5 rules for starting your PR career

Here are my top five:

1. Raise your hand. Demonstrate an active interest in the business. As new business opportunities arise, extend yourself to help a team or participate in an internal project. Yes, this may mean extra hours above and beyond existing account work, but it can be very rewarding and give you extra experience. Also, be open to time in another market either in your own country or abroad. The world is more global today than when I started and it is only going to become more so.

2. Be curious. Be a “student” of the media. I have always read up to three newspapers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times) each morning, consumed an hour of NPR, and have only missed one episode of “60 Minutes” when there was a national emergency (and programming was pre-empted). Naturally, in recent years I’ve expanded my consumption to blogs (Huffington Post, Politico, and The Daily Beast) along with industry newsletters (PRWeek and The Holmes Report).