Kwittken

How Must Education Evolve to Address the PR Professional’s Expanding Role?

by Jason Schlossberg for PRWeek

Kwittken + Company’s President, Jason Schlossberg participated in a Master Class panel for the April issue of PRWeek. The subject was: How must education evolve to address the PR professional’s expanding role?.

Here is Jason’s full excerpt:

I am generally skeptical of PR education’s role in creating superior PR pros. Not surprisingly, that is a reflection of my age and experiences. When I was in college, I don’t think PR was even a major. If it was, I never met anyone who majored in it.

Only after several years in the industry did I meet someone who had studied PR at a university. She was a very eager account coordinator. I remember her telling me she had recently completed her senior thesis on how Exxon should have responded to the Exxon Valdez crisis. I recall saying something to her along the lines of, “That will come in handy once you are VP of corporate communications for a major oil company, but how will that help us sell more ‘widgets’ today?” She didn’t have an answer.

If I were to develop a PR curriculum it would be multidisciplinary in nature, incorporating business, marketing, creative writing, technology, critical media theory, and philosophy.

Most current PR programs do not exist within a business school environment and require little to no completed coursework in management, economics, strategy, or finance. But having a solid foundation of business knowledge is integral if PR pros want to be taken seriously by their clients or colleagues.

Today’s PR pros must also possess a much better understanding of the other marketing disciplines. Modern idea-based marketing programs are born of multiple influences. There is no such thing as a PR campaign, ad campaign, or digital campaign. Innovative marketers are now taking a channel-agnostic, idea-based approach to their campaigns, implementing whatever tools and tactics they feel will best accomplish the task at hand.

Technology, media theory, and even philosophy are all crucial areas of study for anyone interested in a PR career, but if there’s one more thing I would stress it’s the importance of creative writing within any PR training program. Regardless of how technology evolves, PR pros need to excel at storytelling, which has become even more important with the increased need for brands and organizations to create their own content.

Article Details