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Blurred boundaries between advertising and public relations professions due to new roles in social media raise the question of whether educators can adequately prepare their students for a career in those growing fields, according to a Baylor study.
"Educators need to address the deficiencies identified in this study and find ways to build these skills and competencies in their courses," said Marlene S. Neill, Ph.D., assistant professor of journalism, public relations and new media in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences.
The study—"Gaps in Advertising and Public Relations Education: Perspectives of Agency Leaders "—is published in the Journal of Advertising Education.
"In the study, we have provided some specific and practical recommendations for advertising and public relations educators," Neill said.
Recommendations include:
--Business literacy: Have advertising and public relations students read and analyze investment reports and financial statements, as well as take current events quizzes from business and trade publications.
--Math: Require advertising and public relations students to take a statistics course.
--Online community management: Have advertising and public relations students conduct social listening/social media audit and develop evaluation reports using social media analytics; advertising students should consider taking electives in public relations to learn about crisis and issues management.
--Media planning/buying: PR students should consider taking advertising electives to learn about paid media strategies.
The reaction of people polled on this issue is this?
(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Friday December 04 2015, @03:18PM
The better professors are sufficiently on top of being part of a rapidly changing field to roll with the changes, but most of them are just average. Frankly, this stuff is developing so quickly that it taxes most academic institutional structures to be able to cope. By the time a curriculum committee has agreed on what the target should be for instruction in a cutting edge subject and put together a course structure, three years have gone by and the program is out of date before the first student who receives it has graduated. It reminds me of the programming classes my school had on offer in the early 90's - "Seriously, take all four ADA classes, the government is mandating it."