PR Specialists Who Left the Field: What Actually Happened Next

Ashley Isham had been in PR long enough to know she was good at it — and to know that being good at it wasn't going to move her up. "In PR," she wrote later, "you only move up when a position becomes available." There wasn't one. So she started looking at tech sales, and somewhere in that process she articulated something most PR specialists spend years failing to see: "If I could pitch a story to a publication, I could sell a product to a customer." She got the job. Within eighteen months she was earning more than she ever had in PR.

Justine Tello had the same restlessness — five years at a PR agency, remote work for four of them, burnout she described, with unusual honesty, as "a quick escape" rather than a real plan. In July 2024 she took a nearly 36% pay cut to teach high-school English. She quit after one semester.

Both of them made it out of PR. One move worked. One didn't. The conditions that pushed them out are widespread — 64% of PR professionals report extreme stress or burnout, and 50% have seriously considered leaving the field (PRSA, 2025). The exit instinct is legitimate. What this article is about is everything that comes after you trust that instinct: specifically, what separates a move that works from one that doesn't.

Before you can make the move Isham made, you have to see what she saw — that the skills you've built in PR translate directly into language destination employers are already looking for. Most PR specialists can't see that yet, because their resumes are still written in the wrong language.

Your PR Skills Are Worth More Than Your Job Title Suggests

PR specialists consistently underestimate their transferability — not because the skills aren't there, but because they're labeled wrong. The same competency that reads as "managed media relations" on a PR resume reads as "orchestrated multi-stakeholder approval workflows across 90-day production cycles" on a product marketing or project management resume. The skill didn't change. The language did.

Three translations that work across the most common destination roles: "Drafted press releases under deadline" becomes "produced high-stakes written deliverables under real-time reputational pressure, coordinating legal, executive, and communications sign-off." That's risk management and cross-functional coordination language — it maps directly onto Project Manager and Product Marketing Manager job descriptions. "Maintained brand voice across channels" becomes "stewarded brand consistency across owned, earned, and paid touchpoints, setting standards adopted by multiple internal teams." That's the Content Strategist job description, almost verbatim. "Built and managed media lists" becomes "mapped and segmented external stakeholder audiences by influence tier and relationship stage." That's what Market Research Analysts and Customer Success Managers call stakeholder mapping — and it's a paid skill in those roles.

Jessica Bayer, cited in Indeed's June 2026 resume guide for communications specialists, put the hiring expectation plainly: employers now want fully integrated communicators, meaning the bullet points that matter are the ones that show cross-functional reach, not channel-specific execution.

The resume rewrite is not spin. It's accuracy. PR specialists have been underselling their scope by describing tasks when destination employers are screening for mechanisms and outcomes. This applies equally to communications specialists, internal comms professionals, and corporate affairs roles — if your work has ever required translating a complex message across an organizational boundary to an audience with power, the same logic applies.

Open your resume and find your last three bullets. If they describe tasks — "drafted," "managed," "coordinated" — rewrite each one to describe the mechanism, the stakeholders, and a measurable result. That exercise takes about 45 minutes and is the first step in any of the three career paths below.

Three Paths Out of PR (And the One First Step Each Requires)

The eight most documented destinations for PR specialists aren't equally accessible to everyone, and trying to evaluate all of them at once is what keeps most people stuck. Three paths account for the majority of successful transitions, and they sort neatly by tenure and appetite for transition cost.

Path 1 is Content Strategist or Marketing Specialist, and it's the right starting point for anyone with zero to five years in the field. The skill overlap with PR is almost total — brand voice stewardship, integrated messaging, editorial judgment. The median Content Strategist salary is $109,000 (Glassdoor, 2026), roughly 56% above the PR Specialist median of $69,780 (BLS, May 2024). The entry barrier is low and closable fast. First step this week: complete the free HubSpot Content Marketing certification — approximately six hours, no cost, widely recognized in job postings. Then rewrite your resume using the translation exercise above before you apply anywhere.

Path 2 is Product Marketing Manager or Marketing Manager, and it's the path Ashley Isham ran instinctively — the same persuasion and positioning stack PR teaches, applied to a commercial product rather than a media narrative. Marketing Manager median salary is $161,030 with 7% projected growth through 2034 (BLS). Product Marketing Manager base averages $120,470 plus additional cash compensation (BuiltIn, 2026). The skills gap is real but specific: attribution modeling, P&L fluency, and demonstrated AI-tool experience. First step this week: complete one AI-augmented project at your current job — use a generative AI tool to draft something you'd normally write manually, document the time saved, and add the outcome to your resume as a quantified bullet. That single data point signals AI fluency to hiring managers in both roles.

If I could pitch a story to a publication, I could sell a product to a customer.
— Ashley Isham, PR and marketing professional turned tech sales

Path 3 is Fractional Internal Communications Consultant, and it's designed for specialists with eight or more years of experience who want autonomy over their client list. Most large organizations have an internal communications function. Most companies below 200 employees don't — and they need one. A tenured PR specialist with stakeholder management experience can serve three or four of those companies simultaneously at rates between $150 and $200 per hour. Tello's eventual landing — running communications and marketing for the small business she and her husband co-own — is an informal version of this same logic: the PR skill set is worth more when you own the deployment. First step this week: look up one fractional communications platform and price one hypothetical engagement. What would you charge for ten hours per month of strategic comms support to a 50-person company? Putting a number on it transforms the idea from a daydream into a business decision.

The right path isn't the most exciting one — it's the one where the gap between where you are and where you need to be is sized to your actual runway.

The Timing Mistake That Kills Most Transitions

Choosing a path is the strategic decision. But there's a practical variable that determines whether any transition works regardless of which path you choose: when to quit, and what to have in place before you do.

The single biggest structural difference between transitions that work and transitions that don't is whether the preparation happened before or after the resignation. Tello's own post-mortem is precise: "It's better to approach a career change intentionally and with an overarching goal, rather than latching onto a new idea and pursuing it blindly." She described her own exit as "a quick escape" — and she's right that this is what it was. The antidote isn't patience for its own sake. It's using the employed months to close the specific gaps the destination role requires.

There's an additional financial dimension that didn't exist five years ago. The historical premium that employers paid to job-switchers over job-stayers has collapsed to nearly equal footing (WraySearch, March 2025). You can no longer count on a new employer rewarding you just for changing jobs. What they will reward is documented skills in destination-role language — which is exactly what the preparation period produces.

It's better to approach a career change intentionally and with an overarching goal, rather than latching onto a new idea and pursuing it blindly.
— Justine Tello, former PR agency professional

The practical preparation pattern that appears across successful transitions: complete at least one certification while still employed, not after, because employed people finish certifications at far higher rates than unemployed ones. Build one visible AI-fluency artifact into your current role before you leave. Reframe your resume before your first application, not after a rejection. Lucy Eckley, a UK strategic communications adviser who left financial services for her own brand-storytelling consultancy, saved six months of expenses and waited for her annual bonus before resigning. Her first client engagement arrived within a month of leaving.

If you're burned out enough to want out immediately, that feeling is valid and worth taking seriously. It's also exactly the emotional state where people make Tello's mistake. The counter-move isn't to suppress the urgency — it's to channel it into preparation rather than application.

There's one more variable that no preparation checklist fully addresses: the internal experience of the transition itself, including the identity adjustment that comes from being the new person in a role where you used to be the expert. That's worth naming before the close.

What the Transition Actually Looks Like

Ashley Isham is still in tech sales. Justine Tello runs communications and marketing for the company she and her husband co-own — which is to say she's doing PR work, on her own terms, for an audience she chose. Neither of them escaped their skills. They found employers who valued those skills more accurately than their PR agencies did.

The pattern across every successful PR transition in the research — the coaches, the sales professionals, the consultants, the marketing managers — is not that they discovered new skills. It's that they recognized the ones they already had and described them in the language of the role they wanted.

The PR career you're considering leaving didn't waste your time. It built the exact toolkit the next role is looking for. The gap is mostly translation.

The first move is the resume exercise from the second section: open your current resume, find your last three bullets, and rewrite each one to name the mechanism, the stakeholders involved, and the measurable result — using the vocabulary of the role you're targeting, not the vocabulary of the role you're in. Forty-five minutes. No cost. Do it before you open a single job listing. That rewrite is how you find out whether your next move is a translation or a reinvention — and that answer changes everything about how you plan the rest of it.

The transition is hard. The toolkit is already there.

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