The 3 most common skill gaps in PR — and how to fix them
Chief APR examiner sees the patterns — and skill gaps — the rest of us miss in our comms careers.
Constant change, shrinking budgets and org chart shuffles are exposing skill gaps in areas like measurement, strategic thinking and cross-functional collaboration.
That’s why L&D is having a moment. So where should you start?
For the answers, we turned to Alex Sevigny, chief APR examiner for the Canadian Public Relations Society, professor at McMaster University and advisor to Ragan’s Center for AI Strategy. Here are the three most common comms skill gaps he sees — and how to fix them:
- Close your AI strategy gap before it widens. Most communicators understand what AI can do but lack the strategy and processes to guide its adoption, Sevigny says.
As communicators get serious about custom GPTs and AI agents, documenting work becomes imperative. Sevigny says that means developing key assets, including a full process audit, AI policy and guidelines for the team, a library of prompts and frameworks, and a database of materials for AI agents to learn from.
Sevigny adds that the best training “asset” might actually be the relationships you build across the organization. “Making friends and allies in IT, data science and other technical departments in your organization can be very helpful in getting all this set up properly for you,” he explains.
- Sharpen your strategy — and stop confusing it with tactics. APR submissions often reflect a lack of alignment of strategies and tactics with goals and objectives, according to Sevigny.
His advice: “A great way to learn strategy is to read about it in venues like the Harvard Business Review, which has a nice two-volume set on strategy. The next step is to practice applying strategic thinking tools to everyday practice and everyday life.”
Learning tried and true methods for goal and objective setting is also very useful. “For example, try to apply SMART objectives and FAST goals to any campaign you’re working on,” he suggests.
Another related weakness is budgeting and asset maximization. “I see a lot of budgets that aren’t directly tied to goals and objectives, so it’s hard for a grader (or the CFO) to get a sense of exactly where you are spending your resources,” he says.
His advice is to practice better budgeting by setting FAST goals and SMART objectives — and then tying costs directly to the goals and objectives. “That makes it easier to understand the ROI on your hard (monetary) and soft costs (HR, volunteer hours, etc.),” he explains.
Sevigny also suggests taking time to understand the fundamentals of your organization’s financial practices. “Making a friend in the finance department can be very helpful,” he says “I am a big fan of leveraging institutional allies and friends to help you elevate your practice.”
- Embrace data literacy like your career depends on it. “Our practice didn’t fully embrace social media’s demand for data-driven storytelling,” Sevigny says. “That led to an inability to prove our value in high-leverage areas like relationship management, building trust at scale and two-way communications— which means you’re seen as a cost center, not a strategic partner.”Sevigny understands that many PR pros and communicators came to the practice from journalism—and that many of us “lacked the language and the data points to prove our value often in strategy and leadership meetings.”The good news, he says, is that you can use AI to help you analyze the “baffling spreadsheets” that you pull from Google Analytics, your CMS or media monitoring system.“AI can help you quickly do things like word, topic and theme analysis — and open-source systems like VADER or Textblob can be trained to conduct effective sentiment analysis,” Sevigny says. “PowerBI also has a lot of AI-powered tools using Copilot that make data analysis and data visualization more accessible in terms of time-cost and technical difficulty, since you can ask for outcomes in natural language like English.”
Need an L&D boost or consult? Learn how you can advance your career with Ragan Training.
Brian Pittman is the dean of Ragan Training and a senior Ragan event producer. A veteran journalist, storyteller, Hollywood screenwriter and surfer, he can be reached at [email protected].
