Having stepped away last year from running Nelson Bostock and the Comms Division at Unlimited Group, I’m excited to now be embarking with Ben Smith and the PRmoment team on a new project called PRmoment Leaders.

PRmoment Leaders is our new subscription-based learning programme and community aimed at helping the best people in PR and comms reach their full potential in the workplace.

It’s for both agency-side and in-house professionals. We’re launching the agency programme this week and the in-house version later in the year. If you’d like to be kept informed about the content and launch date of the latter, please add your details here.

Our profession is richly populated by smart and curious people who thrive in teams that tackle the challenge of persuading others via the power of ideas built to encourage and withstand attention, scrutiny and debate. It’s exciting and enjoyable work, and ongoing training throughout careers is essential to ensure great people are able to continuously deliver in a rapidly evolving world.

We’ve traditionally been good at bringing newcomers into our teams, the more diverse, the better, and at providing ongoing training to those who progress through the earlier years of their careers. But if we’re honest, we often simultaneously expect our best senior people to just crack on delivering in roles demanding ever more responsibility while looking after our wider teams, seldom with enough time to reach beyond the day-to-day.

This senior cohort contains the individuals who often feature in formal succession planning and who will collectively own the next decade of our industry. Time and again, in both formal and informal feedback, these individuals get named by clients and partners as critical to our businesses. Ours is a people business, of course, and the members of this cohort are skilled at building and maintaining the key relationships on which PR is built.

PR leaders know all this and passionately believe in their senior people but sometimes life gets in the way and we struggle to properly focus on the continuing development of our senior teams to fully equip them to step up and lead.

The better trained and educated our business leaders, the stronger our businesses will be. And so when Ben approached me to co-create a new programme targeted specifically at this cohort, it was a no-brainer to get on board.

I’m excited to be heading up our new offering which will enable such great PR professionals…

• To Learn: Accelerate their career progression by increasing their strategic knowledge, learning directly from the best people in the industry

• To Network: Grow their personal networks by meeting and getting to know peers in similar positions across PR and comms

• To Lead: Enhance their leadership skills in preparation to step up and confidently lead high-performance teams

Find out more about PRmoment Leaders here.