You Ask, I Answer: Advice for May Graduates in PR?

In today's episode, Brianna asks, what advice would you give to a communications college student graduating in May? Hmm. Well, uh this year, 2020, uh the graduating class will undoubtedly be in one of the most unique and challenging environments for employment in the last decade, if not the last century. So there's a bunch of things that students should be doing to get ready for that environment. I'm going to assume if you're in communications, you're probably going to be looking at uh work in public relations, marketing, advertising, etc.

The basics first, get all the basics out of the way. That means a personal website with uh a recognizable URL, preferably your name. Uh example, Christopher Spen.com, a solid CV or resume, depending on uh where you are, uh, a LinkedIn profile that is fully optimized and tuned up and shows the uh you in the best possible light, uh, doing all the basic stuff like you know posting and sharing credible content on uh social media, etc. The basics. Second, start the process of building your portfolio now.

Be able to demonstrate that you have all the requisite skills through work that you've done. So if you have not already, uh make sure that you've taken an internship, uh that you're volunteering at a nonprofit or small local business to learn the ropes, to learn uh what you need to know, and to be able to have work that you can demonstrate, put up on you know, slide share or whatever that shows that you are capable of generating high-quality work. Third, learn sales. Pick up you know the sales training of your choice and learn the sales process. Communications, uh public relations in particular, especially if you are agency side, is a sales job, but it's the worst sales job in the world.

You have all the pain of sales, the cold calling, the pitching, the uh smile and dial, and none of the commissions. Uh it's it is a very, very difficult job. So learn how to do sales because especially in agencies, they don't teach you that. Uh at best, they just start putting you on the phone with a more seasoned professional who cut tries to walk through it, but they don't ever give you sales training, which is what PR is. Uh use this time right now.

It's an unusual time, but use it to network now. There are so many people, so many uh experienced professionals holding Twitter chats, coffee chats, Zoom office hours, happy hours, you name it, um, that there's no excuse not to be able to drop in on these. You don't have to go anywhere, and meet other industry professionals. Uh if you're not sure where, go to any of the public relations, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, you name it. There's so many of these.

And join, you know, the happy hour of your choice. Stop on in. Join uh Slack communities, uh the Spin Sucks community, uh, which is uh run by uh our uh friend and colleague uh Jenny Dietrich is a phenomenal uh community, thousands of PR professionals. Get in there, um, listen, learn, network, um, all that good stuff. Get your finances in order.

You're graduating in a time where uh jobs will be scarce, and uh you want to make sure that you're taking advantage of all the different programs, especially if you're in the United States for uh deferring any student loans that you have, uh getting uh as much help from the government as possible. Cut your expenses as low as you can possibly take them. You know, add extra roommates, whatever, whatever it takes to get to a point where you can survive in an environment uh where uh there won't be a lot of work. Diversify your skills beyond standard PR. So communications itself here's the challenge with with public relations.

Again, especially agency side. I spent five years in an agency. Public relations is sort of the redheaded stepchild of the marketing world. It is the first to have its budget cut, it's the last to have its budgets increased, uh, its budgets are missing a zero compared with other marketing disciplines like advertising, for example. And so when you have a massive change in the economy, as we saw in you know 2008 through 2011, uh PR took the first hits before advertising did.

So your skills, your skill sets need to be diverse. Content generation, paid ed. If you have any skill with audio production, video production. Uh I would give this advice for any student who's in school right now, regardless of whether you're about to graduate or not. In fact, it's better if you're not about to graduate because it gives you some lead time to generate these skills.

But things like uh writing uh great copy, being able to uh ghostwrite uh well for somebody else, being able to uh create long-form content, uh learning the ins and outs of SEO, learning the ins and outs of analytics, all these skills are essential to diversify your background because there's a decent chance that you're not gonna find a uh a PR job in the first months uh after after graduation. The B2B lifecycle in general tends to lag behind B2C. So when the current crisis is over, you will see um businesses and things reopen. It will take them you know a good two or three months to get back to business, right? They'll have to rehire some people of their own, uh, they'll have to start generating revenue again, and then B2B companies that rely on those B2C companies for business will then follow the same pattern.

So again, two to three months. So after that, you'll have the B2B companies that rely on those, right? Like PR agencies, ad agencies, marketing agencies, take some time to get back and running. So you could be looking at an environment where there may not be much hiring broadly in public relations for nine months, nine months to a year. So be flexible in terms of what you look for, be flexible in terms of what's available, grab those extra gigs, look into the gig gig economy and things to tide you over until that that field reopens again.

Um get those skills up. Get those skills up. So if you are not graduating, take all this advice and do it now so that you have extra time to become more skilled, to build that portfolio, things like that. We don't know how this will all unfold. The the nine month gap that I just mentioned is after the crisis abates and you see things start to go to reopen up, depending on which model you look at for the current crisis, it could be September before that starts to happen.

So then your clock starts, and it could be September 2021 before you see you start seeing a surge in hiring in the public relations industry. Now keep in mind also when it comes to public relations and communications, different industries will perform better or worse. Healthcare, for example, will grow actually in in the current environment. Digital businesses will grow in the current environment. But the vast majority of the economy, the brick and mortar, will take some time to get back up and running.

So that would be my suggestions for uh getting prepared as a as someone who's uh graduating in May. Uh it's gonna be uh a a challenging time. So do as many of these things as you can while you have the time uh before you have to start uh making it work in the real world. If you have uh follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and talk to you soon.

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