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Escaping from CIPR studies
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Hello - welcome to my website.
On my blog I write about marketing, public relations and digital communications. To keep up-to-date with my posts you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or sign-up to receive blog posts by email.
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Regular readers will probably have noticed that over the past four or five months, and over the past six weeks in particular, I have virtually disappeared from this blog.
There’s only one reason for this really: the final stages of my Chartered Institute of Public Relations diploma. I started back in June 2007, and having deferred the final project deadline once, I finally handed in my project on Thursday.
The final project is a 6000-word piece of personal research into a topic chosen by the student. My project looked at the role of social media in local government communications, but more on that in a future post.
A couple of days on from handing it in, I’m starting to feel a sense of relief and my perspectives are once again broadening beyond the world of PR theory and academic papers.
One of my aims when setting out on the diploma was to give my PR work a decent theoretical grounding, in the same way as I have with my marketing work. If anything the CIPR diploma is more weighted towards theory than its CIM marketing counterpart. I’ve learnt a lot about PR theories, their relative merits and, most importantly, how they relate to the practice of PR in the real world that we work in.
But it’s been hard work. From past experience I knew that taking on a distance learning qualification eats into the little spare time that I had. I have a lot of respect for those people that take on academic qualifications alongside a career and a family. The CIPR diploma was one year and I found that a challenge, so people that study for masters and doctorate level qualifications over extended periods of time deserve a great deal of credit for their perseverance and tenacity.
I was a member of the first cohort to take the CIPR Diploma online. The basis for the course online presence was the open source Moodle application, delivered by PR Academy. I enjoyed the online interaction with other students and found the tutors helpful and thought provoking. Unfortunately I only made it to one of the two face-to-face learning days, but that was definitely worth attending.
So now it’s all over, what I am I up to?
Well, aside from enjoying the rest of the summer, getting to know my family again and upping my weekly running mileage a bit, I’m looking forward to getting back into blogging and being part of an ever-exciting online conversation among marketing and PR people that I’ve watched (or should that be listened to) from the sidelines recently.
To those of you who have stuck with me (and there are a few, I promise), thanks for your patience and I hope I can reward you with more blogging that reminds you why you subscribed in the first place!
Tags: Blogging, CIPR, diploma, News
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Latest links 
Links to interesting information I've spotted recently on the web:
- Councils told: embrace social networks
- Communications: Some lessons from the New Deal for Communities Programme - Communities and neighbourhoods - Communities and Local Government
- e-Published: my e-book, Brands in Networks...
- Research brief links engagement, business improvement to internal use of Web 2.0
- AskPeople: Easy, quick & simple online feedback surveys, polls and questionnaire forms
- What is Social Media? eBook on Mashable
- Cook & Hopkins Social Media Report - 3rd Edition
- What does really advanced IC look like?
- Trust, the Media & the public sector
Latest bookmarks
My most recent bookmarks from del.icio.us:
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Good luck for your results, Simon! Will you be able to publish your paper online, or will it belong to the examiners?
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 10:43 am
thanks Dave. I’m planning to publish the full paper here once it’s been marked and the results are out - I don’t think I can before then unfortunately.
I will write a blog post or two pulling out some of the highlights though in the next couple of weeks - there were some really interesting results from the survey.
Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Hi Simon,
Congratulations on finishing the course! I was in the January cohort and have just handed in my Planning Assignment! I can only imagine the relief it will be to hand in the final project.
Congratulations and best of luck with the results!
Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Simon, I feel your pain. These courses are very difficult but I am sure it will all be worth it in the end when you get your results. I will look forward to reading more of your posts as you get back into the hotseat.
Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Ellie - thanks, and good luck with the rest of your diploma.
Chris - thanks too. I’m looking forward to getting back into the blog and online PR in the coming weeks.
Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 6:16 am
[...] results broadly reflect the findings of my CIPR research which I will publish once it has been assessed and graded. I found a high level of use or desired [...]
Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Many congratulations on completeing your course and glad to hear that you found the CIPR Online Diploma worthwhile.
Lis CIPR President
Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Lis - thanks for your congratulations - it’s great that the CIPR president is following PR blogs - PR Voice is already on my reading list!
Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
[...] my final tutorial for my CIPR Diploma on Saturday and on Monday I have to submit the outline for my research project, which means I need to have a question to answer and a pretty good idea of how I’m going to [...]