It’s nice to have a special day on which to celebrate something and there are a lot of ‘special days’ on the calendar - one of my favourites has always been International Biscuit Day. Today, however, is World Public Relations Day, and while it’s a chance to celebrate what we do, it should also make us pause and ask what sort of profession we are creating for our future practitioners.
This year’s theme, ‘The Golden Age of Strategic PR’, carries a sense of confidence and possibility — the suggestion that public relations is recognised for the strategic contribution it can make. But a golden age does not arrive simply because we declare one. Nor can we build the future of practice by bolting new technology onto old job descriptions and continuing much as before.
The operating environment has changed. The practice must change with it. And nowhere is that more visible than in the discussions relating to ‘who we let in, and how’.
For far too long, entry-level public relations has been geared towards production. Juniors drafted stories and reports, sent stuff out, compiled lists, monitored coverage, prepared social posts and kept the communication wheels grinding. Gradually, if they were fortunate, they were allowed closer to the conversations where judgement was exercised.
We know much of that routine work is now automated and the predictable (and rather tawdry) response has been to dismiss junior practitioners as unnecessary in today’s world. This is an extraordinarily limited conclusion, rooted in an equally limited view of public relations.
If we think our work consists mainly of churning words and filling channels, then a machine capable of producing plausible copy might look like a replacement. If we understand our work properly, the picture is very different. Public relations builds and sustains the relationships an organisation needs to maintain its licence to operate. Those relationships cannot be reduced to content. They are shaped by what an organisation does, how it behaves, whose interests it considers, how it responds under pressure and whether its words can be reconciled with its actions.
This is our actual work and new practitioners need to be involved in it from the beginning.
We should not mourn the loss of an apprenticeship based on repetitive production. We should roll up our sleeves and design a better one.
New practitioners will still need to learn to write — not so they can produce more material but so they can detect weak reasoning, edit with precision and recognise when fluent language is hiding an empty or inaccurate claim. They need to read widely so they can question what they are given. They need research skills so they can verify sources, evidence and assertions. They need to listen, observe and notice the significance of what has not been said. And they need the confidence to challenge an output, an assumption or, when necessary, a senior colleague.
These are not supplementary skills. They are the foundations of responsible practice in an environment crowded with synthetic material, distorted information and scraped search results masquerading as authoritative answers.
A new practitioner’s working day might include verifying an AI-generated summary, mapping the relationships affected by a proposed decision, tracing the movement of a false narrative, checking the provenance of an image or preparing a relationship impact note after observing a leadership meeting. This is not lesser work. It is a richer and more demanding introduction to public relations than spending months updating distribution lists — because it places new practitioners inside the work of judgement, interpretation and relationship intelligence from the start.
Back in May,
I described four functions that I believe will shape future practice: the Steward, who keeps relationships, purpose and licence to operate in view; the Guardian, who protects the integrity of the communication environment; the Sentinel, who notices change and the signals that appear before an issue becomes visible to everyone; and the Sensemaker, who brings context and judgement to complexity.
These roles are waiting to be claimed and they offer young practitioners possibilities far beyond the false divide between media relations, internal communication, content and channels moving them towards the valuable work of relationship and situational intelligence, misinformation tracking, information disorder management, crisis preparedness, narrative mapping, AI leadership, verification or relationship impact assessment.
The opportunity is substantial and so is the responsibility.
Those of us who have spent many years in practice have a wealth of knowledge worth passing on. But experience becomes an obstacle when we confuse familiarity with necessity. We cannot prepare new practitioners for the future by insisting they repeat our past and we should not judge their readiness by how closely they resemble us at a similar stage of our careers.
Our task is to help them develop judgement without first requiring them to serve an outdated apprenticeship for a world that no longer exists. That means inviting them into consequential conversations earlier, explaining how and why decisions are made and allowing them to challenge us without damaging their prospects. It also requires humility — new practitioners will sometimes see what senior people do not and their questions may (and will) expose assumptions protected by habit and hierarchy.
We should want that. Really, really want that.
Public relations has never been valuable because it can produce material quickly. Its value lies in helping organisations understand and meet their obligations to the relationships on which they depend. Technology does not remove that responsibility. It makes it more urgent as the Third Presence of AI inveigles itself as a new relationship dimension.
On World PR Day, we should celebrate the opportunities ahead. We could even have biscuits and cake. But celebration without change will not take us very far. Future practice will be built by those entering public relations now. Senior practitioners can choose to defend the arrangements that shaped our own careers or we can help the next generation create something more useful: pass on the torch and ignite a practice centred on relationships, alert to risk, firm with truth and capable of sensemaking in a difficult world cluttered with competing realties.
That would be a future worth handing on — and a golden age worth building.
