Communications Coordinator Job Description

A Communications Coordinator runs the production side of an organization's public voice. In a marketing department, an agency or an in-house communications team, the coordinator is the person who turns a manager's plan into finished, approved, scheduled work: the release that crosses the wire on launch morning, the media advisory that reaches the right desk, the employee newsletter that ships on Thursday, and the coverage report that lands on a director's screen Monday morning. Some employers post the same job as Marketing Communications Coordinator, a title O*NET lists under the same occupation.

O*NET's Job Titles file lists Communications Coordinator under Public Relations Specialists, the occupation whose tasks include writing press releases, preparing employee newsletters and stockholder reports, and posting content to company websites and social channels. The coordinator does that work at the execution level, working under a communications manager, PR manager or marketing director who owns strategy and approves the final word.

A working week mixes writing with traffic control. On the writing side, the coordinator drafts releases, fact sheets, boilerplate updates, talking points, website copy, intranet posts and short social captions, then routes each draft through subject experts, legal reviewers and an approving executive. On the traffic side, the coordinator keeps the communications calendar honest: which product announcement moved, which executive interview needs a briefing document, which event needs a run-of-show, and which partner must sign off on a joint statement before anything goes out.

Media relations support is a core part of the job. Coordinators build and clean media lists, track which reporters cover which beats, log inquiries, schedule interviews, and assemble press kits with approved photos, logos and bios. After a launch they gather the resulting coverage, tag it by outlet and message, and write the summary that tells leadership what landed and what did not.

At a publicly traded company, timing carries legal weight. The SEC's Regulation FD says that when a company intentionally shares material nonpublic information with certain outsiders, it must make the information public simultaneously, through a Form 8-K or another method reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution. A coordinator who schedules an earnings release or other material announcement is working inside that rule, which is one reason the wire time, the website post and the investor relations update are lined up and cleared by legal first.

The job also carries a lot of quiet stewardship. Coordinators maintain the brand style guide, the photo library, the approved boilerplate and the archive of past releases. They hold embargoed information, sometimes for weeks, and they are in a position to notice when two teams are about to announce conflicting news on the same morning.

BLS lists a bachelor's degree as the typical entry-level education for public relations specialists, the occupation that includes this title. Common majors for a Communications Coordinator include journalism, communications, English, marketing and public relations. A degree matters less in hiring conversations than a portfolio: three to six clean writing samples, such as a press release, a feature or blog post, a short internal announcement and a set of social posts, show an editor more than a transcript does.

As a rough guide, coordinator openings fit someone with zero to three years of experience, often after one or two internships at an agency, a newsroom, a campus communications office or a nonprofit. Student media work counts. So does freelance writing, a stint as a campus newspaper editor, or event work that involved real deadlines and real vendors.

Writing in house style is the core technical skill. Teams that write to the AP Stylebook have to keep up with its changes. The Associated Press released the 58th edition on May 27, 2026, with an expanded chapter on artificial intelligence that added entries for "AI agent," "AI slop" and "vibe coding," and the edition made "healthcare" one word. A coordinator who keeps the current edition at hand, and knows where the team's own style guide departs from it, saves editors a round of corrections on every draft.

The tool kit is broad but learnable. O*NET's profile of the occupation lists Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Illustrator among the graphics tools in use, alongside standard office and email software. On top of that, plan to learn a media database, a wire distribution service, a social scheduling platform, a project tracker and the content management system behind the company website. Specific products vary by team; being able to learn a new one in a week matters more than knowing any single brand.

Soft skills are concrete in this job. Coordinators need to chase approvals without irritating busy executives, hold confidential information without slipping, take blunt edits without defensiveness, and track a dozen small deadlines at once. A simple personal system for intake, version control and sign-off records is worth building early.

No certification is required for the job. Two voluntary credentials exist for people who want one later. The Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) is awarded by the Universal Accreditation Board, and the Communication Management Professional (CMP) is awarded by the Global Communication Certification Council. Each body sets its own eligibility rules, so treat either one as a later goal and check the requirements before planning around it.

Useful extras include basic photo and video editing, comfort reading web analytics, and some exposure to investor relations or crisis plans.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track communications coordinators as their own group. It counts them inside public relations specialists, an occupation with 314,500 jobs in 2025. In its 2025-35 projections, BLS expects employment of public relations specialists to grow 2 percent from 2025 to 2035, which it describes as slower than the average for all occupations, adding 5,700 jobs. Despite limited employment growth, BLS projects about 23,000 openings for public relations specialists each year, on average, over the decade.

Pay across the occupation spans a wide range. The May 2025 OEWS survey put the 10th percentile at $44,110, the median at $74,750 and the 90th percentile at $135,150 for public relations specialists nationally. BLS does not report coordinators separately, so the band describes the occupation as a whole. Industry matters inside that band. In advertising, public relations and related services, the industry that includes PR and marketing agencies, the May 2025 median for the occupation was $77,480. In social advocacy organizations it was $69,570, and in credit intermediation, the industry that includes banks, it was $93,950.

Workload is a real factor in how people experience the job. A 2026 study by the Institute for Public Relations and The Grossman Group, based on a survey of 419 communications professionals conducted between October 2025 and January 2026, found that 88% were engaged overall while 81% said they experience burnout at least "sometimes," a 22-percentage-point jump from the 2025 report. In the same study, 40% said they were likely to look for a job at another organization in the next 12 months, up from 31% in 2025. For a coordinator, clear intake rules and realistic calendars are practical protection against that pressure.

AI raises a specific legal question for anyone producing content. In its January 2025 report on copyrightability, the U.S. Copyright Office concluded that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. The same report says human authors are entitled to copyright in the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in AI outputs, or in creative modifications of the outputs. For a communications team, that puts weight on the human edit as well as on fact-checking.

The path up from coordinator runs toward specialist, senior specialist and manager titles in public relations, internal communications, executive communications, social media or marketing communications. Investor relations and public affairs are also open paths, since the disclosure and stakeholder skills learned on release days carry over. A practical route forward is visible ownership: run a newsletter end to end, manage a launch calendar, or take over the coverage report and make it something leadership reads.

Dear Ms. Delgado,

I am applying for the Communications Coordinator position on the corporate communications team at Harbor Ridge Outdoor. I have followed the company's trail stewardship program for two years, and I would like to help tell that story with the same care your team puts into the product launches.

For the past eighteen months I have worked as a communications assistant at a regional land trust. I write and distribute our press releases, keep our media list of about two hundred contacts current, and produce the monthly member newsletter from first draft to send. Last spring I managed the calendar for our capital campaign launch, which meant coordinating approvals from our executive director, two board members and a corporate partner's legal team. The release went out on schedule, and I built the coverage summary our director presented to the board.

I write to AP style, and I keep our internal style sheet updated so volunteers and staff use the same names, titles and terms. I use AI tools for rough outlines and headline options, and I treat every draft they produce as raw material: I verify each fact and rewrite in our voice before anything goes to my manager for review.

I am organized in a way that other people can see. I keep a shared tracker for every piece in progress, with owners, deadlines and approval status, and colleagues have told me it saves them from chasing updates.

I would welcome the chance to talk about how I could support your launches, your employee communications and your media relations work. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely, Jordan Whitfield