It's one of the fastest growing fields with plenty of promotion opportunities, decent salary, lots of intellectual stimulation, and a wide variety of work assignments. So what's the downside? It's hard work, often under deadline pressures, and few people understand - or appreciate - the value of public relations. Many, in fact, see it as planning glitzy parties or spinning the media. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Public relations has evolved into an important business field that assists organizations communicate and build relationships with their publics and with those who influence those publics. Among the key publics are employees, investors, customers and business partners. Influencers are the media, stock analysts, government regulators and other third parties who affect the way those publics perceive companies.

While public relations is often confused with advertising, it is very different. Because advertisers pay for media coverage, they control the message and its distribution. Public relations professionals must earn their media coverage or third party endorsement and have little control over how their message will be repeated. That's why public relations offers more credibility than advertising, and why it is such hard work.

Qualifications

Public relations demands the creativity of advertising, but the business savvy of management consulting. While there are college majors in public relations, a good liberal arts or business education is excellent preparation for the field. Excellent writing skills and an ability to use all the research tools available in today's information-rich, Internet-drive world are prerequisites.

A successful public relations professional must be able to tune into the external world of an organization to discover issues and opportunities, to identify adversaries and allies. So intellectual curiosity and active listening skills are important to complement formal research.

Responding to issues and critics tests ones communications and counseling skills under pressure. Public relations professionals must communicate with a broad range of audiences and constituents -- from customers to competitors, shareholders to Senators, employees to environmentalists. Because their interests are rarely aligned, their motives little understood, it's often left to public relations to resolve conflicts and ambiguity through communications. You'll find yourself applying insights from your psychology and sociology courses and the skills of your English or journalism courses.

Employees are a particularly important audience for public relations professionals. Their productivity is directly affected by how well they understand the company's business and their role in executing that strategy. Internal communications help to build that understanding. And since employees also make an all-important first impression on customers and are the face of the company in the community, they need that understanding and commitment to be good ambassadors. In an age of eroding loyalty between company and employees and tremendous competition for talent, company public relations staffs are increasingly looking for good communicators with schooling or backgrounds in organizational development and industrial relations.

In practicing media relations or investor relations it takes a knowledge of business to hold one's own with a reporter digging for a story or an institutional investor with millions riding on the nuances of the explanation of a recent company event. Often public relations has to get the reporter interested in doing the digging, to cover a story about a company or product when there's no controversy or breaking news. A public relations professional's creativity and selling skills are tested daily in trying to obtain coverage of positive events.

If a company has built solid relationships over time with its constituents and the media, the job is infinitely easier. That means helping investors, customers and the curious public with their information needs about the organization. It means helping reporters on deadlines with quick research, leads to sources or a creative story idea. So counseling and customer relations skills are important.

Finally, a background in some of the hot specialties will give one an added advantage. Healthcare public relations is booming. So too, is high tech public relations. Public relations is playing a major role in developing the many information and community-building functions of the Internet.

Starting a Public Relations Career

Career paths in public relations follow two tracks, either through positions in a company or non-profit organization or in a public relations firm. Increasingly professionals find themselves moving back and forth between the two during their careers. The difference is whether one has a single client - one's own company - or works on several clients at an agency.

Working in a company you will get a strong, firsthand grounding in business and organizational dynamics. To get the maximum exposure to many industries and fields of public relations there's an advantage to starting out in a firm.