To celebrate Mi liberty’s 13th birthday as a PR agency, we’re featuring two examples from either end of the PR spectrum. One, a fresh-faced PR graduate with one year’s experience in the workforce. The other, an aging former journalist who came to PR after over 16 years’ experience in other industries.
The PR graduate
Until I decided to study public relations at university I didn’t know what it was. I was keen to study a subject at university that I could use in an industry. Although looking back there will always be a part of me that regrets not following my heart and studying dance. Nevertheless, even when I was young and supposed to be carefree I was not, so I chose a degree that not only had relevance to the working world it also had a sandwich year. This meant that I would work for a year to get experience. To try and combat the age old dilemma of graduates not having enough experience to get a job but no one willing to give them a chance to gain experience.
I went Bournemouth University to study public relations. I spent three years in total at Bournemouth and spent one year in the middle of that working full time in two separate agencies. I have to admit, my year out in the world of work was not an enjoyable one. Although I gained some invaluable experience it left me wondering if PR was the job for me. My two agencies were consumer focused and it ended up feeling more like I was a salesman or cold caller rather than a PR professional. This left me slightly disheartened and I spent my final year at Bournemouth considering that I maybe had made the wrong choice. Nevertheless, pragmatic as ever, I got my BA Hons in Public Relations realising that if PR didn’t work out, I could take my very transferable skills into a new sector.
While having a PR degree offers graduates with a wide range of transferable skills, it also has the advantage of being extremely vocation, which makes the first tentative steps into the workplace a little more obvious. Like the majority of my fellow graduates, I began my search for a career at an agency upon graduation.
Misfortune struck somewhat to me and my peers, graduating as we did in the middle of a deep recession. The media regularly reported how challenging it now was for fresh graduates to find gainful employment. Additional competition in the PR workforce came in the form of thousands of graduates from non-vocational traditional arts or humanities backgrounds such as English, history or politics. Nevertheless, I felt pleased that my decision to choose a sandwich course would prove fruitful. And so it proved to be, my experience working at agencies helped put me in front of potential employers.
Mi liberty was one of the agencies that requested an interview. My first interview was conducted by four of the senior managers, so felt quite daunting. The interview went well though and I was asked back to meet the wider team. Thankfully, Mi liberty then offered me my first fulltime contract at a PR agency, an offer that I gladly accepted.The irony of me working at a telecoms and technology PR agency was not lost on me. At university I was the butt of many jokes as I managed to go through five phones in my final year of university. This meant that I was never able to trust myself with any phone that was too flash. So when I let my friends know I was going to work in the telecoms industry this added fuel to the fire and no one saw me lasting beyond my probation period!
Nevertheless, not only did I last, I thrived. I have now been at Mi liberty for just over a year and I am thoroughly enjoying the experience. My old fears about PR not being the role for me career-wise have long since vanished. I have learnt so much from the Mi liberty team and its wide range of clients during my first year. I expect this trend to continue as my career progresses. In addition to learning on the job Mi liberty, I have also attended a variety of training sessions.
Mi liberty supports people as they grow. Across all my teams I have been given opportunities to push myself and try to prove myself. There is a great team spirit throughout the company and you really get the feeling that everyone wants to see you succeed.
I think I was worried when I first started telecoms PR especially with it being an industry that I had no idea about. However, Mi liberty has supported me throughout and I am glad that when it came to university choice I followed my head not my heart.
The former journalist
So, Mi liberty is 13. Thirteen is a tricky age; no longer a child, not yet an adult. As Mi liberty enters its 14th year I expect that its future will be no less colourful than my own has been. As a slightly bemused 13 year old making his GCSE choices, I was told to fill out a form by the school careers officer. The form posed a number of questions regarding my perceived abilities and preferences. The data was put into a computer and the computer suggested that I should become a fireman.
The careers officer asked me whether I had considered becoming a fireman, “not really,” I said thinking to myself that footballer or rock star sounded more fun, and less dangerous. “Well,” said the CO, “maybe you should go and work in your dad’s garage?”
I’m sure that my career officer had my best interests at heart, just like she had the best interests at heart of the 400 other kids she had seen over the space of that week. Her advice was rubbish, of course. Still, that’s what you get when you appoint a middle-aged career long English teacher as the school careers officer. It wasn’t her fault, she was massively under-qualified for the role and this was the tail end of the 1980s when the media were telling everyone on a daily basis that there were no jobs anymore and that the country was going to the dogs.
Rather than take up the position of assistant to my dad fixing up cars, I decided that the harsh realities of the workplace could wait a few more years. I got some GCSEs and some A-levels and went to university instead. Then I found myself facing the harsh realities of the workplace in my early 20s still with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life.
Ultimately, formal education saw me graduate with a degree in environmental engineering from Nottingham University. I started applying for jobs, well, any jobs with the word ‘environmental’ in their job description. My first job after college was writing distance learning courses in environmental management subjects at De Montfort University.
I had never considered writing as a viable career option before. I had done engineering principally because it was a ‘proper’ degree, one with maths and science, one that would certainly get me a much better job than the one my pal doing media studies would get anyway.
Only my pal who had done media studies ended up working as a journalist down in London and I had ended up as a technical author in Leicester. Somewhere along the lines something had gone seriously wrong. After about three years of technical authoring, I decided that I actually what I really wanted to do with my life was become a journalist since it sounded much more fun and glamorous than technical author.
Becoming a journalist is a lot easier said than done. My first job in writing had revealed that writing might be something I could do that would keep me from working in my dad’s garage. But it hadn’t really taught me how to be a journalist. Back in those days, the web and email were in their infancy, and no one I knew had a mobile phone. Job searching involved buying Monday’s Guardian and scouring the adverts. I went through a period that lasted about a year applying for about ten jobs per. All of my CVs were accompanied by bespoke letter and posted down in the finest envelopes that WH Smith supplied.
I was singularly unsuccessful in my search for a job in London in journalism. I ended up getting a job in Newmarket for an energy analyst – it was kind of near London and it was kind of like journalism. I got to write monthly reports for a set audience of newsletter subscribers, but mostly the job involved cutting up the Financial Times and sticking the stories in a scrapbook. I did this for a couple of years while I built up more experience writing newsletter reports, then I started buying the Guardian on Mondays again. At this second time of asking I was a bit more successful. Mostly I was ignored and occasionally I was rejected, eventually though I was invited to an interview, albeit for a job for which I hadn’t actually applied.
The editor of a b2b magazine called Banking Technology had been passed my CV by one of the hundreds of people I had applied to for a job and she wanted to see me. I knew nothing about banking and even less about technology. I got the gig. This was my first job in journalism.
As a child, I had The Game of Life, in which the most financially rewarding career was journalist. If you landed that job in The Game of Life you generally ended up winning. It didn’t take me very long as a journalist to realise that, in this instance, life did not reflect the challenges and promises of a boardgame. Journalists are not well-paid.
In the six years following graduation, my annual salary had crept up from a £12k per annum to an uninspiring £14k, while my cost of living had gone in the opposite direction. When I lived in Leicester, my monthly rent at one point was £75, while rent at my first flat share in Hackney was £350. I was significantly worse off financially, but hey, at least I got to live on a street just off Clapton’s Murder Mile.
The financial blisters that I had acquired by walking this rocky road of financial discovery were soothed only by the fact that journalism comes with a number of fringe benefits. First up, it is interesting. You get to find out about all sorts of new stuff, you get to meet all sorts of interesting people and if you’re lucky you get to travel all over the world. Second, it rewards the soul. Not only do you get to find out about new stuff and meet interesting people, you also get to write about it and have an audience. Third, in addition to learning and writing about all the exciting new stuff you cover for the publication, you get PR people being nice to you and telling you that you are important.
The fringe benefits are so good that they encouraged me to stay in journalism for 10 years. My salary did go up but it was still significantly lower than that of my friends working outside the media. I was, however, noticeably happier than almost all of my friends. I loved being a journalist. Being wined and dined, going to parties, I really did fly all over the world and stay in some extremely plush hotels, and every so often I wrote some articles.
Unfortunately, the world wide web had grown up in the time it had taken me to move from Leicester to London. Its arrival represented a genuine paradigm shift. The consumption of news and views changed rapidly, and the number of places where marketing executives could spend their advertising budgets multiplied almost exponentially. Many of the traditional publishing houses were not equipped to change their business models. Job security in journalism became almost as bad as the remuneration.
It is a common complaint among journalists that they do not have the time to cover everything of interest to the level that they would like. The instantaneous nature of news consumption now means spending time on quality stories is no longer always an option. In many instances, journalism has become churnalism. When you spend your time covering the same set of subjects with no real level of depth, a good deal of fringe benefits numbers one and two disappear. It is perhaps no coincidence that the most recent version of The Game of Life does not even include journalism as a possible profession.
Fringe benefit three remains in journalism though. In fact, it is stronger now than ever. Principally, because the number of outlets for marketing messages is shrinking and so it is more challenging than ever to get coverage. Public relations is growing as journalism shrinks. When I moved into PR one old hack I knew joked that pretty soon there would be no one left for PRs to call and pitch.
PR, for me, represents growth. It represents a challenging and fascinating change of direction. It represents a chance to stay in the media industry and have genuine influence. And, perhaps most importantly, it represents financial stability. Moving into PR as a former journalist, losing fringe benefit number three was a bitter pill to swallow, people don’t call me up very often and offer to take me out to lunch or fly me to the other side of the world, but benefits one and two are very much in place and have been joined by a very obvious direct benefit. The path from journalism to PR is well-trodden, it is not without its rocks and the resultant blisters, but the financial rewards are there for those who persist.
Apologies for upsetting English sensibilities and ending this post discussing the taboo topic of cash, but when you have a mortgage and baby to support, the fringe benefits don’t cut it; while money most certainly talks. If I had continued to follow my heart, I would not have been able to support my family. Frankly, if I’d followed my school computer’s advice and become a fireman I would have been better paid than I was as a journalist. I put out a fair amount of fires now of course, but as one of my amazing friends at the agency points out regularly, we work in PR not ER and what’s more, it is better paid. Like Hayley above, I am glad I followed my head.
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