Strategic Communications and PR practitioners typically operate in a react, respond, and revise environment. Without a committed push to level up on skill sets and capabilities, practitioners find themselves simply going through the motions, and not achieving the career success they aspired to before. We share some tips on how to level up to proactively shape your career.
Over the daily grind, it can be easy to fall into a comfortable routine of reacting and responding to situations and revising execution to map to the level of action required. Tasks become overwhelming because of the frequency, volume, and intensity. Personal career goals take a backseat as the needs of the organisation over-ride personal development. Opportunities pass, and knowledge as well as skill sets diminish over time.
The career trajectory – for strategic communications or PR practitioners – does not need to be so tragic.
Our discipline and function is business-critical from a brand, reputation and communication perspective. We belong and support the leadership team when it comes to identifying trends, providing bridges for cross-function collaboration to happen, and mitigate risk. The work we do influences customers, supports revenue generation and ensures internal alignment across the organisation as work is done.
So why does it not feel that way as we go through our daily work?
It is our choice whether we want to show initiative and self-reliance.
Our organisation or our direct managers cannot force us to show up, be able to initiate activities independently or be proactive in our actions.
Their tasks are different from our tasks; and while help and support should be freely and easily available, the action – and the decision to act upon the task – belongs to us.
We are the ones that must decide to show up and choose to show initiative, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency.
However, it requires us to have the skills and the capabilities needed to master the task. What if we lack these skills and capabilities, or we are not confident enough in our knowledge to use them?
The Strategic Communications Group (SCG) seeks to enable and empower strategic communications organisations, teams and PR practitioners to become better at their craft, improve industry and provide people with value through the support of platforms and tools.
Through the Strategic Communications Academy, we provide a training platform and service focused on skill sets and competencies for communications and Public Relations teams and practitioners.
Learning pathways and topics include building basic and foundational capabilities on writing, media relations, the use of content and the application of communications through to developing good project management skills and client/stakeholder relationships for practitioners.
SCG also provides consultancy services to organisations looking for support on branding and narrative, issues management and crisis communications. Our Academy trainers are also available to coach and train executives and teams.
Send an email to academy@strtgcommsgrp.com and we will connect with you shortly.
We work with brands in the corporate, professional services, retail, travel, and technology spaces.
Levelling up your skill sets, and capabilities is a proactive move for controlling your career success
If we can only control what we can control and leave external factors out of our decision-making process, the reality is we are in control of our own actions only.
Our own actions can influence and determine our career success.
One of the strongest actions to take is to be disciplined and consistent about levelling up our skill sets and capabilities. This increases our knowledge about our craft, adds confidence to our decisions, and helps us be more effective and efficient in the delivery of our thinking and execution.
Confidence provides momentum towards taking initiative. As we improve our capability, we are being self-reliant while supporting our organisation and managers with business and team goals.
This is one of the formulas to achieve recognition and success in our organisation. By stringing several milestones over time, we arrive at career success. This is regardless of whether success is measured by money, status, or reputation.
Levelling up is one of the simplest tactics to take control of your future career success.
How can you use levelling up to improve your career?
- Focus on learning and improving your skill sets: Skills are the first principles between knowledge, information, and action. When you understand WHY you are doing something, you can be creative about HOW you want to achieve results.
- Build capabilities vs. acquiring technical information: A capability is the outcome when you understand both WHY you are doing something and WHAT can be done about it. HOW you do it – through execution, platforms and tools – can be enhanced with the WHY and WHAT.
- Balance learning and acquiring hard and soft skills: Practitioners do not lack creative and smart ideas and concepts. However, we often need the soft skills. These can help us influence, convince, and negotiate win-win outcomes within and for our organisations and teams.
- Anticipate the Forgetting Curve: What is this curve? It describes a situation where 75 percent of learning is forgotten if it is not applied within a specific period. Ensure that you put into practice what you learnt as quickly and as often as possible. Mastery comes with consistency and frequency.
- Work within your learning rhythm: Training does not need to be boring. Pick topics that you can micro-learn. Use badges and levels within a platform to maintain progress. Treat the training process like your personal video game; you can only reach the higher levels after you have mastered some skills, acquired some capabilities (you know, like protection, armour, etc), and are ready to take on the bosses (big work challenges) at the end of each level.
The Strategic Communications Academy can be a partner and ally supporting you to achieve career success.
The academy provides talent – like yourself – with a structured training programme and curriculum covering hard and soft skills and capabilities related to the practice of strategic communications.
Connect with us through email at academy@strtgcommsgrp.com to set up a meeting, or to request for more information, or to recommend your HR/training colleague to us for a chat.
Let us help coach and train you and prepare you (and your colleagues or teams) for an exciting career-adventure as strategic communications or PR practitioners.