Although most teens and young adults are very social media savvy, it’s all for personal use.  They have no experience of using social media to achieve business goals.

In a Businessweek article Dr. Elaine Young, an assistant Professor at Champlain College, says that schools need to give students the immediate skills they will need once they graduate, so that they can begin their professional careers.  For PR students social media is one of those skills.   Every employer expects new PR hires to have all the traditional PR skills, but today they also expect that they will be able to use social media in the mix.

“Over the past decade, there has been a sea change in the marketplace demands for graduates. Whereas broad skills used to be sufficient, now our students must demonstrate a set of concrete skills that not long ago were required only of those in highly technical majors.

Nowhere has this change created a greater shift than in fields such as marketing and public relations, which traditionally have been viewed as nontechnical but are now demanding a technological competency that is astounding.”

At one PR agency, where I taught a one-day workshop on strategy for PR and social media, the younger members of the staff were surprised that someone much older than they were was teaching the class. But they soon realized that creating a social media strategy is a far cry from using Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with friends.

Last week I spent a day at Cal State Fullerton as a guest lecturer in the Communication Department.  Again, although they were all very savvy kids, none of them was fully up to speed with the social media skills they are going to need to enter the workplace.

And this doesn’t only apply to teaching PR – earlier in the year Dr. David Hulme taught a class on Middle East Politics at USC and had the students set up a news blog and post information about the countries they were studying as part of their course.

“Why is all this important? Because the businesses that don’t know how to respond to and use social media are filling knowledge gaps in staff by hiring students with these skills fresh from college. In the lean organizations of 2009, students will not simply learn on the job; they will be asked to implement these tools strategically – because no one else knows how.” Dr. Elaine Young  Businessweek.

The idea of young folk being responsible for a business strategy has not been universally well received.  A recent post in Valleywag called out  a major PR agency for using 23 yea-olds to teach their execs about social media after reading this  article in the Chicago Tribune “Younger employees help senior executives unlock social media mystery” but it is happening in the workplace.  A survey for the Center for Work-Life Policy found that 40 percent of respondents had asked younger colleagues for help with text messaging, social networking and using iTunes.

Business and Communication schools need to prepare their students so that not only can they deliver  their personal knowledge of the digital world, but actually integrate that knowledge into a communication strategy.

The last word goes to Dr. Young:

“Professors need to lead students by example by knowing the mechanics of social media and showing our students how to use them strategically for the good of their employers.”

Image Credit:  Mike Perez