ARM Holdings CEO Warren East announced today that he will be stepping down after 12 years at the helm. He will be replaced on 1 July by ARM president, Simon Segars, a 22-year veteran of the semiconductor developer.

The Cambridge-based tech firm has made its name in creating designs and owning the intellectual property rights for semiconductors and microprocessors. However, through its partnerships with over 1000 worldwide technology firms, it has also become a thought leader in the business world, marketing and communications director Ellie Springett tells Communicate.

Apprenticeships in communications have been sweeping the nation over the past few years. Nearly all, however, have focused on providing young people with skills for careers in PR, design, digital and internal comms.

Last week, during National Apprenticeship Week, Tangerine PR announced its spearheading of a programme to address the skills shortage in social media. The first social-only apprenticeship programme will provide young people with the necessary skills for professional creative and marketing work in social media.

Last weekend in Zagreb, Croatia, the best and brightest in European public relations gathered at the 2013 PRO.PR Conference. The three-day conference featured Balkan and British business leaders, communications directors and academics who discussed everything from international PR to reputation management to the communications challenges of different industries.

As part of the conference, the PRO.PR Awards recognise excellence in individual, public and private PR projects. Three were distributed to leading British PR professionals for their work in European public relations.

International maternity retailer, Mamas & Papas has borne a new visual identity that may finally quash rival Mothercare’s attempts at regeneration.

The rebrand, carried out in-house, repositions the retailer ‘at the heart of parenting.’ The visual identity has been given a friendlier, more lower-case treatment than its previous incarnation. It will soon be followed by a rebrand to the company’s physical properties.

With international pizza companies offering rewards programmes, discounts and gimmicks left and right, breaking away from the pack is becoming more difficult. Domino’s Pizza, a US-based chain, revamped its branding last September but rolled out the new look to its UK outposts only this week.

The branding features a modernisation of the stylised domino, but boldly, does not include the company’s name. This was a conscious move to bring the brand in line with the likes of Nike or Cadbury, brands whose reputations precede them; brands which have surpassed the need for identifying marks beyond a simple swoosh or colour or characteristic object.

In 2012, there was a credibility gap between rhetoric and action, or rather, inaction, in corporate sustainability reporting. This year, however businesses are achieving more in their sustainability reporting, according to Radley Yeldar’s fourth-annual ‘How does it stack up?’ report, by explaining how it relates to corporate strategy.

Sustainability reporting has become an important objective for stakeholders, particularly in large, FTSE-listed companies. However, sustainability reporting, while having made improvements, has yet to fully integrate sustainability with communications and stakeholder relations.

For a communicator who has spent most of her career blazing trails in digital for organisations large and small, working for Ketchum’s digital arm is a natural transition.

Abby Guthkelch has spent the past two years revolutionising the way Royal Mail does digital. The massive, at times sluggish, public institution met the digital age reluctantly. Guthkelch brought it into the 21st century by overhauling the website, changing the intranet to meet the demands of a non-office bound workforce and tackling huge projects like the Olympics and Movember.

The stakes are high in determining the outcome of the Leveson Inquiry. “If we get it wrong we will actually end up damaging the fundamentals of free speech and free press,” Lord Black of Brentwood, executive director of the Telegraph Media Group, said at today’s PRCA Future of Communications after Leveson conference.

A particularly timely event, as David Cameron has just called off cross-party talks on the implementation of a statutory regulatory body.

The furor recent over NHS’ PR budget comes just months after the Government increased its spending on communications, particularly for the NHS. In September of last year, the Cabinet Office highlighted health-related communications and PR programmes as a priority for the following year.

This morning, the BBC reported on Freedom of Information requests uncovering 82 in-house press officers and £3 million spent on agencies. A number of critics have called money spent on PR consultants and branding agencies a wasteful use of funds.

Best practice in internal communications is exhibited in campaigns and channels that make people take notice. Creativity, strategy and effective evaluation are key to doing so. The Institute of Internal Communications (IoIC) will be honouring the best in internal communications at its 2013 Awards, which are now open for entry.

Awards categories range from traditional categories like print and writing to design to innovation and digital media. The Awards celebrate those individuals and teams that consistently demonstrate best practice in internal comms.

At this week’s SXSWedu conference, News Corp. unveiled a learning-based tablet computer that will be made available to schoolchildren in the US. The Amplify tablet will feature Android-based learning apps. The programme will rely on the Education Department’s ‘Race to the Top’ Programme that is designed to cover the costs of new technology in public schools.

Not to be outdone, Carphone Warehouse in the UK has had a similar plan to disseminate tablet technology to schools across the country. Education secretary Michael Gove okayed the the mobile retailer’s plan to implement the project by the end of 2013.

The rebrand of a company responsible and renowned for its impact on childhood development has allowed it to exemplify that remit via visual testimony.

Fisher-Price’s 83 year history has propelled it to the forefront of the children’s toy market. The company however, has found that young children, toddlers and even babies are increasingly using such grown-up toys as iPhones and iPads. In developing new interactive toys to suit this trend, Fisher-Price has introduced a new set of brand guidelines to highlight its tradition of excellence.

They say news is dead. They say newspapers are remnants of a bygone era and the revolution Gutenberg began some 600 years ago is no longer relevant.

Mark Zuckerberg has something to say about that. A Facebook revamp has become a somewhat expected story out of Palo Alto. But yesterday’s “personalized newspaper” moment addresses the one thing that has kept newspapers alive throughout the centuries – advertising.

Companies desperate to reach a youth audience through Facebook have been met certain with challenges.

Social media has changed the way the world interacts, it has changed communications, changed booking airplane tickets and buying coffee, among other things. It has also changed the way international organisations respond to shifting patterns of influence.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is no different. The IMF has 60 stakeholders and 188 member states and operates in the world’s most volatile economic situations. Last night, at the CIPR’s annual Maggie Nally lecture, deputy MD of the Fund, Nemat Shafik, spoke on the IMF’s changing communications strategies in a landscape of democratisation, globalisation and hyperconnectivity.

Transparency is widely acknowledged to be key in corporate communications. Maintaining openness about spending and funding can build brand trust and loyalty as the public becomes aware of the business’ practices. It also assuages stakeholders concerns about use of funds and budgets.

Capital Metro, the transit authority in Austin, Texas, has long had a dedicated webpage for fiscal reporting – its budget and spending is clearly accessible to passengers and stakeholders alike. It has also embraced transparency as core to its buiness practice. But Capital Metro has taken transparency one step further.

The transit authority has introduced 35-foot graphics featuring x-ray images on six buses in its fleet. Designed to communicate the agency's transparency, the supergraphics exemplify Capital Metro's business outlook in an accessible manner.

Last summer, Australia took the bold step in eliminating all recognisable branding from cigarette packaging. The UK is likely to follow suit within the year. Branding is now widely recognised as a significant factor in attracting people, particularly children, to become new smokers.

The plain Australian packaging included an olive drab background along with graphic images of diseases related to. The British Government is likely to announce the legislation in May.

Students from BME backgrounds in the 16-18 year-old age range are more familiar than non-BME students with what a career in public relations entails, but are subsequently less likely to enter the communications industry.

The CIPR’s Diversity Working Group has sought to improve access to communications professions for hopefuls from minority backgrounds since 2010. It’s recent research into the perceptions of PR by 16-18 year olds has yielded somewhat surprising findings.

Though it seems that studying for PR qualifications has become a surging trend over the past several months, in fact, the amount of communications professionals or hopefuls studying with PR training academies has remained largely consistent.

The PR Academy, one of the nation’s most prominent communications training facilities, released its third annual trends survey this week. Though the percentage of students has remained almost unchanged, the reasons for studying have changed significantly.

A year ago, Queens Park Rangers acquired South Korean star Ji-Sung Park from Manchester United and only recently added his countryman, Suk-Young Yun to the roster. There are currently 11 players hailing from the Republic of Korea in the the Premier League. However, QPR has the unique position of being home to two Korean footballers.

In light of the squad’s ties to South Korea and its growing fanbase in East Asia, the club has launched a Korean Twitter account. The @OfficialQPR_KR account will be managed jointly between the UK and Korean and will tweet exclusively in Korean.

“I said at the outset I’d do three years, and three years have gone” says Jane Wilson, on the day her resignation from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations was announced.