This week in PR (18 August newsletter)

A level results day. I can still remember where I was and who I was with when I phoned home from a camping holiday in Cornwall to learn my A level results. I’m sure you remember receiving your results too.

We spend most of our first 18 years in full time education, and our A level results feel definitive at the time. It seems they will define our futures and impact our chances of success and happiness.

There’s certainly increased pressure to get the grades to secure first preference university places this year. But in hindsight, how good a prediction of future success are our A level results or indeed our university places?

Perhaps it’s an easy hit in public relations since no one among the 100,000 or so UK practitioners will have gained an A level in this discipline. Only a minority will have a public relations degree for that matter (they have only been around for three decades and have been declining in popularity in recent years).

So we will all have reached our current positions through more varied routes. Our futures were not set in stone at 18.

Public relations is often a second or third career. As well as the former journalists, I’ve worked with former management consultants, army officers, and teachers among many other occupations.

Experience counts - and that’s something most 18 year olds lack. To speak up for all of those who came good after disappointing A level results, I’ve picked out a tweet from author and consultant Advita Patel. ‘My A-level results were tragic and I’ve managed to do alright. Don’t let letters and numbers define your worth.’

This week’s content selection (containing 27 content links across 12 categories) gives a flavour of the mix of natural smarts and lived experience needed to follow Advita and ‘do alright’ in a public relations or communication role.

Let me pick out three highlights.

I’ll start with a hard one. Communications around the climate emergency must be among the biggest challenges in public relations. Go in too hard with too bleak an assessment of the prospects for life on our planet and people will conclude that the problem’s too large and insoluble for them to do anything about it (an issue satirised in the 2021 Netflix film Don’t Look Up).

So the messages have to be hard - but they also have to offer hope. Yet there are well-funded vested interests supporting existing industries and current technologies who will do all they can to cast doubt on climate science or the claims of activists. So for every piece of information communicated, expect a barrage of misinformation and disinformation to the point where identifying the truth from claims and counter-claims becomes near impossible.

This is the subject matter tackled by Sophie Howe who suggests it will take bold politicians to brave change.

‘I don’t negate that braving change is easy. All too often when politicians have put their heads above the parapet to put in place the – often unpopular reforms needed to tackle climate change, they are hit with backlash; backlash which is often driven by mis or disinformation.’

Sophie Howe has a law degree according to her LinkedIn profile - and worked in public policy before becoming a sustainable futures adviser. I doubt much of that was predicted by her A level results.

John McTernan addresses the same topic from a party political perspective. If, as looks likely, the Conservatives will position themselves as pro-motorist net zero sceptics at the next election, how should the Labour Party respond? They certainly won’t want to be boxed in as anti-motorist. In McTernan’s analysis:

‘The Tories are now making a historic strategic error. They act as though they want the next election to be a referendum on net zero. Normally, Napoleon’s advice is sound: “Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.” This time, Labour should seize the moment and run with it. It will define Starmer in terms of what he stands for.’

McTernan is now a political strategist for public relations consultancy BCW having previously been a political secretary to former Labour prime minister Tony Blair. He has an English degree, so I doubt that any of this career was predicated on his choice of A levels.

The third article that especially caught my attention this week was by Katy Hetherington on the role of intuition in a data-driven world.

‘Intuition. Gut feeling. Inner voice. Sixth sense. Knowing. Hunch.

Call it what you will, it’s the unexplainable guidance we all possess, defying data, statistics, and facts. It can guide us to make more insightful, human business decisions — choices that feel right and have integrity.’

Hetherington is the exception among my picks: I see she has a degree in communication from an Australian university.

Whatever your A level subjects and grades were*, I hope we can all agree that learning doesn’t stop at 18. We all need to be adaptable lifelong learners with insatiable curiosity if we’re to turn our minds from the climate emergency, to politics, to data, to artificial intelligence and more.

*I won’t name names, but one senior practitioner included in the round up this week left school before A levels and did not gain a university degree; none of that held them back from having a long and high achieving career in public relations and even teaching at university.

With lifelong learning in mind, this is a good time to consider your options for professional qualifications, open to those at all stages of a career whatever your previous exam results were. With professional qualifications, experience (even intuition) will count as highly as academic credentials.

PR Academy is holding an online open event on 6 September for you to learn about professional qualifications in public relations and its main specialist areas.