With redundancies in PR at a (probably) all-time high as agencies battle their way through a tough market, I have two questions. Firstly, who’s making what redundancies? Secondly, and more importantly in the long-term, is the PR industry is danger of creating a talent chasm by failing the young people wanting to enter the profession?

I can’t answer the first one. But let me at least have the balls to state how many people at Speed (actually across its predecessors BMA Communications, Mantra and Rainier PR) have been made redundant this year. The answer is two people. We unfortunately had to make some reductions because of client budget cuts. We’ve also had some people leave through natural attrition. There you go. I wonder if any of our competitors will go public (and tell the truth) about their situations? They should do. If not, perhaps I should?

So, to the second question. Having read Britain’s favourite newspaper on the topic of unemployment yesterday, my feeling is that PR agencies are setting themselves up for a fall with a short-term attitude to staff development. Rather than closing the door to new recruits and looking nervously at their payroll, they should be braver. While costs have to be watched like a hawk, they should consider how they can develop skills within their existing teams. They must improve the talent they have and create room at the bottom for young people starting out in PR, as soon as they can afford to take them on.

Things PR agencies should be doing:
1. Establish or rekindle recruitment links with universities and colleges, and the media.
2. Maintain a database of inbound CVs from people looking to start out in PR. God knows there are enough of them.
3. Ensure you are pushing forward your staff so they learn more and can move up the ladder. You may not be able to afford to pay them any more at the moment, but they can’t be left to fester. This goes for everyone in the agency.
4. Meet potential entry-level recruits so you can keep tabs on them, even if you have no vacancies at the moment.
5. In particular, appreciate the value of digital skills and understanding, and the value it could bring to your agency, even in a recession, as PR continues to modernise.

Things not to do:
1. Ignore inbound CVs and enquiries (unless they are really crap or full of errors).
2. Ignore the development needs of your existing staff.
3. Ignore the fact that as the economy recovers, you may be in a difficult place skills-wise unless you act on all of this now.
4. Ignore the digital modernisation that is going on in PR and the wealth of talent that could be coming onto the jobs market with those skills.
5. Ignore the fact that too many PR agencies are commercially childlike, and those that are need the foresight and confidence to get their priorities right.

Point of law: this post may be about ‘young’ people coming into the PR profession from academia, but for the purpose of clarity they are not necessarily young and we are open to interview and potentially employing people of all ages. Just so that’s clear.

These may be strong words, but it’s an important issue. If a newspaper hadn’t had the guts to take me on fresh from studies in the depths of the early 90s recession I wouldn’t have had the start to my career that I got and may be doing something very different now.

But then again, you’re probably still worrying about the excuses you need to keep making about redundancy levels.