To land an entry-level staff associate job at Rogers & Associates, a Century City public relations firm, you have to be able to pass a simple editing test finding the misspellings and punctuation errors on a business letter.

It’s not rocket science, but these days, a college diploma alone is not a dependable indicator of a basic command of English.

“I just interviewed a recent college graduate, a young woman who wants to learn the business, who couldn’t pass the test,” sighed agency chief Ron Rogers. “It’s just a one-page letter, but this person missed nine different spelling or punctuation errors.”

The new generation of college graduates entering the labor pool isn’t getting much respect from its elders hence the nickname “slackers” but the frustration of the older generation for the younger seems especially acute in the P.R. business.

“Johnny can’t read” is a frequently heard complaint; he also can’t write, he doesn’t have any business skills and he does not understand the meaning of the word “loyalty.”

West Coast P.R. Newsletter, a bi-monthly publication created in West L.A. by Darren Shuster, recently completed a survey sent to about 400 members of the Public Relations Society of America’s Counselors Academy, a group of high-level P.R. executives. Only 60 responded, which might make for a skewed survey (it’s quite possible that only the people with a beef sent in answers), but the results are nonetheless interesting.

Among them: Only 29.9 percent were satisfied with existing university communications programs. Not a single respondent felt that young professionals are “more loyal” than earlier generations (75.4 percent said they are “less loyal”). Writing abilities were identified by 68.4 percent as a primary weakness, followed by client-relations skills (61.4 percent) and public-speaking skills (50.9 percent).

The loyalty issue was seen as a particularly big problem.

“If you talk to corporate P.R. people, often they only read my newsletter because they’re looking for their next job. They’re always looking for their next job,” said Shuster.

Executives from nearly every industry are complaining about the same thing these days. An improving economy, combined with the aging of the huge baby boom generation, has resulted in a major labor shortage around the country, which means people change jobs more often because they’re getting better offers.

More troubling to many are the skill sets that aren’t being acquired by recent college graduates. Like many agency heads, Marci Blaze of the Venice-based Blaze Co. insists that job applicants take a basic writing test before they will be considered.

“There are a lot of unskilled writers out there, and I think the explanation is pretty basic they don’t read,” Blaze said. “It’s been the bane of the public relations industry, because we send a bunch of people out there who don’t communicate well and then we stand there with mouths agape when the media don’t respond very well.”

Rogers agrees that writing skills are a problem, but says an even bigger one is the lack of business skills possessed by recent college graduates. At most universities, public relations falls under the communications or journalism departments which give students a theoretical education, but very little practical knowledge.

“They don’t have a clue about what business is all about,” Rogers said. “They don’t understand how companies make a profit, they don’t understand marketing, they don’t understand distribution.”

Trying to do something about that is Jerry Swerling, who was tapped last fall by the University of Southern California to revamp its public relations department, particularly a graduate program that had been losing its focus.

Swerling was an apt choice for a university looking to give its students a more real-world education. The former head of P.R. agency Porter/Novelli’s West Coast operation, Swerling quit that job two years ago to start his own P.R. consultancy, which has been hired to handle some of the biggest account reviews in Southern California in recent months.

Besides teaching a class of his own at USC, Swerling has spent the past year recruiting top-level L.A. marketing executives to do the same. About a half-dozen of them have been taking workshops on teaching skills, and will each teach a course starting this fall.

“We’ve got to make sure we’ve got enough strong, strategic problem solvers who can understand a business situation and come up with appropriate marketing solutions,” Swerling said. “That’s the biggest problem facing the P.R. industry today.”

Playing ketchup

Mendelsohn/Zien Advertising Inc., the West L.A. agency whose Carl’s Jr. commercials keep treading the line that separates what you can get away with in advertising and what you can’t, may have launched its riskiest (risqu & #233;-est?) spot to date.

A young man and woman in a laundromat are both eating messy Carl’s burgers and playing a kind of strip-tease contest. He drips on his pants, off go the pants into the machine; she drips on her shirt, off goes the shirt. When he’s finally left in nothing but his boxer shorts, he drips on them and off go the shorts. But instead of following suit, his partner runs away leaving him holding the bag, literally, hurriedly snatching a Carl’s Jr. bag to cover his privates.

Despite the spot’s suggestive nature, agency President Richard Zien said there wasn’t any trouble getting station clearance for it.

“I think the reason it is a totally delightful spot to most network and station censors is, he ends up with egg all over his face and she doesn’t,” Zien said.

The real test, though, might be how many angry calls Mendelsohn/Zien has to field from viewers. Ever since the “If it doesn’t get all over the place, it doesn’t belong in your face” campaign began, the agency has been taking calls from people complaining that it teaches kids that it’s OK to be sloppy. When the agency produced a commercial showing a burger dripping on a pigeon’s head, animal rights activists called to complain about pigeon abuse, Zien said.

So far, no calls about the laundromat strip-tease spot.

News Editor Dan Turner writes a weekly column on marketing for the Los Angeles Business Journal.