If you are currently a member of PRSSA, or a full-fledged member of PRSA, you may already be familiar with the organization’s APR designation. If you are not a member of our esteemed professional society, shame on you! Just kidding. Seriously, though, there is a great deal of confusion among PR practitioners, young and old alike, regarding the APR designation offered by PRSA, and how it may benefit professionals like you — now, and in the future. As a current APR candidate, I would like to offer my personal perspective on this very important certification program.

For starters, let us begin with some very simple questions and answers provided by PRSA:

What is APR Accreditation?
Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) is a voluntary certification program for public relations professionals, administered by the Universal Accreditation Board. The APR Accreditation is the only professional certification program open to public relations professionals.

Who administers the Accreditation program?
The Accreditation program is administered by the Universal Accreditation Board (UAB), a consortium of 10 leading industry organizations, including PRSA.

Who can pursue the APR?
Any PRSA member in good standing can take on the challenge of earning Accreditation. However, it is recommended that candidates have at least five years’ experience in the full-time practice or teaching of public relations, and who have earned either a bachelor’s degree in a communication-specific field (e.g., public relations, journalism, mass communication) or have equivalent work experience, which includes public relations principles, public relations writing, public relations campaigns, research, ethics and law and internship (practical experience under supervision).

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As we all learned in elementary school, plagiarism is just flat-out wrong. If a teacher caught you doing it, you received an F on the assignment, at the very least; possibly suspended; or at the opposite end of the spectrum, expelled. In the professional world, it gets you fired, and makes it extremely difficult to be hired in the future in a similar capacity. As PR professionals, given that the lion’s share of our daily actiivities is writing-related, I believe we are particularly acute to the dangers and consequences of plagiarism.

So what’s the deal with the recent plagiarism cases which have become public? Case in point, and Exhibit #1: The main cover story of the May 8, 2006, issue of PRWeek, discusses the plight of Raytheon CEO William Swanson, who may be directly ousted, or forced to resign, by the company’s board of directors for admittedly copying material for a leadership pamphlet from an obscure 1944 engineering textbook. In the piece, Paul Argenti, a professor of communications at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business Administration, aptly summed up the situation by stating, “His [Swanson’s] credibility is shot; there’s no way he can go on as CEO at this company and have any kind of credibility with key constituents, including employees, investors and regulators.” Ouch. To add insult to injury, the board immediately took action by reducing Swanson’s 2006 restricted stock allocation by 20%, and holding his salary at its 2005 level. The unkindest cut of all, which seems likely according to sources quoted in PRWeek, will be his termination.

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I had lunch last week with a recent business school graduate to get an update on how his job search is proceeding, and the specific challenges he is facing. While this individual is certainly well qualified, and has skills and experience that most employers would drool over, he is struggling with ways to advance discussions with hiring managers past the cursory phone interviews, or more importantly, the first round of in-person interviews. As our conversation progressed, it became apparent to me that this professional, even with his strong academic background and expertise, was generating solid interest from employers and securing initial interviews. However, his progress is being stalled because he is not truly differentiating himself in a compelling fashion, vis a vis other candidates, once he entered the interview process. That is extremely frustrating for any professional, but the good news is that there several easy ways to overcome these obstacles.

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As graduation approaches for countless public relations students across the country, including our esteemed managing editor, many aspiring professionals will be entering into PR internships and entry-level positions, both in agencies and in-house. That being said, I would like to address, and debunk, several myths surrounding one of the primary responsibilities which is frequently off-loaded to entry-level practitioners, regardless of industry or media focus: the editorial calendar.

Even in today’s sophisticated PR programs, many driven by online strategies and new media vehicles, editorial calendar research and follow-up persists as a basic staple of corporate communications programs, particularly in agency environments. This baffles me, especially since editorial calendar (ed cal) monitoring is generally considered to be an outdated, “old school” means of generating media coverage by many of the industry’s luminaries. So why do editorial calendars still live in the PR consciousness? It is difficult to pinpoint all of the reasons, but I can point to the following reasons:

Myth #1: Editorial calendars are static. Once they are set by the publisher for the year, they never change.
Reality: Not even close. Ed cals change all the time. That means opportunities which look promising for a client one week may not be around the next. If you are stuck with the ed cal monitoring task, you will have to conduct twice the amount of follow-up with the reporter or editor in question to determine what the publication is really planning as far as editorial coverage for a given issue.

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As most of us have learned in our public relations educations, and our subsequent careers, public relations is a strategic marketing discipline, and one of the four components of the promotional mix, along with advertising, promotions, and personal selling (i.e., sales force). Furthermore, marketing is a core business function. So why, pray tell, is public relations still primarily taught at the university level as a major within communications or journalism schools, and not as a business school major, a la marketing? This, my friends, remains one of the biggest disconnects between academia and Corporate America when it comes to our esteemed profession, and it is adversely impacting the prospects of recent graduates when they enter the workforce to embark on their respective PR careers.

Now, to be clear, I am not criticizing any of the fine undergraduate or graduate public relations programs which exist today, including the excellent curriculum taught at Auburn University. However, I am stating that that these programs often fall short in completely preparing their students for the real world because there is typically insufficient emphasis on additional marketing courses, as well as classes covering other core business functions, such as accounting, finance, organizational management, economics, business law, supply chain management and logistics, and strategy. This could be for any number of reasons, including poor curriculum design, lack of cohesion with the business school, or simply a failure to recognize the need.

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