The rise of specialist practice areas within communication
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As organisations faced an increasingly complex set of audiences and genuine challenges over time, the communication profession gradually splintered into distinct specialist practice areas, such as crisis communication, internal communication and public affairs, each requiring genuinely different skills that a single generalist practitioner would struggle to master equally well across every area at once.
This growing specialisation allowed individual practitioners to develop genuine depth within a particular area of focus, producing more sophisticated practice overall than a purely generalist approach could typically achieve on its own, while also creating a genuine need for careful coordination across specialisms whenever a single organisation required more than one at the same time.
The rise of these distinct specialist areas has continued alongside the broader growth of the profession itself over recent decades, with entirely new specialisms still emerging as organisations encounter genuinely new categories of challenge that existing practice areas were never originally designed to address at all.