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A delayed start
March 4, 2021
As a 31-year-old, you might expect me to already have up to ten years’ experience in PR. But you’d be wrong. I started my first PR job in 2017 – in a few months I’ll be at the four-year mark.
There is so much pressure to know exactly how you want your university or college degree – or general experience – to work for you. I graduated in 2012 with a BA Hons in English Literature and English Language and, quite honestly, I had absolutely zero idea how I was going to use it in the real world.
I knew I enjoyed writing creatively – in my very early 20s I thought I was super cool going to gigs and writing up amateur reviews for local websites or submitting my anguished 20s-crisis poetry to blogs so I could ‘express’ myself (excuse me while I wince with embarrassment).
And although I was yet to conclude that PR might be a good path, thinking creatively back then definitely helped me to where I am now. I can’t tell you if my post-uni writing was good or bad, but I can tell you that consistently writing for myself gave me a sense of confidence in my ability to communicate well.
My PR journey may have had happened sooner if it wasn’t for falling quite ill in the summer of 2015. Multiple issues left me in hospital for a month and off work for a total of 18 (learning how to walk again doesn’t happen overnight). When I was finally able to return to work, I was back to the ‘what am I doing with my life’ stage for a second time!
But I learnt to stop, take a step back, and be patient – all the while being kind to myself.
I think it’s a common misconception that PR is a hard-nosed job. It does help to have a thick skin and you need to withstand a few blows here and there but communicating candidly and mustering an abundance of patience are the most important attributes that will get you where you need to go. And perhaps kicking off my career a little later allowed me to build up resilience and self-assurance outside of my profession. These parts of my character are now integral to how I work.
If I had jumped straight into PR, I’m sure I still would have made a success of it. But the stops along the way, and the uncertainty of where I wanted to go after I finished university, which led me to write on my own more, equipped me with skills I may not have found otherwise. There’s nothing wrong with starting a little later.
Katie McIlvenny