Public Relations is an intense and difficult job that can be rewarding and disappointing. It can be exciting, and mind boring. PR, more often than not is misunderstood by people outside of the industry. Increasingly, the lines between PR, marketing and advertising are becoming more blurred and taking the industry into a new direction. In short, once you got below the surface, PR is not what it appears to be from the outside.
To be a PR person, you need to posses a certain skill set than can be broken down into two categories; "human skills and professional skills". Human skills include things such as patience and congeniality, while professional skills include the ability to speak publicly and write professionally.
Human Skills - [Patience] it's waiting to hear back from journalist or producers that you have pitched, or simply understanding that a PR campaigns takes time to gain traction and evolve, if you don't have patience, you will never be able to be PR person.
The best PR people are people who can put things into context. The ability to take an idea and narrow or broaden it is important when it comes to pitching a story, as well as when it comes figuring out how to target the story.
Professional Skills - [Writing] don't have to be a novelist. You can't write a decent letter, memo or most importantly, press release. Despite the proliferation of emails and instant messaging, the ability to communicate via the written word is something lost on many people who have grown up in the electronic age.
[Orating] Public speaking is not easy, and it certainly takes most people time to get comfortable in front of a large group of people. PR people need to be able to articulate their through and their company's story in front of an audience, be it a group of employees or a swarm of media.
PR takes an immense amount of research and PR people who don't understand tools such as blogs, search engines and premium search services suffer the consequences.
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