Connected and together, primus inter pares bias and a professional future with lights and challenges. Experiences and perspectives of Communication students in Spain during the pandemic

Abstract

Despite the important role that young people can play in a context of health crisis, little attention has been paid to their discourses on how they experienced confinement and post-confinement. To fill this gap, discussion gropus were conducted with young communication students in Spain to understand how they coped with these circumstances and to understand their professional expectations in a post-pandemic context. It was found that they coped well with the restrictions, using applications to keep in touch with their friends, and that the difficulties came with the end of the restrictions and the maintenance of certain restrictions, a period in which they felt the effects of possible contagion from a primus inter pares bias. Regarding their professional future, journalism students, in contrast to advertising and public relations and audiovisual communication students, were pessimistic and complained about a labour market that requires skills related to corporate communication. In the face of possible future pandemics, it is necessary to generate health information from an educational approach (Peñafiel et al., 2014) and involve them in the search for solutions (Paiva et al., 2021). Finally, the experiences of journalism students coincide with the results obtained from the analysis of the labour market available on job portals (Martínez-Nicolás, 2023; Gómez-Diago; Martínez-Nicolás, 2024) and suggest the need to include in the curriculum design of journalism courses content that goes beyond journalistic production and is related to corporate communication (Martínez-Nicolás, 2023).