numbers put them off. Every year people who didn’t think they had a chance of winning a place on the scheme do just that. As Fellowship Director Jon Steel puts it, “Those who are most intimidated by the odds may be the people we most want to employ.”

Unlike graduate schemes for some other large organisations, we are not looking for a “type”, because there is no such thing as a typical Fellow. We don’t want identikit leaders for our businesses.

Fellows will have achieved high levels of academic success, but the subject doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they are interesting, interested and enthusiastic. They need an ambidextrous brain, both logical and intuitive, they need to be intellectually curious, and they need to demonstrate originality and independence of thought.

Every year we try to choose people who are different from each other and different from the previous year’s cohort – an approach that means Fellows are a diverse bunch, in lots of ways. A happy side-effect of our strategy is that 62% of Fellows currently working with WPP are women.

Fellows are also loyal, with 75% of those who joined over the last 10 years still with WPP and its companies today. This is, in part, because it is a true fellowship – an active, supportive network of friends and colleagues that carries on long after the three years of the programme itself have come to an end.

We are now taking applications for the 2017 Fellowship. If you have an ambidextrous brain and want to put it to good use, find out more here.