Why Your PR Training is Probably Making You Worse at Public Relations

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Most PR professionals think they know what they're doing because they've attended a workshop or two. They don't.

After seventeen years in corporate communications—including stints at three of Melbourne's top consultancies and two years as head of external relations for a major retail chain—I've watched countless professionals bumble through media interviews, butcher crisis communications, and completely misunderstand what public relations actually means in 2025.

The problem isn't that people are stupid. The problem is that 90% of PR training is still stuck in 1995, teaching techniques that were outdated when MySpace was trendy.

The Elephant in the Conference Room

Here's what nobody wants to admit: traditional PR training is designed by people who've never had to explain why their company's stock price dropped 15% after a Twitter storm that started at 2am on a Sunday. It's academic theory dressed up as practical wisdom.

I learnt this the hard way during the Brisbane floods of 2011. My company had just completed an expensive PR course focused on "controlled messaging" and "stakeholder management frameworks." Absolute rubbish when you're dealing with actual humans who are angry, scared, and have smartphones.

The course materials might as well have been written in Latin for all the good they did when Channel 7 showed up at our reception demanding answers about why our insurance claims were taking six weeks to process.

What Actually Works (And Why It's Controversial)

Real PR isn't about spinning stories or managing perceptions. It's about being genuinely useful to people who don't care about your company at all. Most training gets this backwards.

Opinion One: The best PR professionals are former journalists, not marketing graduates. They understand deadlines, they know what makes a story, and they've been on the receiving end of terrible PR pitches. Marketing people think in campaigns. Journalists think in human interest stories.

Opinion Two: Crisis communication training should be mandatory for every senior manager, not just the communications team. When your CEO freezes up during a hostile interview, no amount of "key message frameworks" will save you.

I've seen million-dollar PR campaigns fail because nobody taught the leadership team how to have a normal conversation with a reporter. Meanwhile, companies like Atlassian and Canva handle media beautifully because their executives understand that authenticity beats polish every single time.

The dirty secret? Most PR disasters happen because someone followed their training manual instead of using common sense.

The Skills Nobody Teaches You

Traditional PR courses love talking about "stakeholder mapping" and "reputation management." But they skip the stuff that actually matters:

How to write a media statement that doesn't sound like it was translated from corporate speak by Google Translate. How to prepare an executive for a hostile interview without making them sound like a robot. How to use social media during a crisis without making everything worse.

And here's the big one: how to admit when your company has stuffed up.

Australian businesses are terrible at apologies. They hedge, they qualify, they use passive voice until nobody knows who did what to whom. "Mistakes were made" is not an apology—it's a grammatical atrocity.

Companies like Qantas have mastered the art of the genuine public apology. They don't blame "miscommunication" or "process failures." They say sorry, explain what went wrong, and tell you exactly how they're fixing it. Simple.

The Digital Reality Check

Here's where most PR training completely loses the plot: social media isn't just traditional PR delivered through different channels. It's a fundamentally different way of communicating.

Your carefully crafted press release doesn't matter if someone's already posted a video of your delivery truck blocking a bike lane. Your "controlled messaging strategy" is useless when your customers are having a conversation about your brand without you.

The smart PR professionals have figured out that their job isn't controlling the narrative—it's joining the conversation in a way that's actually helpful.

This means monitoring what people are saying (not just what media outlets are publishing), responding quickly to legitimate concerns, and having the authority to make real decisions, not just promise to "pass feedback along to the relevant team."

Where Most Training Gets It Wrong

The biggest mistake in PR education is treating it like a technical skill instead of a human skill. They teach frameworks and processes and approval chains, but they don't teach judgment.

Real PR decisions happen fast, often outside business hours, and almost always without perfect information. Do you respond to that criticism on LinkedIn or let it slide? Do you offer an interview to that blogger who's been writing negative stories about your industry? Do you comment on that viral TikTok that mentions your brand?

You can't flowchart your way through these decisions. You need experience, good judgment, and the confidence to make calls without running everything past legal first.

Most training programs assume you'll have time to consult your stakeholder matrix and check with the head office. In reality, you'll be standing in a car park at 6am explaining to A Current Affair why your factory is emitting smoke, and you'll have about ninety seconds to either solve the problem or create a much bigger one.

The Real Skills Gap

After nearly two decades in this business, here's what I wish someone had taught me earlier:

How to build genuine relationships with journalists before you need them. How to spot the difference between a legitimate story and a fishing expedition. How to write social media content that sounds like it came from a human being, not a committee.

How to handle the emotional side of crisis communication—because when things go wrong, everyone's stressed, nobody's thinking clearly, and the last thing you need is a by-the-book response that ignores how people actually feel.

Most importantly: how to be useful. Not just to your company, but to the reporters who cover your industry, the customers who use your products, and the community where your business operates.

When you're genuinely useful, PR becomes much easier. When you're just trying to manage perceptions, everything becomes harder.

The Bottom Line

Good PR training should make you a better communicator, not a more sophisticated spin doctor. It should teach you to think like your audience, not like your legal department.

The best PR professionals I know treat every interaction as an opportunity to build trust, not just manage messaging. They understand that reputation is earned through consistent actions, not clever communication strategies.

If your PR training doesn't include role-playing exercises with actual journalists, real crisis scenarios with tight deadlines, and honest feedback about your communication style, you're probably wasting your time and money.

The future belongs to PR professionals who can have authentic conversations with real people about complex topics. Everything else is just expensive theatre.

Looking to improve your conflict resolution skills or learn more about emotional intelligence for managers? Sometimes the best PR starts with better internal communication.