SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

fi̇lm top trailers in hd – blogger

I attended a “stakeholder meeting” hosted by the Dean’s Office for the Communication Faculty at Istanbul University late November 2017. I don’t know if any other universities hold similar meetings, but that really was the most efficient and high-quality event I have recently attended. There was a small number of highly-qualified people such as faculty members, NGO authorities, media members and representatives from every section of the industry.

The main problem is that ten thousand people graduate from different departments of the communication faculties in Turkey every year. More than half of these people study advertising and public relations! There is no such demand, there are no job opportunities for graduates, the level of education does not meet expectations and students are not sufficiently-informed. Under these circumstances, the communication faculties send the ranks of the unemployed with a degree to society!

We have been papering over this fact known by everyone for years. Graduates realise that they do not have any other choice but to apply for a job as a cashier in a supermarket, as a waiter/waitress in a café or as a shop assistant in a store.

I have been asking myself for years how come we can ruin the future of bright young people.

The meeting organised by the Dean’s Office for the Communication Faculty at Istanbul University gave me the opportunity to express my thoughts on this subject.

Our main concern should be to identify “the use of public relations”. The public relations departments opened before finding an answer to this question will have no function other than uncertainty in young people’s careers.

As the name implies, this discipline is about “having relations with the public“. This is not a simple or superficial subject which can be limited to the public relations department of a company and its employees.

Public relations is the main responsibility of all the managers

• who work at the top positions of an organisation,
• who are responsible for the reputation of that organisation,
• who have to manage crises and similar situations actively,
• who employ the principles of accountability as the main function of management and
• who have to give exact, timely and transparent information to the public.

Therefore, especially CEOs, managing directors and their assistants plus people who manage areas such as purchasing, sourcing, transportation, production, human resources, finance and law have to know “what public relations is, what it is used for and what it means for their careers“.

As a matter of fact, the communication departments of companies are managed by one person or just a few people since the above-mentioned condition is not/cannot be realised. There is always a conflict between communication managers and decision makers. Management teams consider “a seat” too much for a communication manager. Communication budgets are always limited or they are the first budgets to be cut.

If an organisation sees public relations just as “responsibility for organising a press release, a meeting or an event“, that organisation will, of course, have “reputation problems“. It will always fall behind its competitors. It will not have anything to say against regulations and it will eventually find itself in a “desperate” situation.

What if the situation was completely different?

• If public relations was a master’s programme,
• If it consisted of the basic theories of the communication discipline, philosophy, sociology, social psychology, human psychology, history of art, dynamics of civil society etc.,
• If it was presented through senior lecturers’ project-based work,
• If it was defined as a privileged infrastructure used by everyone from every discipline to advance to the top hierarchical positions and
• If it came with a master’s degree, would organisations have a different performance in communication management with all their stakeholders especially their employees and customers?

You might say “Where will we find the human resources needed by the public relations industry?”

Please look at the jobs done in the public relations departments of agencies and companies, and decide whether anyone needs to go to university for four years to do these jobs.