Charactersitics of An Investor Relations Officer

For last weeks classes we were asked to read Professor Laskin's article on the roles and activities of investor relations officers. We learned about the different roles they played within the company along with the different problems facing the investor relations world today. Through class we learned that Investor Relations is typically managed by IR departments with only 27% percent being controlled by finance and 7% being concluded by communications departments. The typical activities include attending road shows and conference, responding to requests from shareholders and providing information to the top management.

After learning about the tasks typically involved in a investor relations officers day, I decided to research the different characteristics needed in order to successfully perform the IR tasks. Oliver Schutzmann put together an article entitled "A Wish List for the Ideal Investor Relations Officer".The article describes the need for fair valuation along with IR officers linking the demand for capital with the availability of capital to investors. This article also mentions the idea that IR professionals report to the CEO and CFO in order to show that senior management is very concerned with IR.

To be successful in IR these professionals need to be smart, credible and articulate due to the fact that they are dealing with intelligent investors asking tricky questions on a regular basis. Officers must have a clear understanding of the business, as well as a way for different managers to meausre the success of IR. Tasks including delivering target achievements, being able to reach target audiences and develop communications channels.

IR professionals should possess skills that can be considered both hard and soft. Hard skills include, financial communications, public relations, media relations, strategic planning, accounting, administration, legal and marketing among others. Soft skills are more focused upon personality, including credibility, flexibility, persuasiveness, loyalty, team work and objectivity. There is no definite way to learn IR skills other than participating in the activities.

IR officials may also need to be familiar with creating an IR office from scratch. To do this a professionals would create key messages about the company along with positioning it. The importance of information and transparency is mentioned in this article as it has been in so many previously discussed. While we have been learning about their specific jobs within a company, I thought it would be interesting to see which characteristics would help these IR professionals in the different tasks they have been assigned.