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General Description

This is an ideal career for intuitive thinkers. A Public Affairs Manager looks after the reputation of a business. You assist an organisation to plan and enhance their reputation, company image and communicate the organisation’s key messages. Your primary task is keeping everyone who needs to know informed on any matter that can impact on the organisations image.

Career Advice - Public Affairs Manager Career

What you do every day

To effectively manage your employer’s reputation you write and edit electronic and print media such as: media releases, speeches, briefings, website pages or internal policies. You communicate with a wide range of people both within and outside your organization. You might be planning the launch of a product. You inform the local and national media of your organisation’s plans, goals and actions. You create strong partnerships with the community and other interested parties.  Deadlines are often looming over you.

Personality that best fits this career

You need to provide water tight, rigorous and persuasive argument in all forms of communication. You need commercial insight to predict media and public trends and to advise others of altering public moods. You also need the ability to persuade, influence, listen, be intuitive in your thinking, and be patient under pressure and tight media deadlines. If you don’t like team work, don’t bother, attention to detail is expected and you must be truthful and trustworthy.

Best thing about this career

Public affairs is a dynamic and ever changing world. Often you will get up in the morning and not know what’s in store for your working day. This is often determined by events that develop throughout the day. Sometimes you can come home and watch the fruits of your labour on evening news bulletins, making it simple to judge the success of your contribution. Things move quickly in public affairs and if your work is good, you get invited into a variety of environments to advise others on their reputation management.

Worst thing about this career

At times you are asked to become an immediate expert on complicated subjects. Some organisations are cynical about the media and may not share your views about the need to manage their reputation. The working hours are tough and like the media, you can be described as ‘never off duty’, so you need to be able to manage your work and personal life effectively.