It takes time and dedication to land your first job. This sectiion of the PR Career Center is designed to help you get started. But first, you need to understand what employers are looking for.

What PR employers seek from entry-level hires
As reported in “The Professional Bond — Public Relations Education and the Practice,” by The Report of the Commission on Public Relations Education, November 2006, new hires must:

• Be responsible, flexible and professionally oriented self-managers
• Be able to respond and adapt to new and changing situations and to feel comfortable in having to make such adjustments without giving up their personal identity.
• Have intellectual curiosity and be able to link conceptually.
• Have positive attitudes and be able to take criticism.
• Be organized self-starters who take initiative to solve problems.
• Be creative and pragmatic.
• Have integrity as team participants and leaders.
• Demonstrate respect and empathy; even if practitioners do not belong to a group or agree with it, a practitioner must be able to show appreciation for those who are different and be able to understand others’ cultures and perspectives. 

You also need to know what you want. Check out this Career Builder article, 12 things to consider for your first job. Slate offers some good advice for finding jobs online.

When thinking about your first job, you also want to investigate your opportunities to move up within the company. Much of that upward mobility is up to you as highlighted in this well-crafted blog.

The links at the right provide much more than just job listings. You'll also find a wealth of information on the tools you need during your job hunting process, advice from newbies and veterans in the field, and tips on mistakes to avoid. This is also not an exhaustive list of PR job sites. If you find sites that are helpful to you, please let me know about them so I can consider adding them to our PR Career Center.

One thing to note about the links at right: many of the jobs posted are not entry-level positions. However, these listings can still be valuable to you. You can find company names, understand the skills necessary to move up from one position to the next, and provide insight into the variances of PR jobs within different organizations.