You’re probably enjoying your time in college studying marketing, but this time will have to end inevitably. After all the studying, you’ll have to go out and enter the job market as an (almost) fully-fledged professional.
Of course, you surely won’t know everything required on the job before actually applying for it, successfully completing the interview process, and learning the needed information on the fly. It’s the most common pathway for marketing graduates because no matter the quality of education in any particular college, they can’t prepare you for the outside job market.
Every company has its own established work processes, standards, technology stack, and so on. But, if you want to gain an advantage over your classmates in the future, then you want to think about the following things:
1. Numbers Have to Become Your Best Friend
There are so many marketing students fooling themselves into thinking that they don’t need mathematics at all. Any marketer who can’t work with numbers isn’t that valuable to current companies – that’s just the truth.
Marketers need mathematics and, specifically, statistics. The analysis is a big part of the “working as a marketer” equation, and you can’t perform thoughtful and insightful analysis without looking at any statistical figures and pulling out relevant data from it.
2. Don’t Let Marketing Clichés Interfere With Your Work
Whether your professors praise the “ideal” marketing concepts of the 4 main P’s or C’s of marketing or not doesn’t really matter; real life isn’t as neat and beautiful as these concepts. In actuality, the company you will be working for will always be meeting challenges in the form of small budgets, tight deadlines, not enough statistical data, and so on.
In real situations, these beautiful constructs aren’t actually applicable most of the time. Often, you’ll have to make compromises when it comes to promoting a specific brand or product. So, every marketing task is situational, and you can’t rely on clichés to get you through the tasks.
3. No Amount of Case Studies Will Substitute Real-Life Experience
All the scenarios played out in the classroom, the group project assignments, individual homework, and case studies are not work experience – that’s the bottom line. It’s not a situation where a real-life task is given to you, and you have complete it well enough within budget, existing deadlines.
This is why marketing students often choose to use an essay writer service to delegate their boring and tedious tasks to someone else while they go for impressive internships. So, unless you have real-life projects that have already brought in some results (even the smallest ones), the employers will look at you as if you have no experience whatsoever.
4. Internships Can Vary a Lot
Speaking of the internships – not all internships were made equal. It’s great if you’ve had an internship over the summer, but have you done there anything useful and/or marketing-related? The thing is that not only have you had a summer internship, almost every one of your classmates had one, so it’s not something impressive.
What’s important is what tasks you’ve performed during that internship. If all you’ve been doing is just answering emails and buying coffee during lunchtime, then the employer won’t find your application attractive at all. However, if you’ve had a truly marketing experience, performing relevant tasks and not crumbling under pressure – then you’ve got yourself a great entry on the resume.
5. Participation in Student Organizations Isn’t Something Extraordinary
Yes, you might’ve liked that experience incredibly, and you’ve put your heart and soul into the development of your little student group. Nonetheless, it doesn’t give you the skills and professional versatility as you might think it does. Employers don’t value this experience at all.
In fact, some employers deny certain applications when they see that a marketing graduate was overly involved in a particular student organization. Such an experience only shows that you’ve found something you’re comfortable in and decided to stop your personal development.
6. Make a Good Resume Finally
In today’s world, where many things rely on aesthetics and elegant design, putting no effort into your resume is an incredibly reckless decision. Standard resumes might be the answer for non-creative people that apply for common office jobs, but you’re a marketer. You have to show what you’re capable of, starting even with your resume.
There’s no need to be a Photoshop expert for a resume; even Microsoft Word has enough editing tools. Just google what you want to include in the resume and give it a nice, minimalistic, elegant look – that’s it. Compiling information and creating the design will take you at most two separate evenings, not much.
You’ve Got to Try to Excel
Even if you don’t have relevant marketing internships or have a just “ok” resume, you can still probably find a marketing job. However, if you want to outshine others in this field, you have to start doing it early.
