Reflection and professional development in public relations

Public relations and communication is rarely formulaic. There are plenty of models and theories that can help with understanding, but just because one approach worked yesterday does not mean the same will work tomorrow.

Some of the variables are the day’s news agenda, the political climate, the changing media landscape, and people’s attention spans. We make assumptions about power and technology infrastructure, but recent events (cyberattacks and the Iberian power outage) show that we can’t always assume that digital communication will always be available to us.

This may make the practice sound unprofessional – more of an art than a science. But I’m not sure it differs too much in this from established professions such as medicine, where knowledge of psychology is as valuable as pharmacology in treating patients.

Indeed, much of the body of knowledge around reflection and continuing professional development (CPD) was developed for nursing, a regulated profession for the past century.

This body of knowledge is now applied to other professions and would-be professions. In the case of public relations, the need for reflection is built into the assignments for the CIPR Professional PR Diploma qualification, most explicitly in the Unit 2 assignment which requires candidates to ‘apply or more models of reflection relevant to PR practice’.

That’s why we’re publishing a short Toolkit on reflection and reflective practice.

To break it down into its simplest elements, any model of reflection is based around three steps:

1. Experience. What happened?
2. Reflection. So what?
3. Learning. Now what?

The models are presented as a cycle since learning is iterative and continuous. 

Case studies are a valuable tool for learning about applied disciplines such as public relations, and we have published many students’ thought leadership articles from the same Unit 2 assignments on PR Academy Insights (you can find them using the tag CIPRWork).

We have shared many good examples on this site, and it’s invidious to mention only one, but I’ll do so because it illustrates what I mean by the variables involved in real world communication.

Many practitioners will have experience of communicating with remote workforces since this became a common challenge through the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. But there can surely be no current practitioners in the UK with experience of employee engagement during a total war. Achieving Employee Engagement in Times of War was Oksana Stefanova’s topic.

What happened? Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

So what?  The Ukrainian pharmaceutical company where she worked needed to motivate staff to continue working despite the risks of war, including the threat of air raids.

Now what? In her words: ‘The war time in my country has provided timely examples of how leaders can engage their employees through talking to people with empathy and care, listening and maintaining consistency between their words and deeds.’ 

We may feel that communication is important in peacetime, but often fail to provide proof of this. In wartime, we can show that communication is an essential part of individual, organisational and national survival. It’s existential.

Bad times can bring the best out of people and tough experiences can provide the most valuable learning.

It’s a lesson for all of us.