For most of my career I have been told to pick one thing. By mentors, by algorithms, by well-meaning industry voices who treat focus as a professional virtue. I am a PR practitioner who also runs an interior design business, and for years I treated that fact as something to manage quietly rather than lead with.

I no longer do.

Not because the market has suddenly become more forgiving of range, but because it has become more hostile to narrowness. If you work in PR, communications, or media, you have already felt the pressure: AI tools are entering our workflow at pace, clients expect cross-disciplinary thinking, and the talent that earns the most trust is the talent that can read a room, shift registers, and synthesise complexity into clarity.

That is not a single-lane skill. That is range. And South African data is starting to show us why it matters more than ever.

Routine specialist work is exactly what AI will absorb first. What it cannot replicate is the synthesis that comes from someone who has spent years thinking across disciplines.

What the Numbers Actually Say

The 2026 RecruitMyMom Working Women in South Africa Report, which surveyed 3 509 skilled women, contains a finding the communications industry should be sitting with:

  • 29.2% reegular burnout rate among business owners, and
  • 40% regular burnout rate among executives.

Business owners, the people with the most autonomy and, frequently, the broadest portfolio of responsibilities, burn out the least. Not because they work less. Because, as the Global Workplace Happiness Report (80 000 employees, 115 countries) confirms, the primary driver of workplace happiness is not workload. It is inspiration and belonging: a sense that what you do is connected to something meaningful.

For the multi-disciplinary practitioner, meaning is structural. It is built into how we work, not something we petition management to provide.

The PR Industry's Specialisation Trap

Our industry has spent a decade optimising for specialisation. Digital-only consultants. Crisis-only retainers. Social-only agencies. The logic was sound: depth commands premium fees. But the model has a flaw.

Specialisation is also what AI optimises for. Narrow, repeatable, high-volume tasks (media monitoring summaries, first-draft press releases, coverage reports) are exactly what large language models handle with increasing competence. If your practice is built on executing those tasks efficiently, your pricing power is already under pressure.

What AI cannot do, at least not yet and not without human orchestration, is understand the politics of a client's boardroom, read the subtext in a journalist's follow-up question, or know that the right communication strategy for a healthcare brand in a township context requires a completely different register than the one that works in Sandton. That contextual intelligence comes from range, not from specialisation.

The practitioners who will thrive are those who can translate complexity into confidence for clients, and that is a cross-disciplinary skill.

What Running Two Businesses Has Taught Me About PR

I launched VocalCord PR & Reputation Management in 2005. I set it down intentionally when I was expecting twins, studied interior design part-time, and opened Pigs Can Fly Interiors in 2008. Then I resurrected VocalCord. Today I run both, simultaneously and without apology.

Here is what the interior design practice has done for my PR work:

It has made me a better listener. Interior design teaches you to hear what a client cannot quite articulate: the brief behind the brief. That is also the most important skill in reputation management. The presenting issue is rarely the real issue.

It has made me a more precise communicator. When you are translating a functional requirement (a legal firm needs a boardroom that projects authority without intimidating clients) into spatial language, you learn to be exact. That precision carries directly into narrative strategy.

It has made me more resilient commercially. The RecruitMyMom report notes that 45% of skilled South African women are sole household income earners and 80.4% support dependants. A second income stream is not an indulgence; it is risk architecture. When one business has a slow quarter, the other carries the weight. That stability makes me a steadier practitioner, not a distracted one.

The Case for Reframing 'Range' in Your Practice

If you are a communications professional with a serious second competency (whether that is design, data analysis, psychology, another language, or a former career in law, finance or education) I want to suggest that you stop treating it as a footnote to your professional identity.

The 2026 Global Workplace Happiness Report flags AI as an emerging cognitive partner in the workplace. The direction is clear: repetitive specialist tasks migrate to automation. What remains irreducibly human is synthesis: the ability to bring together disparate knowledge systems and produce something a single-domain practitioner could not.

Nobel laureates are 22 times more likely than the average scientist to have a serious arts practice. That is not coincidence. Cross-domain thinking is not a distraction from excellence. It is frequently the source of it.

Our clients are not buying our category. They are buying our judgment. And judgment is almost always built at the intersection of multiple disciplines, not at the end of a single deep tunnel.

The Practitioner the Market is Looking For

The PR and communications landscape in South Africa is changing fast. Hybrid workforces, reduced retainer certainty, AI-augmented workflows and clients who expect their consultants to speak business strategy and brand narrative in the same breath.

In that environment, range is not a liability to be managed. It is positioning no single-lane competitor can replicate.

You were never scattered. You were building something the market is only now catching up to understand.

For more information, visit www.marilizejacobs.com.