The last ten months at SCoRe has been an exciting self-discovery for all of us. As the COVID 19 pandemic has made our lives virtual, so SCoRe decided to organize #PRSchoolFest online through commencement address by the industry experts as we have reached at the end of our course. 

The second commencement address was done by Shereen Bhan, the Managing Editor of CNBC TV 18. She addressed all of us wishing us more power to do the best in our career. She has given her valuable advice and today, I am going to write about what we learnt from her.

• The first point that she mentioned was we need to get our principles right. We need to be clear in our communication. In her long nineteen years of work experience, she has dealt with many PR professionals, entrepreneurs etc. She has been tracking news in business, in policy and from her experience she has learnt that clarity of communication is a must for all communicators during a tough time or a volatile time like what we are going through right now. As a PR professional, we have to be very careful of our messaging, whom we are talking to and what we stand for.
• While pitching to a journalist, our communication or our storytelling needs to be so sharp and clear that even an aged person like our grandmother or grandfather is able to understand.
• While pitching a story to a journalist or an influencer, we should keep aside all the hyperbolic statements and really try to focus on what makes a product or a brand different from its competitions. We need to understand the competitions of our brands that we are working for. What are the attributes that help our product or our brand to find a niche for itself in the marketplace. 
• During this testing time, as PR professionals, we should not only communicate the good news about brands and hide the bad news because in this tough time companies will definitely see up cycles and down cycles as well. We have to come forward and disclose what has gone wrong and why both internally and externally. Transparency should be the key to our communication.
• She has seen that knowing really the brand or the product or understanding the business is a tough job and not everyone gets that right. So, as PR Professional or in any profession even in journalism also, before reaching out to anyone, we should do our basic homework i.e. who the person is, what does he or she do, why are we reaching out to him or her etc and then we should craft our message in alignment with that particular individual. 
• We need to be very clear about our purpose. Putting time and effort is something that matters on the way of success. Inconsistency is the biggest flaw that we should be mindful of. People don’t like to deal with someone who is not consistent in his or her approach.
• To be a good communication professional, one needs to be a good team player. Working with a team, understanding our team members, respecting their efforts can help an individual to go forward and take the lead. We need to ensure that within a team, all members are working to achieve a common goal. Integrity is everything and it is personal integrity that matters. Personal integrity is about how we interact with other people, our mutual respect, empathy and fairness. 
• We have to focus on a constant reinvention of ourselves. We have to take a challenge to make our own choices. She also shared her personal journey and stressed on the fact that we should trust our own ability even after every downfall in life. Failures are a part of life but that does not mean that we forget to take the challenge and leave the process of learning. We have to be open to learning and we have to be flexible, versatile to go forward and make our career from good to better, from better to the best.
• We should not have predetermined notions about somebody or about a brand or a product. We have to go through the exercise of learning and unlearning. Our own predetermined notions become an obstacle for us because it does not let us listen to what the other person is trying to deliver. We have to be a good listener first to be a good communicator. If we are in the field of communication, we have to remember that spontaneity can create magic. 
• As a communicator, we must have the ability to react to certain situations. We have to take a decision on our feet. 

She shared her views on how she thinks as a woman leader about millions of women who don’t have the privilege of making their own choices in life. We should be supportive; we should be empathetic because it’s not so easy for millions of women to live their lives as they want. Then she shared her leadership experience at CNBC and how she ensures that their company respects the decision or choices of women that they have to make in their course of life. And not only for women, as the leader of her company, she ensures that all her employees get the same treatment, they get what they deserve. Even during the pandemic, she has not done work from home just because as a leader of her organization, she needs to stand together with her team in all odds. She said that she can’t expect people go out for work if she is not showing the way and as a company, CNBC has never forced its employee to go out for work during this critical time. She respects this independent culture of her company which values the lives and emotions of their employees. 

After sharing her experiences and talking about the internal communication during this pandemic in her organization, she took questions from us and answered those giving examples of her life, her work experience and shared her opinion regarding the context of those questions. She talked about what her younger colleagues teaches her to be tech-savvy to cope up with today’s digitally active, social-media savvy world. She talked about how to deal with fake news. She shared how she manages the various challenges in her everyday busy work life. She talked about how their (CNBC’s) digital presence is extending and how they are trying to stand out as a media organization. 

The session ended with a positive note. She wished us all the best for our career and we thanked her for taking time out from her busy schedule and share her learning with us. It was an incredibly insightful and engaging session.

– Chandrayee Mukherjee

Interesting Read – Commencement Address by Ashish Mishra

Chandrayee Mukherjee is a part of the Class of 2020 of PG Programme in PR and Corporate Communications at SCoRe, Mumbai. She completed her winter internship with Genesis BCW She is from Konnagar.

She did her Bachelors in English literature and language from Asutosh College, Kolkata. A small town-girl with so many dreams in her eyes, travel enthusiast, foodie, pluviophile, music-lover, nature-lover, feminist, and an Aspiring PR professional. She loves Reading fiction, Writing poems and blogs, Singing.