Career Planning in Marketing

Transcription

1 APPENDIX C Career Planning in Marketing WHEN YOU FINISH THIS APPENDIX, YOU SHOULD 1. Know that there is a job or a career for you in marketing. 2. Know that marketing jobs can be rewarding, pay well, and offer opportunities for growth. 3. Understand the difference between peopleoriented and thing-oriented jobs. 4. Know some ways to use the Internet to help with career planning.

2 One of the hardest decisions facing most college students is the choice of a career. Of course, you are the best judge of your own objectives, interests, and abilities. Only you can decide what career you should pursue. However, you owe it to yourself to at least consider the possibility of a career in marketing. THERE S A PLACE IN MARKETING FOR YOU We re happy to tell you that many opportunities are available in marketing. There s a place in marketing for everyone, from a service provider in a fast-food restaurant to a vice president of marketing in a large company such as Microsoft or Procter & Gamble. The opportunities range widely, so it will help to be more specific. In the following pages, we ll discuss (1) the typical pay for different marketing jobs, (2) setting your own objectives and evaluating your interests and abilities, and (3) the kinds of jobs available in marketing. We ll also provide some ideas about how to use the Internet to get more information and perhaps even to apply for a job or post your own information; this material is in the special box with the title Getting Wired for a Career in Marketing. THERE ARE MANY MARKETING JOBS, AND THEY CAN PAY WELL There are many interesting and challenging jobs for those with marketing training. You may not know it, but the majority of graduating college students take their initial job in a sales, marketing, or customer service position regardless of their stated major. So you ll have a head start because you ve been studying marketing, and companies are always looking for people who already have skills in place. In terms of upward mobility, more CEOs have come from the sales and marketing side than all other fields combined. The sky is the limit for those who enter the sales and marketing profession prepared for the future! Further, marketing jobs open to college-level students do pay well. At the time this went to press, marketing undergraduates were being offered starting salaries around $30,000, with a range from about $16,000 to $49,000 a year. Those with an MBA averaged about $63,000. Starting salaries can vary considerably, depending on your background, experience, and location. 1 Starting salaries in marketing compare favourably with many other fields. They are lower than those in such fields as computer science and electrical engineering where college graduates are currently in demand. But there is even better opportunity for personal growth, variety, and income in many marketing positions. The American Almanac of Jobs and Salaries ranks the median income of marketers number 10 in a list of 125 professions. Marketing also supplies about 50 percent of the people who achieve senior management ranks. How far and fast your career and income rise above the starting level, however, depends on many factors, including your willingness to work, how well you get along with people, and your individual abilities. But most of all, it depends on getting results individually and through other people. And this is where many marketing jobs offer the newcomer great opportunities. It is possible to show initiative, ability, creativity, and judgment in marketing jobs. And some young people move up very rapidly in marketing. Some even end up at the top in large companies or as owners of their own businesses. 1 Starting salary figures taken from: Job Futures Canada (2006) at Retrieved May 27, MBA salary figure calculated from Payscale, Masters of Business Administration (MBA) Canada at Retrieved May 27, C-2

3 Exhibit C-1 Organizing Your Own Personal Marketing Strategy Planning Personal analysis Set broad long-run objectives Evaluate personal strengths and weaknesses Set preliminary timetables Environment analysis Identify current opportunities Examine trends which may affect opportunities Evaluate business practices Marketing is often the route to the top Develop objectives Long-run Short-run Develop your marketing plan Identify likely opportunities Plan your product Plan your promotion Implement your marketing plan Marketing is where the action is! In the final analysis, a firm s success or failure depends on the effectiveness of its marketing program. This doesn t mean the other functional areas aren t important. It merely reflects the fact that a firm won t have much need for accountants, finance people, production managers, and so on if it can t successfully meet customers needs and sell its products. Because marketing is so vital to a firm s survival, many companies look for people with training and experience in marketing when filling key executive positions. In general, chief executive officers for the nation s largest corporations are more likely to have backgrounds in marketing and distribution than in other fields such as production, finance, and engineering. Appendix C Career Planning in Marketing C-3 DEVELOP YOUR OWN PERSONAL MARKETING STRATEGY Now that you know there are many opportunities in marketing, your problem is matching the opportunities to your own personal objectives and strengths. Basically the problem is a marketing problem: developing a marketing strategy to sell a product yourself to potential employers. Just as in planning strategies for products, developing your own strategy takes careful thought. Exhibit C-1 shows how you can organize your own strategy planning. This exhibit shows that you should evaluate yourself first a personal analysis and then analyze the environment for opportunities. This will help you sharpen your own long- and short-run objectives, which will lead to developing a strategy. Finally, you should start implementing your own personal marketing strategy. These ideas are explained more fully below. CONDUCT YOUR OWN PERSONAL ANALYSIS You are the Product you are going to include in your own marketing plan. So first you have to decide what your long-run objectives are what you want to do, how hard you want to work, and how quickly you want to reach your objectives.

4 Be honest with yourself or you will eventually face frustration. Evaluate your own personal strengths and weaknesses and decide what factors may become the key to your success. Finally, as part of your personal analysis, set some preliminary timetables to guide your strategy planning and implementation efforts. Let s spell this out in detail. Set broad long-run objectives Evaluate personal strengths and weaknesses Are you peopleoriented or thing-oriented? Strategy planning requires much trial-and-error decision making. But at the very beginning, you should make some tentative decisions about your own objectives what you want out of a job and out of life. At the very least, you should decide whether you are just looking for a job or whether you want to build a career. Beyond this, do you want the position to be personally satisfying or is the financial return enough? And just how much financial return do you need? Some people work only to support themselves (and their families) and their leisure-time activities. These people try to find job opportunities that provide adequate financial returns but aren t too demanding of their time or effort. Other people look first for satisfaction in their job and they seek opportunities for career advancement. Financial rewards may be important too, but these are used mainly as measures of success. In the extreme, the career-oriented individual may be willing to sacrifice a lot, including leisure and social activities, to achieve success in a career. Once you ve tentatively decided these matters, then you can get more serious about whether you should seek a job or a career in marketing. If you decide to pursue a career, you should set your broad long-run objectives to achieve it. For example, one long-run objective might be to pursue a career in marketing management (or marketing research). This might require more academic training than you planned, as well as a different kind of training. If your objective is to get a job that pays well, on the other hand, then this calls for a different kind of training and different kinds of job experiences before completing your academic work. What kind of a job is right for you? Because of the great variety of marketing jobs, it s hard to generalize about what aptitudes you should have to pursue a career in marketing. Different jobs attract people with various interests and abilities. We ll give you some guidelines about what kinds of interests and abilities marketers should have. However, if you re completely lost about your own interests and abilities, see your campus career counsellor and take some vocational aptitude and interest tests. These tests will help you to compare yourself with people who are now working in various career positions. They will not tell you what you should do, but they can help, especially in eliminating possibilities you are less interested in or less able to do well in. One useful approach is to decide whether you are basically people-oriented or thing-oriented. This is a very important decision. A people-oriented person might be very unhappy in an inventory management job, for example, whereas a thingoriented person might be miserable in a personal selling or retail management job that involves a lot of customer contact. Marketing has both people-oriented and thing-oriented jobs. People-oriented jobs are primarily in the promotion area where company representatives must make contact with potential customers. This may be direct personal selling or customer service activities for example, in technical service or installation and repair. Thing-oriented jobs focus more on creative activities and analyzing data as in advertising and marketing research or on organizing and scheduling work as in operating warehouses, transportation agencies, or the back-end of retailers. People-oriented jobs tend to pay more, in part because such jobs are more likely to affect sales, the lifeblood of any business. Thing-oriented jobs, on the other hand, are often seen as cost generators rather than sales generators. Taking a big view of C-4

5 Marketing Case Report GETTING WIRED FOR A CAREER IN MARKETING The Internet is a great resource at every stage of career planning and job hunting. It can help you learn: how to do a self-assessment, the outlook for different industries and jobs, what firms have jobs open, how to improve a résumé and post it online for free, and just about anything else you can imagine. Here we ll highlight just a few ideas and Web sites that can help you get started. However, if you start with some of these suggestions, each Web site you visit will provide links to other relevant sites that will give you new ideas to think about. One good place to start is at Yahoo ( Select Yahoo HotJobs. Take a look at all of the information and services that are available when you select the Career Tools link. For example, you can browse résumé tools and salary information, look at job listings, and much more. Also check out similar information at You might also go to There are job listings, job-hunting advice, career articles from The Wall Street Journal, and more. You can create and post a résumé here as well. Professional associations are another great resource. For example, the American Marketing Association Web site is at and the Sales and Marketing Executives International Web site is at The Council of Logistics Management Web site is at Another potentially useful Web site address is workopolis.campus.com. It has links for posting a résumé, information on writing cover letters and getting references, and ideas about how to find a company with job openings. To get a sample of what s possible in tracking down jobs, visit the Web site at and experiment with its search engine, which lets you look at what s available by province. For example, you might want to search through job listings that mention terms such as entry level, marketing, advertising, and sales. This should get you started. Remember, however, that in Chapter 8 we gave addresses for a number of Web sites with search engines. You can use one of them to help find more detail on any topic that interests you. For example, you might go to and do a search on terms such as marketing jobs, salary surveys, post a résumé, or entry-level position. the whole company s operations, the thing-oriented jobs are certainly necessary but without sales, no one is needed to do them. Thing-oriented jobs are usually done at a company s facilities. Further, especially in lower-level jobs, the amount of work to be done and even the nature of the work may be spelled out quite clearly. The time it takes to design questionnaires and tabulate results, for example, can be estimated with reasonable accuracy. Similarly, running a warehouse, analyzing inventory reports, scheduling outgoing shipments, and so on are more like production operations. It s fairly easy to measure an employee s effectiveness and productivity in a thing-oriented job. At the least, time spent can be used to measure an employee s contribution. A sales rep, on the other hand, might spend all weekend thinking and planning how to make a half-hour sales presentation on Monday. For what should the sales rep be compensated the half-hour presentation, all of the planning and thinking that went into it, or the results? Typically, sales reps are rewarded for results and this helps account for the sometimes extremely high salaries paid to effective order getters. At the same time, some people-oriented jobs can be routinized and are lower paid. For example, salespeople in some retail stores are paid at or near the minimum wage. s needed for both kinds of jobs Here we have oversimplified deliberately to emphasize the differences among types of jobs. Actually, of course, there are many variations between the two extremes. Some sales reps must do a great deal of analytical work before they make a presentation. Similarly, some marketing researchers must be extremely people- C-5

6 sensitive to get potential customers to reveal their true feelings. But the division is still useful because it focuses on the primary emphasis in different kinds of jobs. s are needed for the people in both kinds of jobs. Managing others requires a blend of both people and analytical skills but people skills may be the more important of the two. Therefore, people-oriented individuals are often promoted into managerial positions more quickly. What will differentiate your Product? Set some timetables After deciding whether you re generally people-oriented or thing-oriented, you re ready for the next step trying to identify your specific strengths (to be built on) and weaknesses (to be avoided or remedied). It is important to be as specific as possible so you can develop a better marketing plan. For example, if you decide you are more people-oriented, are you more skilled in verbal or written communication? Or if you are more thing-oriented, what specific analytical or technical skills do you have? Are you good at working with numbers, using a computer, solving complex problems, or coming to the root of a problem? Other possible strengths include past experience (career-related or otherwise), academic performance, an outgoing personality, enthusiasm, drive, motivation, and so on. It is important to see that your plan should build on your strengths. An employer will be hiring you to do something so promote yourself as someone who is able to do something well. In other words, find your competitive advantage in your unique strengths and then communicate these unique things about you and what you can do. Give an employer a reason to pick you over other candidates by showing that you ll add superior value to the company. While trying to identify strengths, you also must realize that you may have some important weaknesses, depending on your objectives. If you are seeking a career that requires technical skills, for example, then you need to get those skills. Or if you are seeking a career that requires independence and self-confidence, then you should try to develop those characteristics in yourself or change your objectives. At this point in your strategy planning process, set some timetables to organize your thinking and the rest of your planning. You need to make some decisions at this point to be sure you see where you re going. You might simply focus on getting your first job, or you might decide to work on two marketing plans: (1) a short-run plan to get your first job and (2) a longer-run plan perhaps a five-year plan to show how you re going to accomplish your long-run objectives. People who are basically job-oriented may get away with only a short-run plan, just drifting from one opportunity to another as their own objectives and opportunities change. But those interested in careers need a longer-run plan. Otherwise, they may find themselves pursuing attractive first-job opportunities that satisfy short-run objectives but quickly leave them frustrated when they realize that they can t achieve their long-run objectives without additional training or other experiences that require starting over again on a new career path. ENVIRONMENT ANALYSIS Strategy planning is a matching process. For your own strategy planning, this means matching yourself to career opportunities. So let s look at opportunities available in the marketing environment. (The same approach applies, of course, in the whole business area.) Exhibit C-2 shows some of the possibilities and salary ranges. Keep in mind that the salary ranges in Exhibit C-2 are rough estimates. Salaries for a particular job often vary depending on a variety of factors, including company size, industry, and geographic area. People in some firms also get big bonuses that are not counted in salary. In recent years, Advertising Age has been publishing an C-6

7 Exhibit C-2 Some Career Paths and Salary Ranges Materials Management Sales Marketing Advertising Public Relations Human Resources CFO $120 $196,000 Top Sales Exeutive $116 $161,000 Top Accounting Executive $96 $123,000 Regional Accounting $63 $80,000 Accountant III $53 $74,000 Accountant II $42 $54,000 Materials Management Executive $94 $123,000 Materials Director $71 $91,000 Purchasing $65 $82,000 Materials $64 $82,000 Purchasing Agent $52 $68,000 Buyer II $41 $52,000 Sales $65 $99,000 District Sales $61 $82,000 Senior Sales Representative $54 $73,000 Sales Representative $40 $55,000 Top Marketing Executive $109 $148,000 Sales and Marketing Director $80-$99,000 Market Research $59 $88,000 Market Research Analyst II $55 $61,000 Mechandiser $30 $38,000 Top Public Relations Executive $100 $160,000 Product/Brand $61 $84,000 Advertising $58 $90,000 Graphic Design Specialist $42 $51,000 Desktop Publishing Operator $35 $44,000 Public Relations Director $88 $123,000 Public Relations $62 $84,000 Technical Writer III $28 $36,000 Technical Writer II $28 $36,000 Top HR Executive $105 $142,000 HR Director $96 $124,000 HR $66 $89,000 HR Generalist II $41 $54,000 HR Assistant $34 $41,000 Appendix C Career Planning in Marketing C-7 Source: Data from (2006), Monster Salary Centre. Retrieved May 27, 2006, from annual survey of salary levels for different marketing and advertising jobs, with breakdowns by company size and other factors. Many trade associations, across a variety of different industries, also publish surveys. If you use the Internet search engine at and do a search on salary survey, you will find that there are hundreds of such surveys available on the Internet for a number of different industries. There are many sites such as and that provide salary ranges for specific jobs. Identifying current opportunities in marketing Because of the wide range of opportunities in marketing, it s helpful to narrow your possibilities. After deciding on your own objectives, strengths, and weaknesses, think about where in the marketing system you might like to work. Would you like to work for manufacturers, or wholesalers, or retailers? Or does it really matter? Do you want to be involved with consumer products or business products? By analyzing your feelings about these possibilities, you can begin to zero in on the kind of job and the functional area that might interest you most.

8 Your long-run objectives should clearly state what you want to do and what you will do for potential employers. DEVELOP OBJECTIVES Develop long-run objectives Develop short-run objectives Once you ve done a personal analysis and environment analysis identifying your personal interests, your strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities in the environment define your short-run and long-run objectives more specifically. Your long-run objectives should clearly state what you want to do and what you will do for potential employers. You might be as specific as indicating the exact career area you want to pursue over the next 5 to 10 years. For example, your longrun objective might be to apply a set of marketing research and marketing management tools to the food manufacturing industry, with the objective of becoming director of marketing research in a small food manufacturing company. Your long-run objectives should be realistic and attainable. They should be objectives you have thought about and for which you think you have the necessary skills (or the capabilities to develop those skills) as well as the motivation to reach the objectives. To achieve your long-run objective(s), you should develop one or more short-run objectives. These should spell out what is needed to reach your long-run objective(s). For example, you might need to develop a variety of marketing research skills and marketing management skills because both are needed to reach the longer-run objective. Or you might need an entry-level position in marketing research for a large food manufacturer to gain experience and background. An even shorter-run objective might be to take the academic courses that are necessary to get that desired entry-level job. In this example, you would probably need a minimum of an undergraduate degree in marketing, with an emphasis on marketing research. (Note that, given the longer-run objective of managerial responsibility, a business degree would probably be better than a degree in statistics or psychology.) DEVELOPING YOUR MARKETING PLAN Now that you ve developed your objectives, move on to developing your own personal marketing plan. This means zeroing in on likely opportunities and developing a specific marketing strategy for these opportunities. Let s talk about that now. C-8

9 Identify likely opportunities Planning your Product An important step in strategy planning is identifying potentially attractive opportunities. Depending on where you are in your academic training, this can vary all the way from preliminary exploration to making detailed lists of companies that offer the kinds of jobs that interest you. If you re just getting started, talk to your school s career counsellors and placement officers about the kinds of jobs being offered to your school s graduates. Your marketing instructors can help you be realistic about ways you can match your training, abilities, and interests to job opportunities. Also, it helps to read business publications such as Canadian Business, Marketing Strategy, BusinessWeek, and Advertising Age. If you are interested in opportunities in a particular industry, check at your library or on the Internet to see if there are trade publications or Web sites that can bring you up to speed on the marketing issues in that area. Your library or college may also have an online service to make it easier to search for articles about specific companies or industries. And many companies have their own Web sites that can be a very useful source of information. Don t overlook the business sections of your local newspapers to keep in touch with marketing developments in your area. And take advantage of any opportunity to talk with marketers directly. Ask them what they re doing and what satisfactions they find in their jobs. Also, if your college has a marketing club, join it and participate actively in the club s programs. It will help you meet marketers and students with serious interest in the field. Some may have had interesting job experiences and can provide you with leads on part-time jobs or exciting career opportunities. If you re far along in your present academic training, list companies that you know something about or are willing to investigate, trying to match your skills and interests with possible opportunities. Narrow your list to a few companies you might like to work for. If you have trouble narrowing down to specific companies, make a list of your personal interest areas sports, travel, reading, music, or whatever. Think about the companies that compete in markets related to these interests. Often your own knowledge about these areas and interest in them can give you a competitive advantage in getting a job. This helps you focus on companies that serve needs you think are important or interesting. A related approach is to do a search on the Internet for Web sites related to your areas of interest. Web sites often display ads or links to firms that are involved in that specific interest area. Further, many companies post job openings on their own Web sites or at Web sites that specialize in promoting job searches by many companies. Then do some research on these companies. Find out how they are organized, their product lines, and their overall strategies. Try to get clear job descriptions for the kinds of positions you re seeking. Match these job descriptions against your understanding of these jobs and your objectives. Jobs with similar titles may offer very different opportunities. By researching job positions and companies in depth, you should begin to have a feel for where you would be comfortable as an employee. This will help you narrow your target market of possible employers to perhaps five firms. For example, you may decide that your target market for an entry-level position consists of large corporations with (1) in-depth training programs, (2) a wide product line, and (3) a wide variety of marketing jobs that will enable you to get a range of experiences and responsibilities within the same company. Just like any strategy planner, you must decide what Product features are necessary to appeal to your target market. Identify which credentials are mandatory and which are optional. For example, is your present academic program enough, or will you need more training? Also, identify what technical skills are needed, such as computer programming or accounting. Further, are there any business experiences or extracurricular activities that might help make your Product more attractive to Appendix C Career Planning in Marketing C-9

10 employers? This might involve active participation in college organizations or work experience, either on the job or in internships. Planning your Promotion Once you identify target companies and develop a Product you hope will be attractive to them, you have to tell these potential customers about your Product. You can write directly to prospective employers, sending a carefully developed résumé that reflects your strategy planning. Or you can visit them in person (with your résumé). Many universities run well-organized interviewing services. Seek their advice early in your strategy planning effort. IMPLEMENTING YOUR MARKETING PLAN When you complete your personal marketing plan, you have to implement it, starting with working to accomplish your short-run objectives. If, as part of your plan, you decide that you need specific outside experience, then arrange to get it. This may mean taking a low-paying job or even volunteering to work in political organizations or volunteer organizations where you can get that kind of experience. If you decide that you need skills you can learn in academic courses, plan to take these courses. Similarly, if you don t have a good understanding of your opportunities, then learn as much as you can about possible jobs by talking to professors, taking advanced courses, and talking to businesspeople. Of course, trends and opportunities can change so continue to read business publications, talk with professionals in your areas of interest, and be sure that the planning you ve done still makes sense. Strategy planning must adapt to the environment. If the environment changes or your personal objectives change, you have to develop a new plan. This is an ongoing process and you may never be completely satisfied with your strategy planning. But even trying will make you look much more impressive when you begin your job interviews. Remember, while all employers would like to hire a Superman or a Wonder Woman, they are also impressed with candidates who know what they want to do and are looking for a place where they can fit in and make a contribution. So planning a personal strategy and implementing it almost guarantee you ll do a better job of career planning, and this will help ensure that you reach your own objectives, whatever they are. Whether or not you decide to pursue a marketing career, the authors wish you the best of luck in your search for a challenging and rewarding career, wherever your interests and abilities may take you. C-10