Communication Management Generalist
Overview
Why Choose the Media, Entertainment and Creator Industries Area of Focus in USC’s Master of Communication Management Program?
At USC, our online Master of Communication Management (MCM) program is designed to help you build the advanced communication skills to thrive in high-profile, fast-moving entertainment industries. Through the Media, Entertainment and Creator Industries area of focus, you will:
- Work on projects tied to entertainment intellectual property (IP) currently in theaters and streaming
- Learn from faculty with hands-on experience in film, television, streaming, gaming, and the creator economy
- Explore emerging trends in creator culture, storytelling, and entertainment branding
- Earn your degree 100% online with the flexibility to study from anywhere in the world
Careers
100%
reported employment rate upon graduation
94%
received a raise, promotion or new title after completing the program
89%
appreciated the personal satisfaction of earning a degree
83%
said it helped expand knowledge of the industry
Benefit from the USC Annenberg Experience
When you become an online MCM student, you are granted access to the renowned USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and its resources. That means all of our digital libraries, professional networks and accomplished faculty are available to develop your strategic communication expertise and build your confidence to put it into action.
Broaden your skill set with professional growth opportunities:
- Access a multitude of creative workshops, digital tools and events through the USC Annenberg Digital Lounge, an official Adobe Certification Center
- Learn from a world-class faculty of leading experts in marketing, new and social media, change management, research and corporate communication
- Solve real-world problems with experiential learning opportunities
- Engage with diverse, multidisciplinary professionals across industries
- Connect with more than 15,000 USC Annenberg alumni worldwide
Communication Management Careers
The online Master of Communication Management can ignite the careers of a wide variety of professionals. Designed for students at various professional levels across many communication-related disciplines, this immersive online degree helps graduates advance their communication careers in everything from corporate and strategic communications to marketing and public relations. The program cultivates dynamic communication management skills — including critical thinking, writing, presentation and oral advocacy — which can significantly expand your career opportunities in the communications field. What can you do with a master’s in communication? Consider the array of communication degree career options.
MCM graduates have parlayed their degree into key roles at various professional levels. Examples include:
- Brown and Caldwell
- Canon Solutions America
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- The City of Las Vegas
- DISYS
- General Electric
- GP Strategies
- Integrity Public Relations, Inc.
- Kaiser Permanente
- Keurig Green Mountain
- Merck
- Outfront Media
- Roots of Peace
- Signet Maritime Corporation
- State Farm
- Teacher Created Materials
- Tesoro Refining and Marketing
- The University of Southern California
- WSS
- YWCA
Communication Manager Graduate Salary Range
$100k+
33% of grads
$76k - $100k
26% of grads
$51k - $75k
40% of grads
$0 - $50k
2% of grads
6 Career Opportunities in the Field of Communication
Analyst
Job Description and Salary
Analysts in communication roles perform research that helps organizations better understand their consumers and employees. When focused on consumer research, analysts collect and interpret data about customer satisfaction and sales trends. They also examine consumer buying habits and preferences, making use of public opinion polls, focus groups and interviews. This allows them to uncover insights that improve sales and marketing strategies, as well as strengthen product development tactics. Some analysts focus on employee insights, gathering feedback and survey data to help company leaders make data-driven decisions regarding employee hiring, training and management. Analysts may design processes for collecting and conducting research, in addition to creating and delivering reports to stakeholders. According to the BLS, insight analysts earned a median annual salary of $65,810 in May 2020.
Administrator
Job Description and Salary
Communication administrators help implement and monitor an organization’s communication strategies — the communication tactics used to support an organization’s business objectives. Communication administrators create marketing materials, including press releases, newsletters and social media posts, and contribute to their organizations’ websites. They also track the success of communication campaigns and help plan promotional events, press conferences and meetings to improve the image and brand of an organization. The BLS reports that public relations specialists, whose job duties align closely with those of communication administrators, earned a median annual income of $62,810 in May 2020.
C-Suite Positions
Job Description and Salary
Top executives in communications may be referred to as chief communication officers, or they may have executive titles with the phrases public relations or internal and external communications attached. These organizational leaders communicate a company’s business strategy across many audiences, including investors, employees, the public and the media. This role involves handling corporate communications, internal communications and reputation management. It also entails consulting with and serving as a strategic adviser to other organizational leaders about transparent and consistent messaging. Overall, communication C-suite positions have the responsibility of making sure their departments leverage digital communications and other innovative forms of communication to advance their organizations’ performance. The BLS reports that top communication executives earned a median annual income of $185,950 in May 2020.
Supervisor/Manager
Job Description and Salary
Communication managers handle the internal and external communication of organizations. This involves organizing and overseeing the design and content of marketing materials and devising communication strategies that grow brand awareness and customer loyalty programs. It also involves preparing media activity reports and generating fresh ideas with marketing departments to promote a company's services and products. Communication managers often collaborate with writers, designers and marketers. They earned a median annual salary of about $66,000 as of June 2021, according to PayScale.
Vice President
Job Description and Salary
A vice president of communications develops an organization’s communication strategy and contributes to its strategic planning process. Communication professionals in these executive positions oversee the communication activities that build and promote an organization’s reputation. They also develop and implement various public relations activities geared toward advancing an organization’s strategy and positioning goals. Additionally, a vice president of communications is responsible for ensuring communication materials align with an organization’s placement and brand. This often involves designing rules and guidelines about messaging for organization employees. According to PayScale, as of May 2021, vice presidents of communications earned a median annual income of about $149,500.
Director
Job Description and Salary
As organizational leaders, communication directors manage outreach strategy and ensure unified and compelling messaging. They oversee the communications and public relations staff, making sure the internal and external materials produced speak to a company’s values and vision, both clearly and accurately. This involves reviewing and approving marketing materials such as press releases, as well as communications such as internal memos. Communication directors may advise top executives on effective strategies for communicating an organization’s brand, and they may also train employees on how to speak to the media. Additionally, communication directors often serve as the spokespeople for their organizations. Communication directors earned a median annual income of around $84,000 as of June 2021, according to PayScale.
Communication Management Skills You Should Know
Modern Media Skills
Today’s fast-evolving digital world has changed how and where people communicate. It has shifted consumers’ expectations and influenced the ways employees interact with their employers. To keep up, communication professionals must have a firm grasp of tech alongside sharp digital and social media skills. This means knowing how to leverage the potential of social media platforms, ranging from Reddit and LinkedIn to Instagram and Facebook, and becoming knowledgeable about which strategies work best on each one. It also means putting digital tools to work, whether they be emerging software or online platforms such as Google Analytics.
Successful communication professionals know how to choose the channels and marketing tools that best deliver a brand’s message. They also have the media skills that allow them to create the personalization consumers have come to expect. Our online Master of Communication Management courses teach students to effectively maneuver online marketing, new media technologies and big data, making them tech savvy and digital ready.
Research Skills
Well-crafted communications speak to the values and beliefs of an audience. Identifying those values and beliefs requires research. By collecting key information about what an audience wants or thinks, communication professionals gain important insights. They can then design materials that not only reach but also connect with their intended audiences.
Research allows for a strategic approach in business communications. It empowers communication professionals to tailor their messaging and helps them evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts. The online Master of Communication Management curriculum gives students many opportunities to cultivate their research skills and learn methods and approaches that will help them thrive in numerous communication management jobs.
Storytelling
Compelling storytelling sits at the center of effective brand communications. Successful communication professionals harness storytelling as a tool to develop messaging that people relate to and understand. They use it to both motivate and move employees and consumers alike.
The marketing materials that communication professionals develop contain many storytelling elements. By using these elements effectively, communication professionals inspire people to share materials on social media and evoke emotions that prompt people to make a purchase or become loyal customers. Our online Master of Communication Management coursework explores the storytelling techniques and methods that communication professionals need to develop meaningful narratives.
Analytical and Problem-Solving Skills
If you aspire to be a trendsetter in the digital age, the ability to analyze and solve real-world business and communication problems is essential. Organizations rely on communication professionals to critically analyze data to make informed decisions. To help their organizations stay competitive, communication professionals need critical-thinking skills to not only interpret and glean insight from data but to also uncover ways to maximize those insights to their greatest effect.
Determining the best marketing strategies and assessing the effectiveness of communication materials and programs also calls for honed analytic and problem-solving skills. The online Master of Communication Management curriculum provides students with the chance to apply analytical skills to real-world business problems and devise actionable solutions that build the expertise they will need in the workplace.
Collaboration
Product launches, public relation campaigns, promotional events — none of these activities materialize in a bubble. They all require collaboration among many parties. To successfully work across departments coordinating projects, listening to and giving feedback, and generating new ideas, communication professionals must be excellent team players and leaders.
Our online Master of Communication Management program not only provides students with important theoretical knowledge that facilitates collaboration and teamwork but also offers students group-work experiences where they apply these skills in practice.
Career Resources
4 Reasons Why an MCM Degree Can Advance Your Career
6 Government Jobs for Communication Majors
13 Careers for Communication Majors
Communication Careers in the Video Game Industry
Marketing Communication Manager: Salary, Career Growth and Job Outlook
What Are the Highest-Paying Communication Jobs?
What Is the C-Suite? Executive Positions for Communication Graduates
Curriculum
Generalist Courses
Core Courses
Organizations are created through the process of communication, whether in the form of verbal agreements, written policies or enacted behaviors. As a result, organizational communication is highly interdisciplinary. It is inextricably linked to management, sociology, psychology and organizational behavior.
Managing Communication is about the process of understanding the systems, structures and processes that are integral to creating and maintaining organizations. This survey course will work through a model of organizational design to touch on a wide variety of the macro-level areas of the field of organizational communication, including the organizational structure, partnerships, networks, teams, culture and reward systems.
Throughout this course, you will learn how to think critically about research by asking good questions and applying rigorous methods and models to data. You will also practice using research to answer business questions. As industries become increasingly competitive, organizations are relying more and more on data to make more informed decisions. This reality requires individuals who understand not only how to interpret data, but how research can be designed to optimize the quality of research findings.
This course has been designed to provide you with grounding in the overall process of research design, to build your competence as a communicator of complex research findings, as well as to help you gain practical skills in some of the most common research methods.You will have the opportunity to learn course concepts through the development of a marketing research project for a client. Throughout the semester you will work with a team and use research to answer your client’s questions and provide recommendations. The final product will be presented to your clients.
An understanding of research methods is essential to successfully navigate the current professional business world. In this course we consider research from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective.
The course is designed around the principle that the best way to learn is via doing. Each week students apply the instructional materials to a range of problems simulating real-world scenarios. The course presents a range of methodological approaches, and multiple opportunities are provided to tailor the assignments to student personal interests.
In this course you will engage in detailed research-orientated examination of a topic. Topic selection is guided via a discussion with your instructor to design an achievable research goal that fulfills the goals of the program and your goals as an individual.
This course serves as the capstone experience of the program and as such is oriented to allow you to produce your best work while demonstrating what you have learned in the program. Due to the individually tailored and student-oriented research projects, each student engages in very different work, which results in very different final deliverables.
General Courses
Communication in Work Settings focuses on internal communication topics (e, g., manager-employee and peer communication). Equal emphasis is placed on theoretical understanding and practical applications.
A strong theoretical foundation is required to ensure that decisions about communication practices are based on sound research rather than popularized myths. That is, how is a concept studied by academics and why do we want to build/test theories about the concept? Concomitantly, how is the concept treated by practitioners and consultants? Your (future) employers are counting on you to be able to collect and evaluate the most recent research about topics that they are concerned about. Topics covered include: foundations of organizational communication and competencies; leadership, delegation and coaching; destructive workplace communication – workplace bullying and incivility; employee engagement and building trust; emotions in the workplace; organizational culture.
Successful creative campaigns communicate consumer benefits in simple, unexpected and compelling ways. This course provides an overview and application of marketing communication principles and strategies. It focuses on key concepts and frameworks for creating and managing an integrated marketing communication plan.
Topics will include situation analysis, consumer research, branding, campaign objectives, creative strategy, promotion strategy, media strategy, and campaign management and evaluation. Special attention will be given to social media and other current trends and innovations.
Markets are becoming more and more intertwined, and it has become imperative for all entities to analyze their consumers and their competitive landscape in global terms. The ability to effectively do so provides a key competitive advantage to create, capture and deliver value in an evolving global landscape.
This course provides participants analytical tools to identify the challenges and opportunities in the global marketplace. The analysis draws on relevant interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks as well as practical applications from case studies to bridge the gap between theory and practice utilizing lectures, articles and industry reports.
Throughout this course, you will learn how to think critically about research by asking good questions and applying rigorous methods and models to data. You will also practice using research to answer business questions. As industries become increasingly competitive, organizations are relying more and more on data to make more informed decisions. This reality requires individuals who understand not only how to interpret data, but how research can be designed to optimize the quality of research findings.
This course has been designed to provide you with grounding in the overall process of research design, to build your competence as a communicator of complex research findings, as well as to help you gain practical skills in some of the most common research methods.You will have the opportunity to learn course concepts through the development of a marketing research project for a client. Throughout the semester you will work with a team and use research to answer your client’s questions and provide recommendations. The final product will be presented to your clients.
Practical and theoretical survey of the public relations profession as it is currently practiced, focusing on its key role in today's information-based society. The course provides a social/contextual backdrop for further study of the field. Emphasis is places on strategic problem solving skills rather than tactical execution.
In this course you will learn to paraphrase the dynamic changes the public relations profession currently experiences and include your prediction regarding the near future of the profession, explain the meaning of strategy in the public relations context; develop and illustrate an analysis of current news events, utilizing critical thinking; deconstruction and present a campaign plan by applying strategic planning principles; construct and present a campaign plan that is based on research, strategy and actionable insights.
The context of the class is the organization and the role communication plays in developing and implementing business strategy. Students assess and make recommendations on live organizational change projects. Course pulls from corporate case studies as well as current theory.
Topics include business strategy, the role of the change agent, change models and their application, building ad-free brand communities, power, organizational politics and leadership. Students practice using change management tools and techniques while assessing organizational change efforts from both a theoretical and practical perspective. This course prepares students to lead change within the reality of today’s modern organizations.
In an increasingly saturated digital environment, with shifting patterns of media consumption and new modes of communication, today’s marketing and communication practitioners must possess an understanding of these forces and be able to apply communication constructs in new and innovative ways.
This course is designed to provide students with critical perspectives about new media technologies, social marketing communication and consumer behaviors online. In addition to evaluating theories and observing brand interactions online, students are provided with opportunities to gain practical, hands-on experience in creating online elements as part of digital marketing campaigns.
Specialized writing for persuasive and strategic communication contexts. Intensive focus on public relations writing for print, online, broadcast and social media. Through in-class assignments and homework, students will learn to organize and plan their writing both with and without deadline pressure. Some assignments will cover the essentials of news and the basic building blocks of providing information; others will include elements designed to provide insight for specific writing styles for print, online and broadcast media, as well as copy for brochures, newsletters and social media.
This course is designed to provide students with practical writing experience. Special emphasis is placed on composing materials for a variety of audiences and an array of assignments. Through writing drills—many of them timed, to replicate the pace of today’s business world—and evaluation of one another’s work, students will learn to write more effectively; that is, to ensure that the intended audience not only pays attention but is persuaded to take action, whether it be to vote for a candidate, donate to a cause, purchase a product or foster understanding of an issue.
Admission Requirements
Applicants must have:
- A bachelor’s degree from a regionally accredited college or university, or foreign equivalent.
- For international applicants, a valid score on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), International English Language Testing System (IELTS), or Pearson Test of English (PTE).
Application Materials
Complete and submit your Graduate Admissions Application online. Within the application, you will need to provide the following application materials:
- Résumé: Up-to-date professional résumé or curriculum vitae
- Letters of Recommendation: Two professional letters of recommendation are required, but you may submit three. Academic letters are acceptable for applicants with limited professional experience. Select your recommenders based on their ability to give in-depth insights about the quality of your work. Recommenders should not be peers or subordinates.
- Writing Sample: One writing sample is required, but you may submit up to three. These could be published pieces, or be academic or professional in nature.
- Statement of Purpose: One to two page essay addressing why you are pursuing your MSMCM degree, how your professional experience will contribute to the program, how a master’s will help you in your career, and why the program at USC Annenberg is a good fit for you.
Transcripts: Open, scan and upload official transcripts from each postsecondary institution (undergraduate and graduate) you have attended directly to the application portal.
Ready to Get Started?
Academic Calendar
Spring 2026
Application Deadline:
December 5, 2025
Upcoming Start Date:
January 5, 2026
Cost of Attendance
Tuition
Per Unit Cost: $2,467
Total Tuition Cost: $78,944 (32 units)
Fees
Application Fee: $90, non-refundable fee.
Books/Supplies: Students can expect to spend approximately $300-$600 for textbooks and other course materials per semester.
Graduate Student Fees: $31 per semester.*
**Graduate Student Fees are charged per semester and are comprised of a $20 Graduate Student Programming Fee and an $11 fee for the Norman Topping Student Aid Fund. Students enrolled in the program full time will pay approximately $124 in Graduate Student Fees ($31 per semester x 4 semesters), whereas students enrolled in the program part time will pay $248 ($31 per semester x 8 semesters) over the course of their program.
Graduate Student Fees & Tuition are subject to change.
For more information on applying for financial aid, please visit USC Financial Aid. USC Financial Aid.
Faculty
Accomplished and Diverse Faculty
Frequently Asked Questions
