Last week, CooperKatz had the opportunity to participate in the Annual Job Fair co-organized by the Howard University Johnson School of Communications and The Council of Public Relations Firms.  While we’ve always found these types of networking events to be fertile ground for the exchange of resumes, business cards and conversations withcandidates ‘putting on their best,’ they’ve also provided us valuable, real-time insight on what’s actually happening out there relative to young people on the job market – both now and into the near future.

There’s no disputing that innovations in technology, and specifically those surrounding the Internet, have driven seismic shifts in the business of public relations. So who better to address the 2010 Member Dinner of the Council of Public Relations Firms than Vinton (Vint) Cerf, popularly known as one of the ‘fathers’ of the Internet? 

Cerf, who co-designed the TCP/IP protocols used to develop the underlying architecture of the Internet (distinct from Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web), is currently known for his role at Google as VP and Chief Internet Evangelist. In a discussion moderated by former Los Angeles Times editor and trustee at the Newseum, Shelby Coffee III, Cerf covered a lot of ground, to say the least. PR agency executives in attendance heard a brief history lesson of how the ‘net as we know it came to be, why packets are metaphorically akin to postcards and even work Cerf is tackling to help NASA establish an interplanetary network to support real-time communications between far-flung equipment and space missions.

Heady stuff, this.  But a few points stood out to me as both a member of the public relations industry and a citizen of this specific moment in time (it’s Google’s world after all, we just live in it…). 

Recently I was invited to speak at the Council of PR Firms annual Internfest.  According to a survey that the Council conducted before the event, 43 percent of the interns in attendance recently graduated from college – a trend potentially attributed to the recession.  

The session was great and I could certainly relate with the recent graduates in the room. That’s because when I graduated from Penn State University in 1999, I also decided to take a post-diploma internship. Or, should I say, my impatience and fear of not finding a job encouraged my decision to take a post-graduation internship. Two weeks after throwing my cap, I tapped into my network from a previous position and locked in a Summer internship with Jackson Jackson and Wagner in New Hampshire.