AP Style Tips: Capitalizing Job Titles

AP Style, also known as the Associated Press Stylebook, is the go-to guide for journalists and media across the country. This style guide provides a standardized set of rules for grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and other language conventions. It has become the authoritative rule-maker for content published across most forms of public-facing corporate communication over the last half-century.

When creating content — especially anything that will be shared with members of the press — it's important to follow AP Style. Why?

• First and foremost, it helps ensure that your message is clear and concise. The style guide is designed to make writing easy to read and understand, which is especially important when communicating complex ideas or data.

• Journalists and editors are used to working with materials that follow this style guide, and using it demonstrates that you understand the conventions of the industry.

• Finally, following AP Style helps to avoid confusion and errors. The style guide provides clear instruction on how to format and present information, which reduces the likelihood of mistakes or misinterpretation.

Let's take a look at a common AP Style question: When should I capitalize a job title?

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When it comes to capitalizing titles in AP Style, the rule is simple: capitalize the formal titles when they precede a name, but lowercase them when they follow a name or stand alone.

Take a close look at the quote attributed to an executive in this recent press release from Amazon.

“Prime members already get fast, free delivery on prescription medications, and RxPass is one more way to save with Amazon Pharmacy. Any customer who pays more than $10 a month for their eligible medications will see their prescription costs drop by 50% or more, plus they save time by skipping a trip to the pharmacy,” said John Love, vice president of Amazon Pharmacy. “We are excited to offer our customers surprisingly simple, low pricing on the eligible medications they need each month.”

As you can see, vice president is not capitalized in this case.

It gets a bit more complicated in certain cases, such as when a title formally notes a specific and branded division within a company, such as in this Amazon release.

“By harnessing the power of AWS, we’ll be able to move faster and give our customers what they value most—advertising solutions that provide the right combination of performance, audiences, and revenue growth,” said Aaron Lake, senior vice president of Platforms Engineering and chief information officer at Yahoo. “Running all of Yahoo Ad Tech on AWS provides us with a broad portfolio of world-class services that will allow us to help advertisers achieve the returns they want by providing them with precise audience targeting, while our ad publisher customers are able to scale and monetize their ad space.”

While the teams that these executives run are capitalized, don't let that distract you — their job titles still are not, per AP Style guidelines.

Finally, check out this press release announcing Andy Jassy's appointment to the role of CEO.

Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos will transition to role of Executive Chair in Q3, Andy Jassy to become Chief Executive Officer of Amazon at that time

You'll see that when the titles stand alone, they are capitalized.

So if you see a title that isn't capitalized, it probably isn't because the PR team is trying to subtly belittle that executive...it's much more likely to be adhering to AP Style.