After the PR interviews with Richard Bailey and Pippa Hanson, it's time for the third interview in my blog series"Why Work PR?".

Today, Jessica Hodkinson shares her PR experiences and advice with us.

I 'met' Jess a few months ago on Twitter and we've been following each other since then. She regularly blogs about online PR and I encourage you to subscribe to her blog and follow her on Twitter for tons of useful information.  

Why Work in Public Relations: Interview with Jessica Hodkinson

1. As a short introduction, can you tell us a little bit about you and what you do?

I am a PR and Social Media Consultant blogging at www.onlineprpixie.com 

2. How exactly did you get into PR and what work experiences have you gathered so far?

After graduating back in 2009, I started the painful job hunt and faced a lot of mind boggling situations and rejection; I struggled to remain motivated before I found the right role. I saw an opportunity with a digital agency in the north of England and I decided to apply for it. I became an online PR consultant and learnt some essential skills that definitely set me up for the future. I also started my own blog!

Today, we continue with the second interview of my blog series, asking PR practitioners "Why do you want to work in PR?" and inviting them to share their experiences and advice around the profession. (If you missed the first interview with Richard Bailey, you can read it here.)

This time I got in touch with my first PR mentor – Pippa Hanson. I met Pippa when I was doing my first PR internship. She taught me so much when I was just getting into PR – from how to craft the perfect press release to how to pitch it to a reporter and secure coverage. 

Pippa has had an interesting career so far and I hope you enjoy reading more about it in this PR interview. 

Why Work in Public Relations: Interview with Pippa Hanson

1. As a short introduction, can you tell us a little bit about you and what you do?

I’m a PR consultant with in-house and agency experience, working with clients including Specsavers, English Heritage and the British Equestrian Federation. 

I’ve been asked many times “Why do you want to work in public relations?” To be honest with you, it’s a difficult question, partly because it is difficult to explain what PR is in the first place.

In my attempt to answer that question, I’ve written three pieces describing why I want to work in PR (if you haven’t seen them yet, you can check them out here, here and here). And I know that I recently kind of left the PR agency life by joining HubSpot, but my new role still has a lot to do with public relations. Why? Because it is based on building and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with my clients – that is very much how the PRSA defines the essence of PR.   

So for all you out there wondering why to work in PR, I decided to start a blog series called "Why work in PR: Advice from the Pros", interviewing PR professionals about their careers, reasons why they wanted to work in PR and their PR career guidance for you.

And what better way to launch these series than with an interview with one of the most well-known names in the PR industry in the UK, who’s been teaching and guiding the new generation of PR for years – Richard Bailey.

On the scale of one to ten, with ten meaning "extremely" and one meaning "not at all", how successful would you say you are? How accomplished do you feel? How satisfied are you with your career and professional life? I hope your answers lie somewhere close to ten. Now, let me ask you some more questions: How stressed would you say you are? How satisfied are you with your relationships and personal life? How happy are you?

If you gave all those questions an answer close to ten, congratulations! You are one of the very few lucky people in this world who's got it all!

Now, let's talk about the rest of us - the ones who still feel there's something missing, there's something to improve, there's something more to do and work on so that we feel truly accomplished and happy at the same time.

That journey towards true happiness in our personal as well as our professional lives starts with our definition of success, or the way society as a whole pictures what success should look like. And for the past decades that picture has unfortunately been rather distorted.

This is one of the messages of Arianna Huffington's, founder and president of the Huffington Post and best-selling author, new book "Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder".

Having been deeply inspired by Arianna's commencement speech at Smith College, I was eager to start reading the book the minute my pre-order was delivered on my Kindle. And I loved it.

The way the book

If you follow my blog, you know how passionate I am about the issue of gender inequality in the workforce. You’ve also seen my commitment to join and support well-known female leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg and Barri Rafferty by fostering the conversation about women climbing the career ladder. And that is the aim of this post – to speak up yet again and offer you some interesting facts and figures.

My posts on the topic have so far been rather negative – highlighting how much more there is that we need to do in order to ensure real gender equality at the workplace. With this piece, I am going to focus more on the bright side and show you some facts and figures about the progress women have made over the past centuries.

Below you’ll find a very informative infographic that presents a rather optimistic view for the future with millennial women leading the change.

The infographic offers an interesting comparison of how things are now for women and how they used to in terms of titles held, advancement opportunities, aspirations and how having kids factors female careers.

Here are some highlights: