Sally Dawson assesses how best to gain a foothold within the expanding public affairs industry.
Entering and surviving in public affairs can be a game of snakes and ladders. As a relatively new industry, there are no hard and fast rules about career entry – but a distinct pattern is beginning to emerge.
There are three main routes into the public affairs industry: political, media and comms/PR. The political route is perhaps the most immediately obvious. Public affairs and lobbying requires an intricate and sophisticated understanding of the political and legislative world – be that in Westminster, Brussels or any of the devolved legislative assemblies. Moreover, a political background, particularly if it involves experience as an MP’s researcher, means the candidate will have built up invaluable contacts among MPs and other party apparatchiks.
This combination of insight and influence is part of the reason that so many graduates of Hull’s British Politics and Legislative Studies – which includes a year spent working with an MP in Westminster – have been so successful in securing jobs in the world of public affairs.
However, there are many and convoluted political routes into public affairs, with some starting as graduate trainees raw from university and many others joining the industry with a great deal of invaluable experience garnered from many different professions. One such example is Ian Parker, an account director with public affairs consultancy L.L.M, whose extensive career background spans both politics and communications.
Parker joined LLM in March this year, and works with a number of regeneration and local government-focused clients, including some key UK cities. He himself describes his route into public affairs as “pretty unique”. Having left formal education at 16, he worked as a civil servant for six years, where he also gained parallel experience as a trade union official, later going on to study as both an undergraduate and postgraduate at Sheffield University politics department during his early 20s.
Parker then followed this period of study with a two-year stint working with the Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle in his home city of Liverpool, subsequently spending seven years at two different think-tanks – two years at the Social Market Foundation, followed by five atthe New Local Government Network (NLGN), where he was head of strategic communications.
The decision to take a different career path and join a public affairs consultancy was taken at the end of last year, when he felt “the time was right to move on”.
“The appeal of LLM was as much, if not more, about the company and the individuals involved than the public affairs industry per se. I was also attracted by the sort of clients I was likely to work with – such as major city councils and companies involved in economic regeneration and the delivery of key public services,” he says. “All of this, when topped up with the occasional media-focused work – that’ll be the frustrated hack in me – ticks the boxes where I’ve had a long and some might say, unhealthy interest!”
Parker’s hands-on experience contrasts with the academic Dr Stuart Thomson, senior public affairs adviser at Bircham Dyson Bell, and author of Public Affairs in Practice. Thomson took a very different, though equally successful, route into the industry, gaining both his degree and PhD from the University of Aberdeen, with his thesis. The Social Democratic Dilemma, forming the basis of a book published by Macmillan.
Thomson has written on a range of subjects including social democratic politics, the Labour Party and its history, the development of the left, political activism, trade unionism, British politics, communications, lobbying and corporate social responsibility as well as a number of other business issues. He began his career in communications with the Rowland Company, part of Saatchi &Saatchi, before moving to Upstream, part of DLA Piper, a global legal set organisation where he was a director, joining Bircham Dyson Bell in 2005.
Whilst he concedes that the move from an academic environment to a commercial one can be a challenge, it was the skills he developed in academia that helped smooth the transition and which he soon turned to his advantage. “The ability to deal with complex matters and distil them quickly and accurately has proved very useful, as had confidence to speak well in public but not deal with people on a one-to-one basis however, if 1 had to point to one thing that being an academic taught me then it will be the ability to build an effective argument – from undertaking research through analysing it and presenting an effective achievable solution,” he says.
Whilst both Thomson and Parker had strong partisan political connection it is certainly not an essential pre-requisite to a career in public affairs. For political correspondent Rishi Bhattadya joined Edelman as an account director in its Strategic Media Unit/Public Affairs unit in April.
Bhattacharya has a decade of experience in both broadcast and print journalism as well as reporting on ITV Granada’s flagship nightly news programme and world current affairs show, he also appeared as a political pundit for ITN. He started his career as a graduate trainee on the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, and has also freelanced on the Sun,London’s Evening Standard and the DailyTelegraph.
“As a former political correspondent I think I have been able to bring something different to Edelman’s public affairs offering. There are always a number of wanting to skin a cat, achieving the same ends by different means. In a practical scenario this involves bringing together politicals media relations with public affairs activities and using one to lever the other.”
And, he says, his lack of political association has also helped. “Broadcasters are governed by rules of impartiality when it comes to political reporting – this means I have built up contacts in each of the main political parties, instead of my just being on one.
I don’t think the route from political journalist to political lobbyist is a particularly well signposted one,” he says. “this doesn’t mean that those who travel down this road will be disappointed when they get here – I certainly haven’t been.”
Public Affairs News, October 2006