Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Tick! Tack! Tick! Tack! ....


Hello everyone,

As you can easily guess from the title, the main topic for today’s blog is ‘Time’. When entering the real world of PR, I quickly realised that Time is a very valuable yet always scarce resource.

During the course of our studies we were often given the opportunity to work on “real-life” clients and provide “real” solutions. However, a very important aspect was missing: Time constraints (It’s true that we did have deadlines for our assessments but these are trivial compared to real-life deadlines).

As an intern, my main issue was to adapt and take in these new skills and understanding of the PR world while at the same time try to keep up with this rapid and demanding world.

Our daily workload has its specific, often short, deadlines which require a quick and almost instinctive decision process. And that is why I believe that work experience plays a crucial role in the PR field - and any other field - ; experienced PR practitioners will have an intuitive feel when working and will automatically know what the task/situation requires.

Interns first have to go through a series of internal mental processes to understand the context and its requirements so as to be able to provide their own inputs. On the other hand, experienced PR practitioners will, through practice/repetition, skip some of these processes and are thus able to put more emphasis on their inputs.

Unfortunately for organisations, it means that most interns are at the learning stage and that the real inputs that they could bring to an organisation only come with time and experience - which alas often comes by the time their internship is over.

So that’s the main thought that I wanted to share today.

Until next time, best of luck for those still doing their internships!!!

1 comment:

Houmaira said...

Hello Benoit,

Thanks for sharing your experience with us! Reverting to what you've said about time being a scarce resource in the PR world, I definitely agree with you because time is really an issue for most PR Practitioners out there. Well, if I take the example of the PR firm where I conducted my internship, I noticed that the PR executives were always busy because they had strict deadlines and their time was very limited. That being said, some of them had to continue their work at home to finish it in due time or seek the help of the administrative staff for certain administrative tasks. I've also come to realize that every PR practitioner should have good time management skills or else he or she will lag behind in this demanding profession. However, my main concern is that sometimes when PR Practitioners have to work fast, they don't get to produce their best work because surely they need enough time to process the work efficiently and to exceed others' expectations.

That's pretty much what I wanted to add. You've actually raised certain good points in your blog posts which I have been following and I feel compelled to comment on your other posts. So, kudos!

Kind Regards,

Houmaira.