King's College London

THIS VACANCY IS OPEN TO INTERNAL APPLICANTS ONLY

About Us

King’s College London is one of the world’s top universities, with an ambitious vision. 

Our award-winning communications team plays a key role in ensuring that our world-class reputation is enhanced and maintained, and that our strengths and successes are effectively communicated. 

About The Role

King’s College London is one of the world’s top universities, with an award-winning Communications Team. With an ambitious vision, effective communications with key audiences, including with students, staff and the media, is crucial.

As Senior PR and Communications Manager, you will work with the faculties and the media to ensure that our world-class reputation is enhanced and maintained and that our strengths and successes particularly across health, mental health and interdisciplinary science, are effectively communicated. 

As a key part of the team, you will provide strategic leadership and direction to faculty communications, ensuring alignment to the university’s internal and external engagement strategy and business objectives, create and place compelling and engaging content aligned to the university’s strategic priorities in national and international news channels, on the website and across King’s digital channels, run a series of communications campaigns that appeal to staff, students and external stakeholders and help to design and curate content for key events series that will help generate PR. You will also assist the university’s issues communications response offering expertise on messaging and lines to take.

You’ll be a dynamic, driven person with an ability to engage with a range of colleagues, and with substantial communications experience. To be successful in this role you will have experience in a similar role and will be able to demonstrate success of managing communications colleagues, working with and briefing journalists and placing positive stories in prominent media outlets. We need a confident self-starter, who works well under pressure and who uses a keen news sense, relationships with colleagues and journalists, creativity and initiative to achieve success.

This is a full time (35 hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 26th April 2026.

About You

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience: 

Essential criteria

1. Experience of working with the media either in communications role or as a journalist and with a successful track record in creating and delivering multi-channel campaigns across media, website and social media both in the UK and internationally. 
2. Skilled at building strong relationships and networks, with a collaborative approach to working across teams, senior stakeholders and external partners. 
3. An excellent news sense and the ability to successfully craft, brief and pitch compelling stories to journalists. 
4. Experience of producing compelling content for digital channels such as websites and social media. 
5. A proactive approach to work, knowing when to work independently and flexibly but also when best to work as part of a team. 
6. Experience of managing communications issues and external reputation management. 
7. Experience of using evaluation tools to measure impact and on and improve activities.

Desirable criteria

1. Knowledge and experience of working in the higher education sector. 
2. A professional qualification in journalism, communications or PR. 

Downloading a copy of our Job Description

Full details of the role and the skills, knowledge and experience required can be found in the Job Description document, provided at the bottom of the page. This document will provide information of what criteria will be assessed at each stage of the recruitment process.

Further Information

We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming. We embrace diversity and want everyone to feel that they belong and are connected to others in our community. 

We are committed to working with our staff and unions on these and other issues, to continue to support our people and to develop a diverse and inclusive culture at King's.

As part of this commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion and through this appointment process, it is our aim to develop candidate pools that include applicants from all backgrounds and communities.

We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the advert. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ‘How we Recruit’ pages.

Interviews are due to be held on 7th October.