Data project aims to make sense of UK market for public relations

There’s limited realtime data about the health of the UK market for public relations. We want to change that.

We’re launching a new project next week that aims to improve the quality of data about the health of the market for corporate communications and public relations.

Employment data is a valuable economic indicator. However, there’s no single source for the market for talent in UK public relations and corporate communications.

We've experimented with using LinkedIn but it's impossible to get granular data and it doesn't triangulate well to other sources. We're not entirely sure why.

The nature of the market itself complicates the situation. It’s highly fragmented. Attitudes to professionalism are mixed.

It’s also highly dynamic.

Anecdotally, we know that as many as a third of practitioners change jobs yearly and a significant freelance component exists.

Our purpose is simple.

We want to build a dataset that helps understand the corporate communication and public relations market.

We want to answer questions about the relationship between public relations and the economy, barriers and opportunities for progression, and salary levels.

There’s also a media opportunity to create an aggregator or jobs board for the industry for employers and anyone looking for a new job.

The project aims to compile a monthly Jobs in PR newsletter of as many jobs as possible. In time, the dataset will tell a story of the UK's employment market for corporate relations and public relations jobs.

We’ve built a minimum viable product, starting with large agencies because that’s easiest, but we plan to develop the scope over the year.

Thanks to the Hard Numbers team for helping build the dataset and Reuben Sinclair for its market knowledge.

If you want to submit a job for inclusion or looking for a job please follow the links. We’ll go live on Wednesday, 13 March.