At 8.43 AM, a message flashes up on a phone that has already been vibrating all morning. A customer has posted a shaky video of smoke drifting across a shop floor. In the comments, people are guessing, blaming, sharing, embellishing. The facts are incomplete, the feeling is loud, and the organisation has a choice to make in public. Say nothing and the story fills the silence. Say the wrong thing and it becomes the story.
Careers in communications are built in moments like this, even when the day job looks calmer from the outside. Behind the press release, the campaign launch, the internal update, the social post and the spokesperson briefing sits a set of skills that combine craft and judgement. You can learn the tools quickly. What takes longer, and what employers notice, is whether you can turn information into understanding, and whether people trust you when it matters.
Writing remains the core currency of communications, regardless of channel. It is not simply a knack for neat phrasing. It is the ability to decide what is true, what is relevant, and what a reader needs first. Traditional news writing reduces that discipline to three essentials: accuracy, brevity and clarity. Miss the first and you lose credibility. Ignore the second and you waste attention. Neglect the third and you force readers to do your work for you.
Good communicators treat accuracy as an everyday habit rather than a crisis response. They check names, numbers, dates, locations, and the meaning of what a source has said, because mistakes spread faster than corrections. They also understand fairness. Even when you are writing for an organisation, your words carry an obligation to the public and to the people affected by what you publish. That means using neutral language when neutrality is required, avoiding inflated claims, and recognising what you do not yet know.
Clarity is not about making things simplistic. It is about making them usable. Plain English helps because it assumes the reader is busy, distracted, and possibly anxious, and it does not punish them for it. Shorter sentences, active voice, and verb-led phrasing create momentum and reduce the chances of misunderstanding. The difference between “a decision was made regarding implementation” and “we decided to implement” is not stylistic trivia. It is the difference between a message that lands and one that slides off the page.
There is also a subtler writing skill that matters in communications: register. You need to sound like a human being without sounding casual when the moment demands care. You need to be formal without becoming foggy. The best writers can shift tone for an internal staff note, a regulator update, a customer apology, and a fundraising appeal, while still sounding consistent. That ability comes from paying attention to audience and purpose, and from reading widely enough to develop an ear for what works.
Communications professionals sometimes flinch at the word “story”, as if it implies spin. But story, at its best, is simply structure: what is happening, why it matters, and what should happen next. A feature writer learns early that a piece must grab attention, keep it, and leave an impression. That same arc applies to comms, whether you are writing a case study, a CEO email, or a campaign landing page.
Structure is a career skill because it forces prioritisation. In a crisis statement, the first lines should address what people most urgently need to know. In a campaign, the opening should make a promise to the reader and then deliver on it. In an internal change programme, the message should anticipate the questions people will ask in the corridor and answer them before they become rumours. Knowing how to build that shape is part craft and part empathy, and it improves with practice, editing, and the willingness to cut your favourite line if it slows the reader down.
Good endings matter, too. People remember the last thing they read, and they often act on it. A strong finish can clarify next steps, reinforce reassurance, or invite engagement, while staying honest about uncertainty. A weak ending simply fades out, leaving the audience to decide what happens next.
Many early career communicators focus on outputs: the newsletter, the press release, the post. Senior communicators focus on inputs: what is actually happening, what people believe is happening, and what evidence supports either view. That is reporting, even when you do not call it that. You are gathering information, verifying it, deciding what is material, and presenting it in a form that others can use.
Listening is part of that, and it is more than politeness in meetings. It includes stakeholder interviews that draw out what a senior leader is reluctant to say plainly. It includes reading the mood of staff channels, community groups and comment threads, and distinguishing a loud minority from a genuine shift in sentiment. It includes the discipline to ask one more question when something sounds neat but does not quite make sense.
With listening comes synthesis. Communicators are often handed competing versions of reality: legal caution, operational detail, leadership ambition, customer frustration. Your value is the ability to turn that into a single narrative that is accurate, fair, and comprehensible, without pretending tensions do not exist. When you can do that well, you become the person people rely on when the organisation is under strain.
Communications is not just language. It is decision making about timing, channels, and risk. Strategy can sound grand, but it often comes down to a few practical questions: who needs to know, what do they need to know now, what might they misunderstand, and what will they do with the information.
Judgement is the skill that sits underneath. It shows up when you decide that a technically correct line is still misleading in context. It shows up when you choose to publish a partial update because silence would fuel speculation, while being explicit about what you are still confirming. It shows up when you know when to push back on a senior figure who wants a slogan rather than an answer.
This is where ethical instincts become career defining. The temptation in communications is always to polish. The craft is learning how to be clear and persuasive without being slippery. Trust, once lost, is difficult to regain, and communications teams are often the first to feel the consequences of shortcuts taken elsewhere.
Communications is a team sport played across departments. You will work with policy, product, HR, legal, operations, designers, videographers, analysts and executives, often with competing priorities and time pressures. Collaboration is not about being agreeable. It is about making progress without losing precision. It includes project management, briefing well, keeping deadlines realistic, and being able to say, calmly, that a message cannot go out yet because it is not accurate enough.
Confidence matters, too, but it should be the quiet kind, grounded in preparation. It is the confidence to ask basic questions, to admit when you do not know something, and to revise a draft without taking it personally. Strong communicators rewrite. They proofread. They read their work aloud. They respect punctuation because it shapes meaning. They aim for plain language not because they cannot write elegantly, but because clarity is a form of respect.
Most of all, communications careers belong to the curious. Industries shift, platforms change, and audiences develop new expectations. The people who thrive are the ones who keep learning how to listen better, write sharper, and think more clearly about the consequences of what they publish.
In the end, the job is deceptively simple to describe. Find out what is going on. Decide what matters. Explain it in a way people can understand and trust. Do that consistently, and you build a career that lasts.
Nazmul Hossain is a seasoned journalist and a public relations professional based out of Dhaka. Reach him at [email protected].
