Shall I stay in the ‘real world’ or leap into another galaxy? 

By this time of the academic year, most of you will be looking for jobs with some of our students already having cinched their first jobs in the industry – hats off to those rising stars!

While Stephen Waddington’s last MAsterclass gives you plenty of advice on how and where to find employment, this post veers off towards an entirely different career route – doing a PhD in PR. 

Let’s start with basics: why do a PhD?

Right now, you’re in the middle of enduring your research quests, ideas are dropping right and left like heavy rocks during an earthquake, data is snowballing into an avalanche, and you’ve no idea how you’ll ever get to the top of your dissertation Everest. Essentially, you’re running a mountain marathon and I’m asking you to consider doing an ultrarun or maybe a leap into another universe altogether.

A visual representation of writing an MA dissertation struggle. To the left: early stages. To the right: reaching the deadline.

A PhD, essentially, is a passport to another galaxy of research and knowledge. You all are aware that PR is a relatively new, fast-growing discipline and this means a couple of important things: there is a lot to discover and contribute to the body of knowledge as well as to the industry itself.           

“Doing a PhD now allows me to see things from a different perspective,” says Jesus Salazar, our programme alumni and a current PhD student at Newcastle University.

“It lets me be more critical towards the industry and the day-to-day practices, contributing to the field by doing something that is often disregarded in PR: theorising. I can study communication phenomena, developing, testing, and proposing new ideas and strategies.”

In short, PhD not only prepares you to become independent scholars and researchers in higher education. It develops your critical thinking, data analysis and synthesis which enable you to make rational, evidence-based decisions and find solutions – and those, my dear students, are crucial skills for anyone craving a high-level, high-impact career.

Communication technician vs communication manager

While in 2020 CIPR’s State of the Profession Survey showed that copywriting and editing remained the most commonly undertaken activity among practitioners across different levels of seniority, the remaining top nine activities placed emphasis on strategic influence:          

As you can imagine, the pandemic resulted in unprecedented changes to the industry and client needs. The top priorities shifted to issues management, strategic counsel, and stakeholder management. On an agency level, practitioners highlighted an increased demand for better evaluation and measurement, too. 

In other words, the growing trends represent the need for critical thinking, data gathering, management, and synthesis leading to solutions – the key pillars of any substantial research.

Crisis and critical thinking

Remember, most reputational crises occur due to lack of critical assessment of the situation the organisation is facing.

Think back to the crises you examined in your Strategies and Management in PR assessment – were any of them unavoidable? Of course not, and most of you rightly placed them in Coombs’s intentional crisis cluster since those organisations or individuals took risks; risks that led to negative response from their publics.

Who was responsible for taking those risks? If you remember the VW crisis, the company’s management tried to distance themselves from it by blaming their employees. But we know it’s not the employees who sign off campaigns. Those crises happened because people at the decision-making level, including C-suite executives decided that the actions they’ve taken were a good idea. They lacked the ability to reflect on the impact their actions would have. In short, they lacked critical thinking.

What areas of interest are there to explore?

The world of research is your oyster: you can investigate AI, ethics and global publics, social mobility in PR, international communication in times of global disasters, to name just a few.

The list is endless and for some inspiration you may want to revisit Stephen’s previous MAsterclass on research in PR as well as some interesting ready-to-explore topics listed on his blog.  

In essence, a PhD builds on what you’ve already studied and takes you to another level of expertise, an expertise no one else has.

Alastair Morgan, also our alumni, currently studying at Leeds Beckett University says: “My Master’s degree in Media and Public Relations at Newcastle provided me with the ideal foundations to undertake the PhD for which I am currently studying.

“My area of interest is in political communication and my research will investigate ways in which programmes of democratic engagement may be made more inclusive of young people with special educational needs.”

It means that if you’re into political communication, your research may impact policies. You may end up working for the government on international NGOs. And similarly to Alastair’s inspirations, you may get a chance to change or improve policies – in his case, to make politics more inclusive and accessible to young and disadvantaged people. How does this sound in terms of making an impact?

How to find a PhD?

There are two commonly used approaches:

Subscribe to a PhD search engine, such as www.findaphd.com or https://www.postgraduatesearch.com which usually give you information about funding options for domestic and international students. 

Look directly at university websites in places that interest you – you’ll find more options available, but there’ll be more data to sift through since you’ll be checking one institution at a time. Look at university rankings in your field of interest – the QS World University Rankings by Subject is a good place to start.

Good practice involves networking, too – again, a key skill in PR – through social media and conferences, so you get to know who the experts (read: potential supervisors in the field) are and engage with them even before you submit your proposal.

Typically, universities recruit around November/December for the next academic year, so start your research the moment you submit your dissertation. The good thing is that by now, you all know how to write a proposal!

What’s next?

There are plenty (PLENTY!) of job opportunities in academia across the globe, from London, Hamburg, Singapore, Hong Kong, Santiago, Dubai to Cape Town. 

Academia, however, won’t be the only available career route. Very often, doctorate graduates find themselves working in web publishing, advising governments or international bodies and this is when you can make a difference and influence policies.

Your research interests will have a major impact on where your doctoral degree might take you. But from Jesus’s perspective, the journey itself is an extremely rewarding process:

 “Above all, it has been a journey of self-discovery,” he says. 

“Doing a PhD has helped me find myself, find my voice, my position in this crazy world, and understand who I am.”

And this is what I wholeheartedly wish you regardless of your chosen post-MA path.