Digitalization in public relations—Changing competences: A longitudinal analysis of skills required in PR job ads

Digitalization has affected working practices in the field of public relations over the past two decades. Consequently, the skills and competences that are expected from public relations professionals are theorized to have undergone stark changes, with obvious implications for educators, role perceptions, and the professionals themselves. Job postings provide information about these changes by describing the skills employers expect and desire from applicants. To date, only a few studies have used this source of information, and these mostly concern the U.S. market using small samples of job postings. The purpose of this study is to enrich our understanding of how digitalization has impacted the skillsets required of public relations practitioners through the longitudinal automated semantic analysis of 62,391 public relations job postings published in Austria and Germany between 2015 and 2020. The analysis shows an increase in the number of hard skills demanded in PR in this region over the past five years. This change is particularly pronounced with respect to digital skills, thus underlining the importance of digitalization in public relations. The detailed and up-to-date findings describing what the job market is currently looking for and how it is changing will be useful for educators in developing and aligning PR curricula and advanced training programmes.