Some of the most important skills for a public relations professional are lifelong ones. You can’t learn all the knowledge you’ll need in a few months of school or a few years of experience.
Instead, we need to keep our skills up to date. This not only helps us learn new things, but it also keeps us competitive in our specialised field of work.
But how do you know what skills you need or where to focus your time? Today, I run through what skills I consider to be top of the pack when it comes to keeping up to date and how a skills audit can be a really effective place to start for you or your team.
It’s back to school for a lot of us across the world, but especially in the UK, so I thought I would spend some time talking about skills today, how you identify what you need and what’s hot to skill up on.
Let’s dive in!
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Full Transcript (unedited)
Some of the most important skills for a public relations professional are lifelong ones. You can’t learn all the knowledge you’ll need in a few months of school or a few years of experience.
Instead, we need to keep our skills up to date. This not only helps us learn new things, but it also keeps us competitive in our specialised fields of work.
But how do you know what skills you need or where to focus your time? Today, I run through what skills I consider to be top of the pack when it comes to keeping up to date and how a skills audit can be a really effective place to start for you or your team.
It’s back to school for a lot of us across the world, but especially in the UK, so I thought I would spend some time talking about skills today, how you identify what you need and what’s hot to skill up on.
Let’s dive in!
Intro
Keeping your PR and Comms skills tuned into what’s happening and the latest developments as a professional can help you and your team be as competitive and up-to-date as possible. It also ensures that you are providing the best service possible to your clients and helping them get more exposure.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed a trend among my professional contacts and myself: Many of us are in a state of perpetual education. Constantly reading industry blogs, books, and articles. Taking online classes, watching educational videos, and attending conferences to hear speakers and meeting with other PR professionals.
It’s also important that we have the right skills to deliver the right outcomes for the business or organisation we work in. There was a trend towards a generalist approach where multi-skilled individuals were taking on a multitude of tasks, but more recently, there is a trend back towards having a niche – a skill that you hone and are the expert in.
But where to start?
Digital is rapidly changing. This means that to serve your customers and stakeholders better, you need to stay up to date on those changes. Working in a niche market means that you can spend your time on one or two areas, and apply that new information to your work.
There are not enough hours in the day to be good at everything!
Having a sector niche can also mean you understand the customers and operating context really well and that can add a competitive advantage in terms of skills when applied to a project.
I would say I am a bit of a generalist but I have a sector niche which is the built environment, for example – even more within that; large-scale housing-led sites – so super niche!
A good place to start is with a skills audit – a simple gap analysis can give you an idea of the big questions;
– What does the business need now and in the future?
– What skills do you have?
– Where are the gaps?
If you’re in a team, asking each member to fill this in is a great way to start, and then feedback and decide together on where the gaps are and how you might go about filling them.
Is it a development area opportunity for someone?
Is it a new hire or a piece of software?
As a guide, this should be done at the start of any change programme, and also in a period of no change, twice yearly.
Another tip I picked up from the lovely Jenni Field when I spoke to her last year on the podcast, was about working out what you can do, what you can’t do, and what you don’t like/want to do as a leader or manager of your own business or team. This is a good way of working out what skills you need to bring into your organisation, short term to deliver a project or support your team as a specialised skill.
What’s hot and what’s not?
Everyone will have different skills, and for me to run a business, my skillset has to be pretty varied.
One growing area for comms and PR pros to get ahead is in data and research
Data analysis is an essential part of being a professional communicator. It allows you to identify patterns and trends, which in turn helps you to better understand your audience and to create the right content and messages. It also helps you to better identify the most important issues and topics that your audience is concerned about, which in turn allows you to create more relevant and impactful content.
You need to be able to analyse data in order to determine which stories are resonating with your audience, which stories are getting the greatest response, and which stories are having the greatest impact. This means that you need to be able to understand what data looks like and to be able to use that data to determine where your efforts are having the greatest impact.
As a professional communicator, it’s also important to be able to conduct thorough research.
It allows you to identify patterns and trends, which in turn helps you to better understand your audience and to create the right content and messages. It also helps you to better identify the most important issues and topics that your audience is concerned about, which in turn allows you to create more relevant and impactful content.
Most professional communicators will come with the core skill of writing and analytical thinking as well as strong creativity, but a team needs a balanced approach in the current and emerging workplace.
But in an increasingly busy world, project management and planning is an essential skill that all, if not someone, in your team needs to possess
Communicators need to be able to plan and manage their workloads in order to ensure that they are able to deliver on their promises and meet their goals. They need to be able to identify their key priorities and ensure that they have the right tools, resources, and people in place to deliver on those priorities. They also need to be able to proactively manage their time and energy in order to ensure that they have the capacity and bandwidth to deliver on their key priorities.
Many people think that they can multitask and get things done, but this isn’t the case. The ability to focus on one thing at a time is essential to being a good communicator, and the ability to manage our time is one of the most important skills that we can develop.
I’D LOVE TO KNOW IF YOU HAVE CONDUCTED A SKILLS AUDIT RECENTLY AND, IF SO, HOW DID IT GO?