Career Advice

If you could give yourself one piece of advice when you started your career, what would it be? As recent PR and communications graduates embark on their first jobs out of school, we asked the PR News community to offer some advice for our profession’s rookies. Here’s a sampling of what PR pros on Twitter had to offer their soon-to-be colleagues.

Chances are that most of the people around you are looking a new job. One of the best ways for PR pros to keep current with skills and potential employment possibilities is to take advantage of the contacts that you’ve been provided through your career, family and social networks. It’s imperative to make networking a lifelong commitment. At a certain point in our lives and careers we can easily become complacent in our roles and surroundings. We need to be sure to make an effort to invest personally, professionally, intellectually and socially in those individuals strategically placed in our path.

It’s that time of year again: Spring is in the air and so are graduation caps. Recent college graduates looking to enter the communications field will face the challenge of their first round of interviews, rife with think-on-your-feet moments. Whether you’re graduating or have a friend or family member entering the PR workforce, here are six interview prep tips for aspiring PR pros.

PR is changing so quickly that what students learn today in college may be outdated by the time they land their first job. Still, there are concepts that are unlikely to change despite this fast-moving industry, argues Edelman VP Amanda Sapp. Making sure you are authentic in your storytelling, speaking to audiences not at them and having passion for what you do will serve you well at the start of your career and during every stage that follows.

In just a few weeks, hundreds of social media-savvy professionals will descend upon the W Atlanta-Midtown hotel for The Social Shake-Up Show. And in this personal account, author Chris Strub details three interactions he had at a past Shake-Up—including one with the show’s late founder, Robin Fray Carey—that forever altered the course of his career.

It can be hard for someone who works in public relations or communications to admit that they’re not that great at schmoozing. It would seem that these things go hand in hand, but striking up a face-to-face conversation with a stranger is its own skill set, and we aren’t all naturals. If you’re attending a professional event, you should make the most of your time there, as with any other aspect of your working life. Being a wallflower won’t move the needle, so keep the following four things in mind and do the accompanying exercises to set yourself up for success.

Something we’ve observed at PR News in recent years: We don’t see “PR” in job titles quite as often as we used to. One reason may be that so few communicators today are restricted to traditional PR functions like media relations and crisis management. In 2017 they are tasked with so much more, from content creation and social media management to email marketing and brand development.

Research links low job satisfaction for PR pros with ethical conflict at work and distrust in leadership. Would you jump ship if you realized your company’s core values don’t align well with your own? Steph Curry, in an interview with ESPN, said he would. While most of us lack Curry’s financial security, we can take solace in trends indicating how values increasingly drive business decisions and serve the bottom line. For example, CSR programs please consumers who want to feel good about brands. And young professionals in particular expect to find a sense of purpose and happiness at work. Below are a few ways to increase your job satisfaction.

With several months left before the chill lifts for much of the country, it can be easy to slip into the winter blues during the work week (that is, unless you’re joining us in sunny SoCal next week at PR News’ Digital Summit & Crisis Management Boot Camp, Feb. 23-24 in Huntington Beach, CA). To ease your winter blues, we asked PR News’ Twitter followers to share the mantras and inspirational quotes that help them stay motivated.

“Almost all firms are over-servicing,” Gould says, though small ones, with yearly revenue of $3 million or less, are the major culprits. This largest group of firms often lacks sophisticated time-management systems (one he recommends is ClickTime) and a chief financial officer (CFO) to oversee, interpret and analyze the data such a system produces.