As you may have read on my LinkedIn profile, I am both a Chartered PR Practitioner and Chartered Marketer. Both of these qualifications come on the back of assessments over a period of time, and are maintained by undertaking continual professional development ‘CPD’, which I am a great advocate of.

There has for many years been a debate about exam-led qualifications vs on-the-job training and experience, or as some industries would refer to it as ‘apprenticeships’. Both certainly have their merits, and reflecting on my own situation, I can’t say that doing post-graduate studies in later life particularly changed me, but what it did undoubtedly do is focus my mind so that I could categorise a lot of what I already did in practice; in other words give structure and more meaning to the practical operations.

Effective CPD is really down to the individual. In a perfect world we should all plan out our CPD in advance, setting goals as to what we want to learn and achieve, but in practice a lot of what happens is reactionary, taking advantages of opportunities that arise.

Without going too far down this avenue, I am going to explain what prompted me to write the post, and that was a recent, poorly executed post by someone in the Government of Jersey’s communication department when trying to gather information to help define the population policy.

“What steps would you be willing to take to help reduce the number of migrant workers needed in the future? A later retirement age? An increase in taxes? More user pay charges? - Have you say…”

Now I think that we all understand and appreciate the need to canvas public opinion, and it is right that the population of Jersey should have a voice, however the wording of this was poor. What checks are in place to stop this going on out social media? - 50% of the population of Jersey (give or take) was not born here; me included. Many of us are migrants, and the island of Jersey would not function without bringing in necessary skills for a multitude of different sectors.
There is nothing wrong with migration; it has been going on since the year dot. So back to the wording of the post.
The question that the powers-that-be were really trying to ask is how we manage the people resources that we have in the most effective way, how we streamline activities, embrace technology and look at alternative solutions to try and maintain a status quo between the human resources that we need to keep functioning and the availability of housing and support services to look after the total population of the island. - That is quite a mouthful and not easy to summarise in a limited number of characters, but the wording of the text could have been so much better.

Sitting an exam doesn’t guarantee that a mistake won’t happen, but it should at least help the communicator to consider the style of their messaging, and I’d also like to think that senior communicators could offer support and guidance in this, and that is where training and CPD come to the fore. As Lucy Stephenson so eloquently wrote in the JEP earlier this week, ‘good communication also comes down to the language being used’.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations has an active local branch, and if you’d like to learn more about it then please get in touch with one of the committee members. - More information is available here https://cipr.co.uk/CIPR/Network/Groups_/ChannelIslands.aspx