Goal Setting for Young PR Pros

One of the first thing that PR students learn is that PR is all about strategy; and goal setting is an integral step in any strategy.

When we undertake communication strategies, goal setting is the first thing we do once our research is complete.

This is for a very simple reason, you need goals to know where you’re going and to work out your objectives and tactics. You also need to be able to measure whether you’ve achieved your goals at the end of the strategy to be sure that your strategy was effective.

So Young PR pros are all aware of the importance of goal setting – but how many of us apply goal setting in our lives/studies/career?

I’ve never set formal goals in the past, but this year I decided that I would. I figured in my first year in the profession I should be trying to move forward in a strategic manner.

Have any of you set goals for yourself in the past? Was it a successful exercise? Would you consider goal setting? Why or why not?

Tips for Goal Setting

  • Take some time to think about your goals

You can’t set them in a second. You need to think them through and know what you want to achieve. Spend some time planning your goals

  • They should be specific and attainable

Your goals should clearly, concisely communicate exactly what they’re supposed to. They need to be attainable, you need to be able to achieve them.

  • They should have a time frame

For example, my goals are set for this year. Be sure that you can achieve your goals within a reasonable timeframe.

  • Write them down

Make sure that you keep a copy of them. That way you can keep them in mind throughout the year and keep working towards them.

I’ll share my professional goals for 2006 with you here, and how I went about setting them. If you couldn’t give two-hoots about my goals, please don’t bother reading on.

I’ve posted earlier about my trip to Uluru, I took some time there to set my goals. I went for a big dawn bushwalk at the ‘Valley of the Winds’ at Kata Tjuta. It gave me some time to walk and think by myself amongst some beautiful scenery. This worked for me – you might prefer a warm bath, a couple of bottles of Penfolds Grange or whatever else gets your creative juices flowing.

I sat down for a while and wrote my goals in the front page of my diary, so they’ll be in front of me all year.

Without further ado, I present my professional goals for 2006.

1 – Love Learning

2 – Be Enthusiastic, Always

3 – Keep a Balance

I wrote a little more under each topic with further things to keep in mind, but I’ll keep them to myself to avoid sounding like a tosser.

Once I’ve got more of an idea of what my public relations career entails, I’ll be setting some goals that are more specific. For now, they’re more like guidelines – but they’ll do a good job of guiding me.

Would you like to share your goals with us?

(This was originally posted at Young PR.) 

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Posted in Misc. Career Insight March 10th, 2006 by Paull Young | No comments

Creating a portfolio

For most of us students, it’s that time — time to start working on creating our professional portfolios! In the past few weeks, I’ve begun to take on the daunting task of starting to organize my portfolio. But if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it right! Anytime I find myself face-to-face with a new endeavor that I’m not familiar with (or, as in this case, have NO CLUE about) I go in search of as much information as I can find. Well, I cast out my net over the wealth of information contained in the vast sea of the internet … initially didn’t come back with much. At all. But then I did some digging and found some pretty good stuff. So this post is for my fellow students, so the rest of you guys don’t have to look so hard.

The following is from an interesting site called Webgrrls International. Um, Josh, you might not get as much out of this site as the gals, but the portfolio advice is still relevant.

Preparing the print portfolio:

  • Collect pieces from every job you’ve had. Sift through it all and put the best in your portfolio. These are the proof of your successes. If your success was less tangible, type it out on paper, explaining what you did and why it was so great, the challenges and so on.
  • Show your portfolio to someone in your field that you respect and ask them to critique it. Implement their ideas, then show it to someone else.
  • Prepare further by thinking of situations in which you demonstrated the particular skills an employer is looking for. Be able to give very specific, action-oriented answers with positive results. If you have any documented materials, add them to your portfolio.

I also found a good bit of information through Florida State’s Career Center. Here’s some helpful tips from the folks at FSU:

A Professional Portfolio is:

  • A reflection of you as a professional person
  • A record of your professional development
  • How you perform/excel on the job or in the classroom
  • What you have accomplished (i.e., tangible artifacts/evidence)
  • Your efforts at developing new skills


Items typically found in most professional portfolios include:

  • Resume or Vitae (ask a career advisor for information on Vitae preparation)
  • Transcripts
  • Evidence of professional affiliations
  • Licenses or Certifications
  • Letters of reference
  • Evidence of specific skills (e.g., public speaking, leadership, writing)
  • Work samples (e.g., class projects, items produced during internship or co-op experiences)

FSU’s site also noted two ways to organize a portfolio: chronologically and functionally. Chronologically, of course, means arranging the content sequentially. Arranging it functionally simply means grouping the material into sections according to the type of content (i.e., separately group together press releases, pitch letters, speeches, etc.).

Those two provided some basic information that was easy for me to pull out and offer as tips, but I’d also like to encourage you to take a look at this site on career portfolio basics. It has much of the same information mentioned above, and it details the difference between a “learning” and “job” portfolio. (Obviously, we want to prepare a “job” portfolio at this point in our lives.) This site is one of the better ones, it seems, just because there’s a lot of information in one place.

A few other sites:
Starting your career portfolio collection
Career portfolio resources

One thing I’m still not sure about even after researching … length! Some places say to make it only about 5-10 pages, while others indicate you should include a lot more. So I’m not sure on that.

I hope the rest of this was helpful! If anybody else knows of any other good portfolio resources or can offer any insight on the expected length, feel free to share.

(This was originally posted in Erin Caldwell’s PRblog.)

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Posted in FAQs and Tips, Portfolios March 10th, 2006 by Erin Caldwell | 5 comments