PR Story #7

This week's PR Story #7 is based around 'CIPR to explain PR in schools'. Naturally you can understand why this caught my attention being a PR student and I think this move by the CIPR is fantastic!!

According to a PR Week study and a ComRes survey 70% of respondents had no idea what PR involved, 9% thought PR revolve mostly around celebrity image management and only 7% were considering a role in PR. Not sure about you but I think these figures are shocking but then again I was once one of the those statistics not too long ago.

Let me take you back to 2009, I just started 6th form and was taking Media, English and Product Design A levels. Media was by far the most interesting of lessons as it touched upon a lot of film theory but also advertising and marketing techniques- but never once did it touch upon PR, but then again why should it? I chose to do an Advertising Management and Digital Comms degree at Bucks but the beauty of it is that all first year marketing, business and marketing, ads and PR modules are the same and so if you decided to tweak your degree specialism at the end of the first year you can- therefore I switched to PR without having to start again! I choose the Ads degree because I thought from my A level experience that was what I wanted to do, but through my university experience I discovered that I would benefit more and gain more from a degree in PR. I think that the information on options for degrees and future careers is very limited within schools and generally universities can only really help you unless you are at the applying stage for university. Therefore, with some schools starting their GCSEs as young as Year 9 shouldn't secondary students be more informed of their decisions earlier on?

With most careers it's fairly obviously what your job will include: doctors, dentists, teachers, bankers and so on but with marketing, PR, advertising (that doesn't involve the creative) it's difficult to fully understand what a university course and career could contain. Plus the thing is, is that it is so much fun- I never anticipated I would be this interested and involved with a university degree. Whether it's the way it's taught with the mix of practical and real world learning at Buck's or whether it's just because the subject itself is of deep interest to me- I have no idea- but I'm thoroughly enjoying it now! I wish I could have been more informed at the time of applying to university however.

The CIPR have identified a gap in their industry that PR is not appealing or attractive to anyone below the age of roughly 17 and that there isn't enough information out there for school children to teach themselves about the basics of PR. Going into schools, I believe, is going to have a massive impact on the numbers that apply for PR courses or even internships in the future.

I also think on reflection it would have been good to have attended a careers fair at secondary school in, say, Year 11 that has stalls set up providing information about all types of careers, not just the obvious ones. I've lost count of how many times I've heard people say "well I wanted to do this, but then I found I couldn't because I didn't have the right subjects/ qualifications" which is quite disheartening to hear and knowing that those people are probably now in a job they wouldn't have necessarily chosen and may potentially not even enjoy. I'm not sure if some schools do run careers fairs, but mine didn't and I've not heard anyone else talk about a careers fair at their school; I think it should become more common practice, especially since trying to get work is only getting harder.

I think other professional bodies can take a leaf out of this book; it would be interesting to see the statistics for marketing/ advertising management/ business courses also and see if they match up. I'd like to know what you think about this- have you heard of anything similar being done within schools/ colleges?