Competence

The public relations profession is undergoing tremendous change. The skills required to work in this fast growing discipline remain a work in progress. Yet the profession has no barrier to entry and requires no formal qualifications or Continuous Professional Development (CPD).

This rapid change coupled with a lack of rigor means that it is not possible to benchmark the skills of one practitioner against another, or one agency or in-house position against another.

Training needs aren’t always straightforward to identify, define and address.

Competency frameworks are commonly used in other professional disciplines to address these issues but no such unified framework has been defined or adopted for public relations.

I’m hosting a roundtable at Ketchum’s office in London from 6pm on Wednesday, 14 January to explore this issue.

It's one of my projects this year as past president of the CIPR and part of the #FuturePR network that Gemma Griffiths and Charlotte Winslett have created.

I want to explore the value and opportunity for developing a competency framework for public relations.

Participants will include senior practitioners with responsibility for hiring public relations practitioners and recruiters from the public relations and digital industries. If that includes you and you're interested in taking part please email me.

The goal of the session is to create a series of blog posts and a white paper exploring the potential of competency frameworks in the public relations profession.

It will also be shared with a project that the Global Alliance for public relations and communication is leading to establish a global competency framework in public relations.

Please give me a shout if you'd like to participate.