Target requires blogging skills for media relations people
Kevin O'Keefe blogged a piece of news that I presume is being echoed across many blogs, but it foreshadows something I have been thinking: communications skill sets and job requirements are expanding to include the newer online communications skills, including blogging.
Target requires blogging skills for media relations people "Target is looking for a new 'Senior Manager of Media Relations.' One of the requirements is 'Strong knowledge for Internet journalism, e.g., blogs.' Here's one of the largest retailers in the country proactively looking for someone to either be involved in publishing blogs or to monitor blogs as part of crisis communications when a story on Target breaks out on the blogosphere."
Not only are blogging skills going to be prerequisites, but more generally good online communications skills. Last week I got the chance to have a conversation with David Millen from IBM. I was blathering that I thought everyone will need online facilitation skills and he gently and accurately got me to sharpen my message. Not everyone has a job that requires negotiating meaning and roles in groups. ;-) Not everyone is going to need to be an online facilitator and those specific skills, just like the skills of a great blogger, my be more sharply defined in some roles more than others. But I'd venture a guess that many working in business will need to be skillful online communicators at some base level.
I was at a university open house with my son (ah, choosing a school) and we went to the Communications Department Open House. During the Q&A session I asked if they had any offerings around online communications. The response was "we teach students how to use Photoshop." Uh, wait a minute? Do you talk about emerging communications channels such as blogs or about how online communication is evolving? Nope. I mentioned this to David Weinberger and he said (I'm paraphrasing again) that he didn't see the need to have courses on blogs, etc. -- that people learn to do this on their own.
I agree we learn much on our own, but it seems to me that if someone was entering the communications profession, their training should include an understanding of a wide range of communications media. And that the institutions offering this education keep a sharp eye not only on the past, but the present and the future. That complements what a gamer learns online, or what a teen discovers while journaling and Flikring. It complements what we learn informally from each other (which I consider CENTRAL.) But the bottom line is in many of our cultures, communication is taking a leap into a new world. Knowing about it and how to do it is an advantage in many jobs.
online_facilitation, blogs, communications
posted by Nancy White at 2:05 PM
3 Comments:
As you were rightly mentioning that they do teach "PHOTOSHOP' a communication skill needed to the professional, so there is sense in what Mr. David Weinberger says - you don't need to have "online facilitation skills" to teach kindergarten kids.
Gen X is finding its own way to communicate - look at the SMS and emoticons and the 'V' sometime ago. Cultures and civilizations always find a way to perpetuate 'communication' so essential to perpetuate its own species.
Anil, I'm totally in agreement that culture and civilizations find ways to perpetuate communications. And I totally agree that I went overboard in saying "everyone" needs online facilitation skills. I believe my own hype every now and again for sure!
But what is alarming is that our universities aren't able to incorporate the fast changing landscape in their curriculum and may be actually styming the emergent new skills.
I wonder if it is the rate of change that is the challenge here, not the sets of skills.
However, I am still a strong believer that online communications skills -- and I don't care how ya get 'em -- are becoming a central issue. That suggests that from a market perspective, universities should pay attention!
Anil: Gen X is getting pretty old and feeble at this point... most of us are in our thirties and forties. We're definitely not pushing any boundaries with SMS and so on. That's the work of a whole 'nother generation.
It's funny. For a while there, it looked like we would be remembered solely as slackers. Now at least we have a shot at going down as the only generation to be both technology-savvy *and* capable of writing coherent sentences.
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