Getting qualified in internal communication

For the last few years, I’ve been a tutor and assessor for some of the CIPR’s accredited internal communication qualifications. After more than 20 years working in communications and IC, it’s one aspect of my work which I can truly and honestly say I still have a real passion for.

October began with two very intensive face to face teaching days in London, working with Dr Kevin Ruck from PR Academy to ‘accelerate’ a group of IC certificate and diploma qualification students into their learning experience.

It was an exhausting but extremely rewarding couple of days, and as I collapsed onto the train back to Yorkshire at the end of them, I reflected on the experience and what I had learned from it.

Face to face is the more ‘human’ way to learn and share

This was the first time Kevin and I had been properly ‘back in the classroom’ after the pandemic. Whilst we covered a huge amount of IC practice and theory in the two days – including IC research, planning, stakeholder mapping, change communication, storytelling, content and channels – we also spent a fair bit of time just chatting with the students about the highs and lows of being an internal communicator. 

This was the biggest highlight of the two days for me, that truly human interaction which is almost entirely absent from a purely online learning experience, however sophisticated the tech. I realised that it was something I had really missed when teaching IC and learning online during and after the pandemic – just sharing the experiences (and pain!) of being an internal communicator.

Internal communication can sometimes be a tough profession to work in, full of challenging situations and challenging people. Some of the most difficult things I have found about working in IC  have included navigating through the internal politics of organisations to get stuff done, trying to simultaneously juggle competing (and sometimes unreasonable) demands and expectations of stakeholders, working out how to say ‘no’ constructively to spurious comms requests, getting leaders to tell the truth (or even communicate with employees in the first place), and dealing with the ‘unintentional disrespect’ of people who think they know everything about your job and that you are just there to ‘Comms it Up’ for them.

As they say, a problem (or challenging experience) shared is a problem halved. Given some of the conversations Kevin and I had with the students about all of the above, hopefully we lightened their loads a little. It was a pointed reminder that wherever we work as internal communicators, we are all grappling with the same challenges and issues, communication related or not, and just talking about that with other people who understand really helps.  

Our alternate realities

Another highlight of the two days was the session I delivered on professional development. I enjoy using my experiences of working in IC for such a long time to help other internal communicators work out how to progress in the profession. For me it feels like a very tangible way to add a bit of value to just teaching IC theory and practice.

The internal communication ‘ecosystem’ is a complicated beast these days, far more complex than when I started out. Working out how to get on in internal communication and how to be part of the profession rather than just having a job in it can be tricky.

There is now a host of digital technology to ‘help’ you do your IC job and ‘engage’ employees, purveyed by a host of vendors vying for market share.

Several professional bodies to choose from if you want to sign up with one of them – which is really the right one for you?

No universal professional framework to guide you through what you need to know and what you should be able to do as a professional internal communicator – what should your competencies and capabilities really be?  

Fancy doing some training or learning? There is now a huge range of it on offer, at a multiplicity of price points from a growing list of providers offering a bewildering mix of qualifications, training, coaching, mentoring and counselling – which is the right option for you and offers the best value for money?

Then there are the commentators and influencers on social media and elsewhere (including me) offering sage advice and opinion about what works well in IC and what you should be doing – who really are the credible voices and who should you give the time of day to listen to?

Finally, there is the conundrum of getting hired as an internal communicator in a world of work with no consistent view or expectation of what internal communication is, and what it is for in organisations. It is this latter place where our alternate realities come into sharp focus.  The reality of what professional frameworks and bodies say internal communicators need to know and do, and what recruiters actually look for when filling roles. This gap seems to be stubbornly persistent and something you need to learn how to negotiate and reconcile if you are to find the IC role which is right for you.

Getting qualified

I have a huge amount of admiration and respect for the internal communicators, and others working in PR, who sign up to study for a professional qualification. It’s a big and daunting leap to go back to the textbooks and study for many, perhaps after being out of formal learning for quite a few years. It takes months (and sometimes years) of hard graft, whilst juggling work and personal commitments, to achieve them. I remember how I felt when I started studying the IC qualification courses I now teach, nervous and scared but excited about discovering exactly why some of the things I had being doing in IC worked and why others really didn’t!

As I headed back ‘up north’ on the train I pondered why more of us don’t make the commitment to get properly qualified in IC. I think one of the reasons is that IC, and communications and PR more broadly, is a very ‘noisy’ profession to work in and there are lots of distractions particularly in relation to what is celebrated and recognised. One of the biggest sources of that noise seem to be the ever-growing multiplicity of industry awards and the organisations and sponsors who promote them as a method of professional recognition

I have a somewhat conflicted view of awards. I know many practitioners who have won awards and have witnessed first hand the immense satisfaction and pride they derive from the personal kudos they confer. However, I question the value that awards add in making a serious contribution to our body of knowledge and our collective credibility as a profession.  

At the very least I think that we could strike a better balance between celebrating those practitioners who achieve a professional qualification and those who win awards. At the moment the celebratory balance seems to be tipped rather unfairly towards awards and the obvious ‘glamour’ which surrounds them. I would also like to see practitioners achieving qualifications being celebrated with equal gusto.

Perhaps if that happened, qualifications would be more noticeable as a route to professional recognition, more of us would sign up to do them and collectively the PR and comms profession would benefit from increased capability and improved societal perceptions of what we do and how we do it.

Now there’s a thought…

Martin Flegg is an internal communication specialist and consultant. He also writes at The IC Citizen. Read the original post.

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