About Sandra Kessell

Sandra is a freelance editor, content creator and media manager with more than 35 years of experience across a wide range of publications. She writes features for a selection of targetjobs clients, mainly interviewing graduates to get insights into their career journeys for the site’s readers. Sandra also writes for targetjobs’ sister business, Cibyl, helping its statisticians turn figures and facts into readable reports.

A (former) very keen sportswoman, Sandra started her writing career in the 1980s producing sports reports in her spare time for newspapers and radio while she was a management trainee for Lloyds Bank. She decided (against her parents’ wishes) to leave banking to start accredited NCTJ training at Harlow College, then secured a two-year contract under indentures (a kind of apprenticeship) with Eastern Counties Newspapers, working on daily and weekly newspapers. She was awarded senior accreditation in 1988. After starting a family Sandra moved into feature writing for magazines, then editing a number of lifestyle publications, working part time and from home thanks to enlightened company directors two decades before it became a thing!

Sandra joined GTI and targetjobs as an in-house staff member, initially as a senior editor publishing a side project of GTI’s (a B2B magazine for insolvency professionals), learning more about careers content from the expert editors at targetjobs. For three years Sandra edited a targetjobs publication and contributed to the targetjobs website. When writing for targetjobs she always bears in mind what her three children and three step-children would have liked to know and she still sends them interesting tips and content from the site (though they are all graduates or settled into their careers in retail management, as a GP, an industrial chemist, a commissioning editor, a jazz musician and a content creator/gym instructor).

Sandra moved back to Norwich, her home city, in 2017, and returned to working freelance for select clients. She is based in the city’s medieval and Viking heartland, and during lockdown walks she learnt more about the settlement’s origins, while completing a series of MOOCs (massive open online courses) ranging from the misappropriation of ancient artefacts, to ethics, business continuity management and media marketing.

Besides writing and editing Sandra freelances for an international crisis management company, and in her spare time she undertakes voluntary work for Norwich’s talking newspaper for visually impaired people and the Green Party.