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Hunting seasons
Posted Colin Byrne on August 16th, 2007 | Filed under Current Affairs, Public Relations
One hunting season – grouse – opened at the start of the week and another starts as the week ends. Yes, the annual media and political event of shooting down A level success by school leavers has arrived.
Ironic really that for days we have had acres of coverage and editorials about feckless, drunken, dangerous ‘feral youth’ and then 18 year-olds get a good kicking in the same papers for getting too many ‘A’s’ in their A levels.
(Full marks to the QCA and other exam authorities for their print ad suggesting we congratulate rather than castigate the kids who have done well and reprinting questions from exam papers that I bet half the fulminating editorial writers would have a tough time answering.)
The educational qualifications and qualities of aspirant PRs have been a consistent theme of conversations I have recently been having with UK PR leaders, as part of my research for a book I am writing about our business.
Most of these highly successful PRs are Oxbridge educated and many got a career lick-start partly as a result of contacts and opportunities made through a first class university education. But if we are going to get any diversity into our largely white, upper middle-class ranks, we have to accept that many of our best future leaders are studying communications and at universities outside the top ten elite ones.
At WS we have had experience of recruiting academically brilliant young graduates who see PR as a short term job while they figure out what they want to really do, or in some cases just can’t communicate. (With my 2.2 – the ‘activist’s degree’ as we used to call it – I wouldn’t get a job at Weber Shandwick, where I am UK CEO, as a graduate trainee today!)Â
We want people with good analytical skills and an understanding of how to make a case. We need people who can actually write – more and more important as PR and the media we deal with change – and we need people with a real interest in the world around them. We increasingly need people with specialist sectoral knowledge as content becomes more important than just contacts.
And we need people who actually want a career in PR in its many forms, and see it as a profession rather than just a brush with glamour.
As more kids with socially diverse backgrounds work hard and get good A levels, and more good quality communications-related degrees become available, this will help our business.
Give the kids a break.
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:38 am
[...] Brain noted his surprise at young PROs attitude towards their careers this week. Colin Byrne added his thoughts on young PR’s, having been prompted by the annual exam results [...]