How Australia’s PR and comms industry can overcome the talent drought
Finding young talent in the PR and communications industry has been a long fought battle. Mumbrella's Abigail Dawson speaks to industry leaders and young PR professionals to understand where the talent issue starts and what the industry can do about it.
One of the biggest issues the public relations and communications industry has been grappling with for the last few years is talent, from recruiting juniors to retaining highly skilled and well trained employees.
Despite agencies implementing internship programs, mentoring strategies, training days and staff incentives; the shortage of talent has continued, leaving the industry scratching its head.
Talented account executives, account coordinators, senior account executives and entry level communications professionals are highly sought after by many businesses and agencies in adland, but on the other side of the spectrum, many graduates find landing their first job tough.
So how should the PR and comms industry be tackling the shrinking pool of talent? Or does the industry just need to tap into unfound resources, students and universities?
Red Agency’s executive director Jackie Crossman says there isn’t one sole reason the PR industry has a talent shortage. Instead, Crossman argues there are many, starting with the difficulty juniors have in landing their first role.
“The first issue seems to be them getting their foot in the door, in an agency or in-house, that seems to be a problem.
“I don’t think they are getting jobs within their chosen field.”
Soraya Calavassy, who co-founded her own PR agency, Neon Black, when she was just 25 years old, says agencies and businesses who aren’t employing graduates are missing out on a colossal opportunity to learn, urging senior professionals not to underestimate the power of fresh ideas.
“If you have somebody who is freshly out of university, has never worked in an agency before, is coming in at a ground level, they might have really amazing ideas and those ideas should be taken into consideration.
“Young talent can just as much educate someone more senior who has been in the workforce for a lot longer,” Calavassy says.
Crossman agrees, taking it one step further by suggesting an urgent need for a corporate or industry effort to “actually give the good students their first chance”.
Outlining this as a huge contributing factor to the talent shortage in the comms world, the executive director of Red Agency says if graduates aren’t being employed from the start then there is a risk of them becoming a resource the industry doesn’t use, wasting a much needed opportunity for both businesses, agencies and graduates.
“If we’re not bringing them in the beginning then there is no one to flow through the system and grow,” she says.
“Obviously not everyone gets to leadership, but as you move up the seniority it’s almost like a triangle. We need to bring a lot more into the funnel at the bottom, and they’re clearly coming out of university. I don’t know what’s happening to them.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Neon Black’s co-founder contemplates the idea of university degrees, arguing that they aren’t essential: “We don’t look at a university degree as being mandatory to work at Neon Black or in part of the industry.”
University degrees don’t guarantee the graduate knows about the industry and how it works, Calavassy says, prompting the idea that personality, drive and ambition are all more important than a “piece of paper”.
“The ability to communicate and amazing writing skills, all of that stuff is stuff you can learn, you don’t need piece of paper.
“If somebody comes in here with a degree and there is somebody without a degree, I don’t judge them differently. I look at who would be the best fit, what they’re about, their passion, their dedication and their commitment,” the leader says.
Crossman agrees, pointing out real world experience will always be extremely compelling to an employer.
“University courses are fantastic but you can’t substitute studying for real world experiences over a period of time.
“It’s almost like an apprenticeship, because an apprentice studies, but they are also getting hands on practical experience as they go through.
“That is the ultimate gold standard, if you as a person can be studying and doing all that really well, and we can be providing them with real world experience particularly in the last year of their study, that makes them far more job ready than if they worked in a cafe,” the executive director adds.
For Cabrini Broderick, a senior account executive at History Will Be Kind, universities don’t always “position what agencies are” and “set out what is involved in PR itself”.
Recently promoted from her previous account executive title, Broderick graduated just two years ago, saying the transition into the agency world isn’t something university prepares students for.
“Yes there is day-to-day writing and pitching and ways to go about those tasks, in this way university does prepare you for that, but I don’t think it prepares you for the social aspects of being in an agency.
“It can be quite daunting to think you’re going to be in an agency of a hundred people and you’re going from being a third year student where you’re quite comfortable, to being back at the bottom like a small fish in a big pond… All of a sudden it becomes the start again.”
Courtney Lambert, an account executive from Red Agency agreed with Broderick, says university is very theoretical and teaches students skills which typically wouldn’t be used until you had acquired a senior job title.
“University is very theoretical, as such a lot of what I learnt you wouldn’t do on the job, until really senior roles. It’s a lot of strategy.”
History Will Be Kind’s Broderick agrees with Crossman, pointing out universities need to push internship programs harder and help students build valuable connections with agencies and businesses.
“I know for some universities there is a subject which is an internship, but I don’t think they push that enough, or they don’t help you as much as they could in building connections with agencies,” Broderick continues, “I still think the onus is on you to do that, which is fair enough as a student… but I think there is definitely more that universities can do to support students in making the transition from a student into agency.”
Red Agency is currently looking to close this gap between university and the working world of PR and comms with its paid internships program, Crossman says.
“We do make an effort to get some people in so that they actually have a faster start and come out job ready. But we can only take so many. From there we also hire a couple of the smart ones to be account coordinators. Again, we can only hire so many,” she says.
Crossman urges businesses not to take on interns just as “free labour”, noting investing in interns and young talent is imperative.
“The commitment to talent isn’t always easy and it starts from the very beginning, at the university level, and continues right until students leave university “to employ and train and develop our future leaders”, Crossman adds.
One of Red Agency’s early recruiters, Courtney Lambert, says through Red Agency’s program she learned day-to-day skills which simply weren’t taught during her bachelor’s degree.
“Red Agency has really given me the tools and ‘on the day’ skills to progress. Even just being able to do the basics like media pitching and writing media releases, that’s nothing that I ever learnt at university.”
For Neon Black’s Calavassy, mentorship is a powerful tool.
“It’s not always a financial investment, the amount of ‘go away and do this training kind of stuff’, that’s really minimal.
“It’s about people taking the time to sit down with you and even tell you stories about past campaigns they have worked on, you can take something from it and some kind of insight from every single conversation,” she says.
Another factor in the talent debacle is travel, because as Crossman points out, many people in their early 20s have ambitions to travel overseas.
“Some people will want to go overseas to work overseas and experience their overseas life and that’s natural,” she says.
Crossman says being accepting of this is critical for companies as the talent may well return, or, alternatively, working with agencies overseas to implement some form of talent swap program.
“We work really hard with them to really develop their careers and give them opportunities so they are less likely to want to go, but naturally you’re still going to have that problem at some point that some people want to go overseas. So I think that’s the role of the Brits shall we say is we are giving them out. We have to take theirs in to fill that gap. It’s a bit of a swap.”
Crossman says the talent shortage in the industry is just an issue with “some people, not all”, and if there is “more of a commitment at the front end to bring on people” the industry may eventually find itself with a larger junior talent pool to choose from.
Every single person in this article is a female. Are men being discriminated against?
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Of course you learn things in practice that you wouldn’t have learned at university. And vice versa. That’s why so many professionals who are passionate about their career and furthering the industry return to university.
Not all university degrees are theoretical. From experience (as regular reviewer of accredited programs and Chairperson of PRIA’s Education Committee), most PR degrees are actually very much hands-on and industry orientated.
At Curtin University we have a compulsory industry placement and real life clients in most of our units – but that’s only a starting point. Individuals need to take charge of their journey and embrace the (extracurricular) opportunities offered to them – like additional placements, seminars, participation in relevant clubs, networking, mentoring, etc.
I believe we are working in and industry that is already benefiting from close relationships between educators and industry. But more can be done. I encourage employers and senior communication professionals to become actively engaged in the education of future PR professionals, by volunteering as guest speakers, putting their hands up for advisory group positions and providing up to date case studies and industry insights.
I believe there is plenty of talent out there! It’s about providing that talent with the appropriate skills, networks and training opportunities – and neither industry nor academia can do this in isolation!
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For every one woman interviewed in the media, four men are interviewed. Given the PR industry overwhelmingly (+70%) women I think we can let this one side hey?
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Honestly, this is probably more a realistic representative of the PR industry. Studying journalism it was 3:1 females to males in the room, but transferring to PR became a 12:1 ratio.
Reality is, males are under represented in the PR industry. It’s not a discriminatory thing, it’s purely there are less males entering the industry.
Of course this reality also has its own culture problems for the few males who do work in consumer PR…
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After 20 years of PR I decided I’d go and get a Masters. After examining the coursework at thre group of 8 I decided against it. a – mandatory unit on “the media landscape” another on “ethics”, an assignment at one of them consisted in writing a communications plan…seiously!
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My daughter is struggling to land her first post-degree job in her field of events management. She has absolute no illusions about hard work, dull tasks etc having worked on a warehouse the past 4 years plus intern and volunteer event work.
My observation is one thing the comms industry overall needs to take a hard look at how it frames job ads and interviews. Ads that say entry level but then ask for 2 years experience. Linkedin posts with every possible tag so you get rubbish in searches. Roles marked ‘event manager’ that are mostly other types of marketing or even mainly admin. And so on.
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I worked at a big 4 bank once in 2007. Of 140 “communications” people there were two males. The guy who ran the shop and me as a contractor.
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Ah, I see now. Because it is the PR industry then it is just the way it is.
But if it is the inverse in another industry it is gender bias.
Thanks for clearing that up.
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Same
I looked at a masters in HK. As well as a questionable course structure that focused on the kind of stuff you would teach in a couple of weeks as part of agency on-boarding, I also looked at some of the guest tutors. A bunch of tired, uninspiring names from the HK PR sector. Exactly the kind of people the more progressive networks are trying to ship out.
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I have 100% seen blatant discrimination against men entering the PR industry. I had one director tell me they had once hired a male employee who was terrible at his job, after they fired him she told me they ‘had an internal policy that they wouldn’t hire anymore men’.
I also heard a different PR director mention that “women are just better at PR than men” Oh yes – the PR gene, that only females possess, how could I forget? *sarcasm*.
Of course it just become a self-fulfilling prophecy that turns into unconscious, or conscious, bias. The sad thing is you miss out on some fantastic talent because of this.
If merit is equally distributed among the sexes, then every industry should have a rough split of 50/50 between men and women – across all roles and leadership positions. If it doesn’t – then there is a problem with your company and your industry that needs to be fixed.
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Sorry Samantha, to argue there’s a problem if there’s not a 50/50 gender split across all roles and leadership positions in every company and industry is a crock.
You need to understand the difference between equality of opportunity (everyone has the right to do whatever they want without discrimination, which is good) vs equality of outcome (how things actually are). The difference is personal choice, and we can’t force people into roles/jobs/industries they don’t want to be in.
Are you arguing that women should make up half the people working on construction sites, driving trucks? Or that men should make up half of hairdressers, nurses? Even if they don’t want to? (I’m stereotyping, just to make the point)
And what about CEOs? Do you realise the level of psychopathy required to become CEO of a large company? There’s very few men or women who are prepared to do what it takes to reach this level, and I suspect there’s very few who actually want to do it. That it’s more often than not men who take these roles is in my view more a cry for help than something we all should aspire to, or push people into.
Let people have every opportunity to pursue whatever they want to do, but let’s not force these ridiculous gender-based outcomes that defy personal choices.
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The elephant that ran from the room is how much the PR industry traditionally relied on former journos to fill out their ranks at all levels.
With the hollowing out of newsrooms that trained these journos, PRs for the first time must develop their own intellectual capacity and sell graduates on the idea of working in PR.
Unfortunately, most new PRs have no idea how the media (and journos) work and there are few old hands around to educate them.
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