360 ° Changes

Hurray!!!! My two months internship placement in Hill+Knowlton Strategies finally came to an end. New working environment in a consultancy firm really do change my whole mindset thinking about the PR knowledge in this two months.  I sincerely want to say a millions of thanks to the Managing Director of Hill & Knowlton Malaysia, Mr Justin Then, Senior Associate, Mr. Burhanuddin Omar who is my internship supervisor and also all the colleagues for their willingness and kindness in giving me the learning opportunities and providing me proper guidance, training skill, and sharing their useful personal experience and knowledge with me throughout the internship period. Before I step into the real public relations industry, I really did not know much about PR. In fact I was just a student who barely understands the actual operation process of how public relations carry out their work in order to achieve their goal of any communication project for their client. I also always had a perspective of public relations that it is just like a professional career which uses communication skill to facilitate the relationship and understanding between an organization and its stakeholders, all about practical daily routine of working closely with media to secure positive media coverage in order to protect corporate reputation and image of company, mainly handle crisis issues and community project, organizing press conferences and others.

After I accomplished the internship, now  my perspective towards public relations have changed and my personal working attitudes have much more improved than before such as the way I think and analyze current issues became more critically and skeptical, communication style with clients and media became more friendly and straightforward to the important point without wasting time, be more aware of my dressing and talking style which might affect the company image and work ethically by following my company policy. Moreover, I still remembered one of my associate director advised me that public relations nowadays actually can be defined as ‘people relations’ which means human networking and contacts are very crucial as sources for  getting information and medium for disseminating information to a diverse range of audiences. This made me realized that when you are in the PR industry, you must make friends whenever and wherever you can. Internship placement in a multinational consultancy firm have made me get the chance to expose to the variety of client from different sectors such as telecommunication, automobile, healthcare, consumer goods, technology and finance. Eventually, this has improved my general knowledge in every aspect that related with my client business. Throughout the internship, I also realized that employee communication is very important in every company to keep engage every staff for making them keep aware about the current business updates and policy of the company and also strengthen  the relationship between the  colleagues by using their in-house news portals, newsletters, email, weekly meeting, staff training, festival celebrations and others. For instances, Hill & Knowlton have organized a Christmas party and Lou Sang Chinese New Year Reunion Dinner to celebrate the festival joy with the staffs. On my last day internship, they also have organized a farewell lunch in the office for appreciating my hard work and contribution towards the company. All these various types of company events improve employee engagement while providing a platform for employees to socialize and be positively motivated.

Based on my personal experience, year end semester break or the month of December could be the best time for students to do an internship. This is because all the clients’ projects and annual report would be due on end of this month. It is the busiest time of a year that everyone in the public relations consultancy firm will be  rush to finish up all the workloads and most of the time the intern will be used to  assist them in finish up their work. This means intern can learn a lot of new working skill or extra knowledge when assist them in handling client’s annual reports. Internship placement at Hill & Knowlton Strategies Malaysia have let me able to experiences and seen the dealing process of a professional PR consultant with client and able to participate in helping the colleagues to engage our client business with the media. In addition, my supervisor have given me a precious feedback regarding my internship performance which is he advised me that as a professional public relations officer need to keep ‘READING ABOUT  EVERYTHING’ on the news information of every industry sector because this extra knowledge could help us to think critically while designing an ideal and reliable communication project for every client. Once again, thank you everyone in Hill & Knowlton Strategies for giving me lots of golden opportunities in learning about the professional public relations frameworks throughout the internship.

Photos below are my best memorable moment in Hill & Knowlton Strategies Malaysia. 

Awesome people in the house HK Strategies!!!!

My Supervisor, Burhan & Me J

Farewell gathering food       

Intern from Taylor University & Segi College

Christmas Party and my Christmas present from company J

Our client brings along their product visit us!! Red Bull Wings!!!!

Lim Min Yuan
Curtin Sarawak
15625074 / 7E0B7821