Abstract: the subject of the research is the prospects for the development of the PR industry in Russia, the specifics of building a career in this field, and new trends that need to be taken into account when developing training programs for PR specialists in Russian Universities.
The article pays special attention to a new trend in relations between PR specialists and employer companies, when the focus is not on the interests of the company, but on promoting the employee’s own brand for building a future career. The author associates the emergence of this trend with the peculiarities of career promotion accepted in Russian companies. So, in most cases, preference is given to invited specialists rather than promoting their own employees. This feature of building a career creates a skew: an employee is more interested in their own promotion than in working for the development of the company’s brand.
The practical novelty of this article is an attempt to study a new trend in the labor market in the field of PR with an analysis of the positive and negative aspects for the development of the industry as a whole. The conclusion is made that the bias towards the development of a PR specialist’s own brand, rather than working to promote the brand of the employer company, as a new phenomenon, requires careful analysis and reaction from the education system. In particular, we can talk about a possible adjustment of the system of training PR specialists in Russian Universities with the inclusion of special courses or master classes on the development of their own brand and the system of building a career in the new conditions on the labor market.
The research was conducted on the basis of survey methods (conversation, interviewing, questionnaire survey of PR specialists), and data from research conducted by recruiting companies is also used.
Keywords: communication, PR specialist, public relations, brand, self-promotion, creative, social networks, education, blog