Is the education system failing the marketing industry?
I am very interested to get views and input on this topic as having scraped through college and not attended university, I’m not exactly the most qualified individual to comment from an educational perspective.
What I can say is that I work with a lot of companies recruiting marketers as well as lots of graduates struggling to find work, and it does seem that in many instances there is quite a big disparity between what employers want and the skills graduates come out of university with.
I remember back to my schooldays, punching all my details into an Amstrad for it to tell me that I should pursue a career as an architect. Not being the most accurate draughtsman and perhaps not the most patient person, I didn’t pursue this career. As it happened, I found that I was good at talking myself into and out of situations, and as such ended up in sales and recruitment. I do sometimes find myself wondering what current process for this is – how do students come to the decision that marketing is for them? Do they really know about the marketing careers available, and what role is best suited to them? Is their degree going to best support them in this quest?
A few years back I had a candidate with amazing educational credentials – including a first class degree in marketing – who was hell-bent on a career in brand management and consumer marketing. The only problem was that he was very quiet and timid, and every consumer brand he went to wanted a gregarious, outgoing person who ‘smashes’ interviews. I felt sorry for the guy, as I wanted to help him get his dream job so much, but the brands he was keen on wanted somebody who blew them away in an interview, and their potential in terms of the actual work itself seemed to take a back seat to personality.
I found myself thinking, “where has the system failed him?”, as if he continues in this area of marketing where personality is so key, then he’s going to have issues for the rest of his career unless he changes the way he comes across, and for some people that’s not possible. Surely if he had known earlier on that to really succeed in that area of marketing, it’s often more about how you present yourself than your educational prowess, then perhaps he might have gone down a route that was more in tune with his personality. In the end he secured a role close to the sector he was looking at, but not what he really wanted, and off he went. This was one of the moments that I realised maybe people were not being given the right guidance to help them be as successful – or happy – as they can be, and this view has been further reinforced through many conversations over the years.
Most of the candidates with marketing degrees I speak to want to be a Brand Manager or a Social Media Manager or a Digital Marketing Manager, but what about every other type of marketing role, how about PPC, SEO, CRO, Affiliate, CRM, Email, Account Management, Strategy, Planning, Direct Mail, Product Management, Channel Management, Trade Marketing, Marketing Analytics, Digital Marketing Analytics and on and on? It seems to me students are leaving the education system with a very beige view of the marketing world, and are not really being sold the options available to them, and which options best suit their attributes. Or maybe they do have an idea, but perhaps the degrees available don’t give them the ability or understanding to specialise in some of the wider areas of marketing?
Linked to this, half of the Digital Marketing Managers, Social Media Managers and Brand Managers I speak to want to do something else. In-house people want to work agency side, agency candidates want in-house, and a lot of the time this is because they don’t really enjoy what they are doing. So is there something fundamentally wrong with guidance and education at grass root level? The reality is marketing is very successful and forward thinking in this country, and there clearly is a lot of businesses centralising marketing here, so we are definitely doing something right. But is this at the expense of a big swathe of people who become disengaged, uninspired and ultimately lost in the process?
I’ve only ever worked in marketing recruitment. Maybe if I worked in another sector I would see this was symptomatic of every industry, and if that is the case, it is a very sad state of affairs. But as it is I’ve only ever done marketing, so I can only say it’s happening here.
Now I would very much appreciate your points of view. Am I right? Am I wrong? Am I an idiot? Do you want a job? Please hit me up with your replies. Even if you just want a good old rant, there’s space for you in the comments section below.
Skilled communicator and networker, connecting conversations. Adapt & change to achieve results.
7 年I've had a wide range of jobs, across a number of industries. I think labels and capability based interviews have reduced the excitement and energy in job hunting. Now recruiters say they want something different, someone who sparkles but increasingly they seem to restrict it to job title searches, to tick boxes interviews ... and so what they get is someone who has learnt the stock phrases and is best able to regurgitate the job description, almost in the form of a comprehension exercise. It seems there's rarely any imagination shown to seeing how skills could be transferable or how a fresh pair of eyes could give a new perspective. Instead it all feels very clinical: match skills to job role, tick boxes, give stock answers and get job ... but how does that help anyone? It just means if you don't get the right job description early you could end up stuck in a career ... unless you want to drop down and change again ... but of course this doesn't refelect well either. It's a challenge that's for sure for everyone. How do recruiters learn to be brave and risk that someone different may be a good choice for the job despite not being a clone of whoever went before. And how do candidates shape their CVs to match a job role to allow them to change direction if they recognise a change is needed without having to return to GO again?
Content Strategist | Marketing Communications Strategy and Delivery | Trustee | School Governor
8 年Admittedly I've only been involved in recruiting for marketing roles a few times (I've had more experience in publishing), but I've found the biggest way education seems to be failing candidates is related to standards of written communication. It's not just my experience, either - colleagues and friends who have been responsible for finding marketing people have told me that even when recruiting for high-level posts in comms, most - if not all - CVs will come in with typos, grammar and spelling errors, poorly worded sentences, or even whole paragraphs which simply don't make sense. Of course, that's quite handy for me, as a copywriter with a broader marketing background, because it means I'm more likely to find opportunities as a bolt-on to a marketing team :) However, perhaps in this aspect - and in a broader sense, too - it's not really up to the education system to spoon-feed skills and knowledge (at least, the responsibility is not solely theirs). The candidates that forward-thinking companies want are those who take responsibility for their own learning, and have a growth mindset. This type of attitude means the candidate is better equipped to be effective no matter how the business develops or what challenges they encounter. The other point I'd make is that recruiters may be missing a trick looking for the 'rock star' who wows at interview. I've witnessed this kind of situation before; sometimes that sort of personality can give a wonderful first impression... but then when it comes to a task that can't be achieved through their interpersonal brilliance, their underlying skills may not stack up (they may, of course - it's just that it can't be assumed). Just to go back to my earlier example of written communication, if the recruitment process doesn't include a robust evaluation of actual unaided writing skill (perhaps example of previous work are taken as sufficient evidence), it's far more likely that a candidate won't be able to do the job that's required. I've seen this happen in both publishing and marketing sectors, on numerous occasions.
Project Manager | Delivering Corporate Transformation and Change Projects | PRINCE2? Practitioner | Change Agent | Local Government
8 年Interesting, Joby Read. I am a recent International Business graduate and for us Marketing were optional modules. We could only choose one or two elective modules from a list of 20 or so including Marketing. I was lucky to do a study abroad in France and take on extra modules like Retail and Service Marketing separately. We had to shoot an ad video for the Service course as our assessment and I really enjoyed it. I also like to work in multicultural situations. So, I decided I want a career in International Marketing that includes Account Management, PR, Events and Marketing. It wasn't the course that helped me realise these specifics, but months of unsuccessful job hunting. My personal experience showed that most companies don't care what degree you did, but only about experience. It gets worse when even the very entry level positions ask for months of work experience. Universities let students do placement year and even those placements asks for experience. People with any kind of degrees like Science can get into business jobs with experience, but not a Business graduate with no experience. Many students don't know what career they want even after graduation & there is no option to test out a career. (*Rant ends*)
Strategic Marketing | Expert in Marketing Communications | Event Management | Stakeholder Management | International Negotiating Skills | Content Creator | Relationship Management | Business Development
8 年I studied with the CIM and was lucky enough to work in marketing while I was studying. In my opinion it is by far the best way - one of my tutors at the Cambridge Marketing Institute even asked how we arrived to be studying for our post grad - the easy way or the hard way. The easy way was a degree, and the hard way was via on the job learning with CIM.
Research | ScriptRunner | Adaptavist | Live in the future. Build what's missing.
8 年City & Guilds are correct: what's "broken" is the under-appreciation of relevant, meaningful and fit-for-purpose professional and vocational qualifications. For example, many recruiters may not fully understand the benefits of a level 6 diploma from the Chartered Institute of Marketing, which might in some cases be more valuable to them than a traditional degree. (https://www.gov.uk/what-different-qualification-levels-mean/list-of-qualification-levels ) CIM qualifications are designed for the workplace, specifically to deal with real-life challenges, so a task might include writing a strategic marketing plan based on the unique challenges of your current organisation. I'm a career changer from the music industry, so it wouldn't have even occurred to me to take a marketing degree when I was in school. My interest is in product development, so I took the Driving Innovation module from CIM and immediately applied it to develop a product idea for my organisation, then fitted it together with the other modules to gain the full qualification, so it was a win for me and for my employer. Many people also neglect the wealth of lifelong learning opportunities available to them. For example, you can take the essential components of the first year of a Wharton MBA online inexpensively through Coursera, and then mix it up with a strategy course from LMU Munich and an ethics course from the Indian School of Business, giving you a world-class education and international perspective from the comfort of your living room. Some of these short online course providers offer "nanodegrees" and other microcredentials in specific areas such as app creation, developed directly in partnership with employers, who then offer jobs to the top-performing students. Another emerging credential type is digital badges, which are informal awards for specific "bits" of learning. Those might be particularly useful for career changers. That's not to say that the traditional model of education is going anywhere, but that the more familiar recruiters and candidates make themselves of the range of options out there, the more likely they are to find something uniquely suited to their individual needs.