Marketing is a popular degree choice for students entering higher education, and with the demand for jobs in this sector so widespread and prevalent, it’s commonly sought after and valued by employers too.
Of course, it can feel difficult to commit to any one course of study if you’re not entirely sure what you want to do with your life once you’ve graduated. Luckily, a marketing degree will equip you with plenty of transferable skills that allow you to work in a whole range of industries across the globe. With such valuable skills, you’re likely to find that you can work from anywhere you want, making a marketing degree perfect for those hoping to earn a living while also getting out there and experiencing the world.
Let’s take a look at some of the useful, transferable skills you will acquire if you choose to study a marketing degree.
Creativity
Marketing is all about using creative expression to communicate with your target audience and ultimately sell your service or product. So, a large part of your degree is likely to be spent creating engaging advertising materials to be distributed, both digitally – such as through social media, email, and web domains – as well as via more traditional methods, such as billboards and advertising cards. You may need to work as a team to generate new creative ideas, whether that be through written, audio or visual marketing collateral.
The creative skills that you develop while studying marketing have a solid foundation in business, making them useful to a number of roles in trade and commerce. Besides this, copywriting, social media management, brand management and content creation are all closely linked careers that will require some knowledge of creative writing or visual design.
Communication
If you choose to specialize in marketing, you’ll need to have great interpersonal skills. After all, if you do opt to pursue a marketing career, you’ll be communicating not only with your audience and customers, but also your clients and their stakeholders, as well as your own marketing team day-to-day.
Through studying for your degree, you’ll have lots of opportunities to present your work back to your peers, allowing you to develop your interpersonal and communication skills. You’ll likely spend plenty of time learning how to pitch marketing campaigns to prospective clients, and may even be offered the chance to take part in a work placement, which many universities offer as part of their course. This is a wonderful way to further expand on your acquired skills, as well as to begin to forge professional relationships in the workplace.
Ultimately, whether you choose to pursue a career in marketing or not post graduation, there are few jobs that don’t rely on some form of communication, whether with colleagues, clients or customers. As well as roles related to business and marketing, such communication skills can be hugely beneficial and applicable to careers in education, human resources, sales and counseling.
Critical and analytical thinking
Marketing involves plenty of critical thinking and strategic planning in order to create materials that will successfully reach and impact the intended audience. Most marketing degrees will teach you how to analyze data in order to get an idea for the current market and potential consumers, which will then allow you to develop effective marketing strategies and deliver powerful campaigns that achieve measurable results. You’re likely to find that this process involves plenty of trial and error and problem solving, encouraging you to plan ahead and see problems ahead of time, as well as develop more effective solutions.
Critical and analytical skills are widely sought after in a range of roles, both related to marketing and in a variety of other industries. While they may require further study or training, some careers in which critical and analytical thinking are highly valued are accounting, medicine, engineering and economics.
Technological skills
There’s always a technological aspect to delivering any kind of marketing collateral. So, as part of your marketing degree, you’re likely to become very familiar with the vast array of programs relied on by industry professionals in order to deliver their campaigns. These will be largely digitally based – for example, automation softwares that allow you to streamline lead generation, measure analytics, or simply deliver email and social media collateral and campaigns at the click of a button.
Of course, much of the software that you use will be tailored to fit the needs of marketing professionals. However, the technological skills and awareness that you develop will be useful in most industries, especially with the vast majority now relying on digital platforms and softwares to streamline their workload.
Why choose to study marketing?
By opting to study marketing at university level, you’ll be gaining plenty of valuable, transferable skills that will look great on your graduate resume and make you a highly favorable candidate for employers.
There are plenty of routes to choose from should you decide that you want to explore a career in marketing, from public relations and advertising, to media buying, social media management and copywriting. You could even become an SEO specialist, or a market researcher. For some, the dream is to work freelance and live a nomadic lifestyle, providing marketing services from anywhere and everywhere in the world – this is made entirely possible with the skills acquired through a marketing degree. Ultimately, the career opportunities that fall under the marketing umbrella are endless, so should you decide after your studies that marketing is the career for you, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.
Of course, a marketing degree also provides a solid foundation for a range of other career routes that you may want to pursue. Whether you choose to take on a graduate degree or perhaps on-the-job training that will qualify you for an alternative profession, you can rest assured that these useful skills gained through your studies in marketing will only aid you in your search for the career that’s right for you.
