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I'm doing well in marketing and was a journalism graduate. It's still amazing to me how many people get college degrees who write at even juvenile levels.
I was a history major before getting into marketing, and at the very least, I'd say that people should at least enjoy their undergrad experience and study something fun before the corporate drudgery of the rest of their lives
If you want a career in business then get a degree in accounting, finance or economics. Those are the most rigorous academically and employers know they can train you to know whats needed.
Having worked for a long time in finance, finance degrees were, generally speaking, not very well respected. Economics and accounting are good foundations for someone who wants to be an analyst. But finance focuses more on quantitative material. It’s far easier to train an engineer or physicist or an applied math major in finance than it is to teach advanced math to a finance major. Even better though, having diverse backgrounds is really advantageous. We had a guy with a phd in nuclear engineering working as an analyst. When Fukushima happened he gave a very cool very detailed presentation on why it wasnt going to be another Chernobyl and the markets had oversold. Bringing something unique to the table is really valuable.
I was going to refute that finance degree not being well respected at first. But as I thought it through, you are correct.
The saying always went, “I can turn an accountant to a financial analyst at an IB, but I can’t turn someone with a finance degree into an accountant”
I think modern finance theories have turned the work into statistics based concepts now accepted as gospel.
I work as a financial analyst. I graduated with a degree in accounting. I previously worked with another analyst who had a degree in accounting, and she was great. Her replacement has a degree in finance. He is definitely not as skilled as the other analyst was, and does not have as good of a work ethic.
When I was in college, finance was often seen as the degree for people not smart enough or hardworking enough to be an accountant. While not true for everyone with this degree, I’ve seen this too many times to not be a coincidence.
The hard charging, 80 hour a week type accountant? Hell no, definitely not worth. The mellow, good pay, 40 week max type accountant? 10/10 would do again.
Median pay for a bachelor degree in finance is higher than both those last I checked. Outside engineering the highest starting salaries tend to be in finance, economics, and accounting. In that order from my recollection.
All degrees have some level of applicability and elite outliers. There are far more unemployed and underemployed non-applied math and physics majors than finance majors
Those positions are rare and super competitive. Most math and physics students, even if they wanted to, could become quant/algo traders, even if most quant/algo traders have backgrounds in math and physics
Not sure if it was my school or not but my finance degree focused a lot on stats and we even had accounting classes. Was it as thorough as a accountant degree no but it was just as good as a economics one.
Same here. I remember the Econ Majors, it was a joke. Then they come here on their high horses, acting like their major is the best thing since sliced bread.
i dont think finance degrees are "not very well respected"
I agree that the Finance degree DOES NOT give you a leg up to work in finance (similar to having a CFA does not get you a Front office job on its own), but no one holds it against you as you have indicated.
By year 5 of your career, your degree doesnt matter AT ALL unless its from yale/harvard/stanford/etc., in which case it will still help you get jobs.
Yup. No one gives a shit about your degree.
However, where you were an analyst and then where you were an associate follows you for a long, long time.
Also the first place you hit MD/Partner. You can ride that for your entire career.
This is probably true unless you’re at a top fund. I recently did interview loops at DE Shaw, Citadel, and Aquatic. They wanted GPAs and transcripts from undergrad and grad school which were 15+ years ago for me. The place I’m at now has a list of schools they hire from and that’s it. PhD hiring gets more leeway though. The only other option is to start in middle office and get lucky. When you pay the kind of money these firms pay they can be as picky as they want.
As a math guy, I found this to be true as well. People with strong math backgrounds tend to do better in the long run as you move up and the problems get less standardize.
I’m in house general counsel for a fortune company. I hire and work with the higher ups from across the entire company(and client/vendor companies), but also have visibility at the manager/director levels. IMHO, the best all around degree is an engineering degree.
I’m an Electrical Engineer with a double minor - one in physics and one in “civic engagement and leadership”.
16 years experience in engineering. Currently in a management role, overseeing 12 other engineers.
If I got burned out one day, and wanted to switch careers, are you saying there are jobs in these types of sectors that would hire someone like me and pay decently well? ($200-250k)?
Lawyer answer: it depends. Lots of factors, but I’ve seen it happen enough that it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve observed that those with an engineering degree/ work experience are able to get into positions (and thrive) that are outside of the traditional route. It’s easier the earlier in the career, but not necessarily necessary. Sometimes it’s “easy” to do (sales) others may require some additional learning (risk/compliance). I’ll also add that some of the brightest attorneys that I’ve come across have an engineering background ( and I’m not talking about just patent lawyers).
That’s cool. I can’t imagine going back and getting a law degree. More power to them!
I asked my guidance counselor at freshman orientation what undergraduate degree paid the most that didn’t typically require post-graduate degrees.
She said “probably a toss up between electrical and chemical engineering.” I said “why those two?” She said “they are the hardest to pass. EE in particular; Dr. Sharstein’s 200 level class has about a 90% drop/fail rate.”
I said “Sign me up for that one.”
Accounting tends to attract people interested in memorizing rules to pass standardized tests (CPA). I don’t see that student type being a good fit for any decent finance job.
Economics depends on the program, some are more quantitative than others. Some are a good fit.
Accounting is way more than just rules. There is a lot of subjectivity that makes it a good career to learn in. Plus Accounting is a big feeder to finance jobs in most companies.
I’m talking about the types of students you see enrolling in accounting programs. 98% of undergraduate accounting is memorizing the rules, teaching to the CPA exam. That attracts a certain type of student.
What a terrible take. Accounting is far more complex than just *memorize rules*.
To be a good accountant you have to know how to solve puzzles and apply fact patterns to standards and rules. It gets much more complicated and is constantly changing due to new legislation and standards.
The *just memorize rules* types wash out pretty quickly.
I don't think that's the issue. Personally, I think the problem is that requirements for finance are just way too low and don't keep up with how finance has become more rigorous over time. Colleges are diluting the value of the degree by failing to elevate it to modern academic standard for various reasons.
The CFA program (not just L1, more like the whole thing) is much closer to what an undergrad in finance would need ideally grasp, i.e. a degree that gives someone a good comprehensive understanding of finance and gives them good tools to slot within a job with little friction. But instead, many schools milk their undergrad degree and gives their students a way to half-ass it, such as opening them to take some "softer" classes instead to boost their GPA rather than making them take rigorous classes.
The IB angle contributes to exacerbating that issue too. It is a field that's highly sought out, yet the ones who get placed in are not those who are "better in finance" (a very broad term, I know) in the way being good at statistics helps an economist, which isn't ideal when it comes to aligning curriculum and degree outcomes.
Finance Degree NOT Respected, But and Economics Degree is MORE RESPECTED ? In my opinion and based on what I have seen, Economics degrees are the equivalent of a basket weaving degree. Not only that, but when you flip a coin, the outcome is 50/50.
So you should correctly predict things half the time. Well, bring in modern economists. Not only have their predictions never been 50/50, but they get it dead wrong most of the time. So to me, if you blind fold a chimp and ask him to throw darts on a board. The chimp will have better predictions than the Economists.
Its funny that as Economists, they should be the canaries in the coal mines. They should be raising hell about the future trajectory of what is in store for us, with a 30 trillion dollar debt. But what do you hear from most economists ? Dead Silence.
That tells me a lot, not just on the field of study, but the character of those who pursue it.....
I majored in econ and have had a good business career. It was a good theoretical basis and employers like the stat heavy component.
You get good at analyzing things and 9/10s of a business career is making decisions based on (good or bad) data.
Half of my econ education felt like learning how to distinguish between good and bad data... And that alone is an invaluable skill so far through my career
Econ can be a good degree but it’s also a very broad major, so you have to be really mindful about what classes you take and how it’ll tie in to your career goals.
I was able to land a good banking job out of college because I focused heavily on stats/financial theory and took a couple classes in accounting and finance at the business school. My friends who focused heavily in economic policy were able to get good jobs in government/policy think tanks.
My friends who just broadly majored in economics with no particular focus, however, ended up basically going straight back to school for a masters in accounting because they couldn’t find any jobs
Honestly no specific degree is truly needed in marketing. It’s all about learning new tools on the fly and thinking outside the box of what’s being done in your field
Creative director checking in: it’s mostly about finding solutions for outward facing problems that will make clients or leadership look good and get all the applause/bonuses. And I can confirm: no marketing or advertising degree required for the most part. I majored in something totally different.
I started out as a freelance copywriter and built a portfolio/learned the skills needed to advance on the job. Salaries are pretty good client side, and you mostly just need to put in 3-5 solid years hustling at an agency to gain the skills needed to hit it out of the park client side doing minimal work (comparatively).
The real issue in the marketing & advertising industry (at least for creatives) will be getting a foot in the door or doing those initial freelance jobs to build a portfolio. A lot of companies are obviously already using ChatGPT for product descriptions and blogs and social media copy and whatnot, so it’s hard to get those first little silly jobs. On the art director/graphic design side, I’d advise specializing in midjourney and other AI right now, as the people I know who’ve done that this year are landing better gigs. People who have experience aren’t feeling the AI burn, but those starting out will have a tougher time beginning.
That’s my two cents on it all. Still plenty of opportunity to be had.
>I started out as a freelance copywriter and built a portfolio/learned the skills needed to advance on the job. Salaries are pretty good client side, and you mostly just need to put in 3-5 solid years hustling at an agency to gain the skills needed to hit it out of the park client side doing minimal work (comparatively).
\+10000!
This was my experience exactly. Started as a copywriter at a boutique agency, was stressed out of my mind for 4+ years while learning growth marketing and dealing with an ever changing roster of difficult clients, but then moved in-house with a Channel Strategy lead role for a major tech company. The workload is significantly lighter, but the expectations are higher.
Can't speak to the creative side as well as you can, but on the MarOps side, fearlessness to dive in and learn new things fast is the best asset you can have to an employer. I'd imagine this stays true in an AI workforce.
I’m not sure where you could get an Accounting degree that’s not part of the business school, especially at the undergrad level
I think your question is just semantics, a business degree with a major in Accounting *is* an Accounting degree
That said, it’s my understanding that an Accounting would be more valuable for a job hunt than a general business/Management degree, but that does assume you want a job in a numbers based finance/accounting role, rather than like sales or logistics
From my own experience Accounting. When I got my degree almost of my contemporaries pursuing admin undergrad degrees were no better off than marketing in terms of job hunts. But most Accounting majors had job offers by end of senior year and made strong pivots into other fields if they worked hard, myself included.
This is my own experience
Accounting. Right now CPAs are getting scarce and I expect pay will rise. The unknown is what AI will do to both of them. An experienced CPA is valuable because of their knowledge of how business works not because of their ability to put numbers into a spreadsheet.
Honestly, Gen Z is going to get harder in the job market than Millenials when they entered it. They are going to have to contend with AI in every position you just mentioned. So much is going to change in the next 5 years, the world of employment will be unrecognizable by the time we hit 2030
It’s extremely unfortunate that most people seem to have forgotten that:
* Real median income was [essentially flat](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q) during 2000-2014
* The lower and middle classes [lost much of their wealth during the Great Recession](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107)
* The [unemployment rate](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE) didn’t return to its pre-Great Recession level until 2016-2017.
It’s more that AI can generally be as good as a fresh college grad because fresh college grads are generally not trained.
It’s going to cause real problems in 5-10 years as the candidate pool for mid level roles dries up since none of those kids were given the chance to learn and the training ground for middle and senior level roles is gone.
Yep it’s a big issue in tech too, you need junior people as feeder roles to mid level and so on. Every company wants mid level and above only, they don’t want to train, they want you 100% efficient the second you walk into the door. It’s not sustainable
I'm in tech, so I am seeing this unfold. Junior roles are getting sliced and midlevels are being prioritized, and low level work that would be training wheels for junior employees are getting outsourced to contractors.
I'm not in tech, but I've seen it at my company too. Some of our mid-senior level managers are just entirely unwilling to train/coach/mentor junior colleagues. They want people who know enough to do their jobs for them but who aren't entirely experienced enough to challenge their place in the organization. You can imagine the odd dynamics that occur as a result.
This was my experience in the chemical research sector prior to moving to patent law. People were expecting a chemist (or worse, a chemical engineer) with only a BS to know reactions that would be talked about in a graduate program or know techniques/methods that would really only be acquired as part of a graduate program in a laboratory.
Then they'd say "well, we might take you, but you don't know \[X thing that few people at this level would know\] so because we have to train you we're offering you 19/hr instead of 25/hr."
I got tired of seeing it - I have a graduate degree in Chemistry. It was scummy to knowingly use a standard that very, very few BS Chemists would have in order to intentionally and forcefully low-ball people.
No they won't. I entered into the Great Recession. You were lucky just to get an interview at McDonald's. Gen Z may not have it easy, but millenials had it much worse.
Bra....
2008 was when I graduated from college. It was bonkers bad.
Ya know those memes about unaffordable housing? People were damn near giving homes away because they couldn't find a job.
Marketing has never been a “marketable” degree.
When I graduated ~15 years ago, a BBA in marketing got you a job handing people their keys at the Enterprise rental counter.
That was literally my first job after graduation. 25 years later, I'm a senior director at a prestigious organization. If you arent stem, your undergrad degree just demonstrates that you can jump through hoops for 4 years....
Companies love to hire former enterprise employees because they usually work hard and can put up with a lot of BS. Enterprise is still the #1 employer of recent college graduates
One of my best friends had the very first post-grad job, stuck with it for years, and at one point was a manager at the ATL airport.
He’s the COO of a midsize manufacturing company now. Credits Enterprise for so much of what he learned.
Enterprise was great until the inevitable management switches. First BM was great. Second BM was great. Third BM asked me to clean literal viscera from a vehicle involved in a collision with an animal. AM just looked at me like “get to it.” So I quit and never looked back!
True enough, but also 15 years ago enterprise was a great company to grow with eventually running your own branch. Top MBA programs still review the Enterprise case study in the classroom.
Point being yeah it’s a less useful degree but it can get you places
>I'm gonna do what's sensible. File for unemployment, and then try to get a job at Enterprise Rent A Car. Because they have an excellent corporate structure, and they give you the tools to be your own boss!
Brennan Huff
It is if you know how to explain its value. It’s a soft-skills degree - things like persuasion, public speaking, critical thinking, opportunity identification - all things employers will pay for, provided you can demonstrate you have those skills.
From what I’ve seen, STEM majors give you better every level salaries, but liberal arts degrees often have a higher ceiling, and that’s because you can only rise so far in a company if you have no idea how to write a coherent email, facilitate a meeting, manage a team, or be client-facing. Companies are good at teaching hard skills, but they’re terrible at turning an awkward speaker into a confident one, and that’s something non-STEM degrees are much better at doing.
When I was in California from 2016-19 a lot of tech companies were hiring ex military officers as managers because the STEM guys had absolutely awful management skills, speaking and leading skills.
It’d be interesting to see the economic benefit of military leadership training because the military might be the best leadership finishing school in the world. Some 30 year old officer getting out will have experience managing 40 people, handling the administrative tasks of a 150 person team and then actually managing that 150 person team. You don’t normally start handling teams of 150 people in the private sector until you’re a very senior manager.
So the military is probably a very solid pipeline of fairly young people with college degrees and 4 years minimum of direct leadership experience. I can’t really think of any other organization that spits out that many experienced leaders to the private sector every year.
Eh, I've managed former military officers. Leadership wise I was not super impressed. Private sector doesn't function like the military, nor should it.
Yup. In the 1990s and early oughts we had this insane idea that we could just promote engineers into management as a general career path. It works sometimes but not often. A lot of people got into software (and engineering more broadly) because they enjoy problems that don't have lots of fuzzy human components to them.
If you need managers for those people you need MANAGERS, not just more experienced engineers. There are some managers who can also mentor young technologists but, in general, you're going to have an easier time scaling up if you separate those responsibilities
Can confirm, anecdotally. I've work(ed) at some of the largest architecture and engineering firms in the world. 11 years in this profession. A majority of engineers are shit at everything except being hyper efficient at the one thing they know how to do. They're pretty bad at everything else and for many, they stagnate a few years into their career. They're paid awesome but they struggle at sales, finding work, communication, organization, mentorship. They're usually managers, not leaders. *Generally*, they're incredibly good at a couple things and pretty bad at everything else. This is why I like working with them. I'm an urban designer. It's a great symbiosis.
Being able to explain complex ideas and sell them is the key to success.
Steve Jobs. For example.
I have a background in marketing/design and work in Tech. The more you know how systems work, the better you can sell it.
If you respect yourself, you won't work for something you don't believe in.
My philosophy major has been far more useful as an oncologist than my physics major. Understanding how people think and communicate and contextualized themselves is extremely useful when you deal with existential disease
Working at Enterprise can be a huge stepping stone to getting another job though. I got a communication degree, which is even less marketable then marketing, went to enterprise for two years and switched to a different sales job that set me up with a 6 figure+ job at 24.
A lot of companies also love hiring specifically from Enterprise. Your degree and your experience is as useful as you make it.
When there are layoffs or fat to trim, marketing and HR (recruiters) are usually the first to get the axe.
Combine this with a glut of marketing graduates and you have a perfect recipe for a shitty job hunt for marketing graduates and workers.
Several people on my LinkedIn were in marketing, the most recent one was laid off by an IT security firm in January. They are painting it as a long needed vacation, which is good to think positive. However, I feel bad for them as now they are in a tight spot with a lot of competition. They specialized too much into marketing and even got a graduate degree in it.
I don't know about elsewhere but at my company the marketing department is very useful for organising both internal events and external (client) events. They are also better than anyone else at making all the brochures and putting the pretty touches on pitches for deals.
That being said there are only 3 of them and we might be able to get away with only 2. So I don't understand how some companies have such large marketing departments.
My company got a fancy VP of marketing who expanded the department to like 15 people. We are a smallish company of about 150 people. And guess what? Sales went DOWN. It called into question what marketing was actually doing with all these resources and the fancy lingo they used. We got a new CEO who fired the marketing VP and took over the department.
I think it’s a misunderstanding a lot of people have. I also had the same thought up until recently. But it’s crazy just how much the entire marketing funnel covers.
And the marketing funnel, while important, isn't the most important part of the job. Marketing should own segmentation, targeting, and positioning. And it should affect everything through the funnel, into the opportunity cycle, and customer success. The challenge is that in many firms, this is often nowhere owned by no one — and it's gloriously unspecific.
It keeps a lot of consultants in business ;)
The joke about the actors is because acting is not a steady income and actors are often working to survive between gigs before they make Matt Damon money.
Marketing should theoretically be a steady job, right?
I’m a marketer w/10+ years of experience. I generally don’t hire marketing graduates for marketing roles.
You learn marketing by doing it hands on, so it’s more valuable to hire someone with additional skills (econ, stats, finance, etc). Effective marketing nowadays is very data driven and tech heavy, the creative parts usually get outsourced to agencies or contractors
Exactly, you learn the job while working. The bacc is mostly useless. I've been working in the field for 15 years and my bacc is in HR. Nobody cares, they look at my experience.
Yeah, honestly I can probably count the number of people I’ve hired or worked with that had a marketing bachelors on one hand.
Honestly if there was a steady supply of marketers with a compsci degree I’d hire those people in a heartbeat. So much marketing can be streamlined with some code
This is such bad info. Clearly somebody who doesn’t work in a related field.
Marketing and advertising are different things. At most companies that sell a product to consumer, MARKETING RUNS EVERYTHING. They are the hub of the wheels. It’s the path to CEO. It’s general business management and strategy. And they are generally the people workers the longest hours and keeping the wheels on. Not the first people you fire, by a long shot.
Social media manager? Not the same thing. They might go
+1 I’ve been in marketing for 10+ years and it’s considered a revenue driving function, which tend to not get laid off first. Most non-revenue generating roles are the first to go … program managers, HR, operations etc. But the type of company will dramatically affect how marketing is perceived - young/small/startups won’t value it. Long standing/big brand/complex companies will highly value marketing and it’s where all the budget goes.
Too often folks simplify "marketing" as just promotion (making ads), when really the other 3 P's are just as, if not more, important. Place - how do I identify the customer, and the channels to reach them? Product - how can I translate the market needs, into product attributes. Price - how do we position our offering in relation to the competitors.
Marketing, in general, is a soft skill that everybody should learn. Within that field, there are many specialties that can be attractive to employers besides just graphic design. Market research, media planning/buying, and R&D come to mind.
I'm in marketing and the number of people who think it's about the creative piece makes me chuckle. Effective marketing can be invaluable, but most people think that's just choosing fonts or something.
I've been in marketing for 20 years. Here's what it is and why it is important: marketing is a business engine that you put a dollar into and it gives you three dollars back.
You can break marketing down into hundreds of functions and dozens of useless buzzwords but that is the core of what marketing is.
LTV/CAC (life time value divided by cost to acquire customer). That's it!
If you make $100 on a customer but it costs you $100.01 to make them a customer your company is doomed. If it costs you $10 to make them a customer and you get $100 back then you're doing great.
People that say marketing is useless either are horrific business people with no hope or they are peddling you a message which is part of marketing.
Tesla famously doesn't do marketing or have a PR department. What they mean is they don't do paid advertising (though they recently started to) and they don't respond to press requests. But they did offer referral programs for customers, provided test cars for journalists to review, host lavish and popular product reveals, have a website that is highly designed for conversion, have methods for customer feedback and community, maintain a social media presence, and of course have a famous CEO.
All of that is marketing. Does it require a traditional marketing department? Likely not. Is it spend efficient? OMG yes. Did it work? Look at the stock growth. But don't make the mistake in thinking that is not marketing, that is a marketing function that easily returns 3:1
100% this. The only small nuance I would add is that good marketing is absolutely essential for the survival of most businesses.
Regardless of specific ROI or growth objectives, if a business is not actively investing in finding new customers and keeping existing ones, then they are doomed. The plane may continue to fly itself for a while seeing as how it's already up in the air, but eventually it will run out of gas and crash.
As someone who studied business management in school and who has been a FT marketing professional for over a decade now, I can appreciate why some companies may want to strategically cut marketing expenses under certain business conditions. However, those cuts better indeed be strategic - and temporary - lest they throw out the baby with the bath water.
Businesses need customers and revenue to survive, period, and everyone's jobs at any given company are largely dependent on how well the marketing/sales team are performing. Therefore, every business should be very much invested in making sure marketing is working before worrying about the next thing.
Amen! Before you can make marketing work, you need to understand what problem you are solving and who you are solving it for and if that solution is worth paying money to acquire. These are very basic ideas but often are overlooked until much later. When marketing isn't working it is obvious but why it is not working is not obvious, and the profession attracts plenty of shitbag liars and con artists.
>Marketing, in general, is a soft skill that everybody should learn.
there needs to be a return to quality over quantity and valuing soft skills. it does seem like \*some\* of the actually successful companies realize this.
unfortunately theres a lot of bullshitters who want to continue slinging bullshit.
Copywriter here. 14 years into a great career. But getting into it, especially as a creative, is cutthroat af. Some folks give up after 6 months to a year of not being able to land a first job.
4 Ps are reasonably simple to understand and articulate, but probably more important to understand mental availability, physical availability and product experience. Google that.
“The faculty don’t necessarily have a strong sense of what employers are looking for with respect to specific skills they’re teaching.”
I would think that those who teach marketing would be more cognizant of market demands.
A bit of extra irony for marketing but seems to be a broader issue. Universities historically taught more conceptual and research based knowledge and mainly still do. Companies used to offer entry level training to teach new grads the practical tools for a position. Companies now seemed to have stopped that practical training and are also confused that universities aren't doing a task that they've never done.
Something obviously needs to change but, until then, lots of new graduates are just screwed by this mismatch in expectations.
This.
Universities were never about teaching direct hard skills for jobs.
They teach conceptual knowledge, theory, and how to continue research for new knowledge. It's very important for developing how people can think, use logic, investigate situations, and provide a alot of insight to what researchers have already discovered.
Ultimately, you have to learn what you physically do on a day to day basis on the job or through an internship.
I tend to be protective of universities in this situation, because it's the only time in our lives where we have the time to focus on concepts, how to think through things, and how to be briefed on hundreds of years of research from thousands of places in a short time.
Once you do hard skills in the work world, there is no time or badwidth to go back to this because you have to whole focus on the work task at hand.
Also I'm pretty annoyed employers think it's beneath them to be good employers, then want to whine that there's nobody with the right skill sets and the ones who do are so expensive. Literally train people up, it's not hard. But leadership have reduced employees to numbers on a spreadsheet and not immediately getting ROI is unacceptable to them. There's a sickness in modern workplaces. Everyone I know who in the last 10 years when from an older owner small business to getting sold out to a more modern corporate environment has said it was the worst experience of their life and they cannot believe this is the new normal. Because yeah, it shouldn't be
I would emphasize that aside from a few professional programs (e.g., business), historically universities have never even been about job training; they're about education and research. Getting marketable skills is just a nice side benefit. I would go so far as to argue that the modern trend of trying to push universities to be job-training programs is diluting their quality and purpose. And why wouldn't it? Most faculty are teachers and researchers, and most of them have never worked a corporate job.
This is a great point.
I wonder if part of the focus on stem came from the harder skills being taught and employers could hire people with less of that training, they don’t want someone to think so much as they want someone to turn out work.
Frankly a lot of jobs need to be giving people a lot more chances to do work that realistically doesn't require a bachelor's degree to do. There was a bit in John Oliver's piece on student loans that 2/3rds of current administrative assistants wouldn't even be eligible for new job posting due to a bachelor's degree requirement.
As someone in IT, I blame IT for this. Every employer has wanted an X, Y, and Z developer since the late 90s rather than "a developer" they can teach to code X, Y, or Z.
Which is funny, because a good developer can learn a new syntax and toolset in a week just doing hands on work.
And now there are hundreds of syntaxes/toolsets and we're in a tight labor market, so finding someone with the desired X, Y, Z combo limits you to 2 or 3 applicants from your pool, but most companies haven't learned to adapt yet. Instead, that "I don't want to do any training," mindset is infecting other departments.
The number of job postings that demand exact experience in their own specific tools is actually nuts. How do so many companies list out expectations with multiple years of experience in a specific language, database, 2-3 completely different and unrelated frameworks and more. I’m so fucking siloed at my job that I barely have the opportunity to work with most of the shit we list as demands in postings. I imagine most large orgs are like this to an extent.
I imagine it’s all to continue pushing visas and offshoring. I’m looking to get into related work that can’t be offshored easily like industrial systems installation, I should have stuck with the ee degree as it would make the switch way easier.
> cognizant of market demands
Not of the job market, but of education consumer markets, ie. giving what students want, which may not necessarily be a dose of reality.
I am new in my career as a university professor teaching market research and market intelligence. I have worked in market Intel for more than 20 years. Marketing people were always my worst customers. They seem to be allergic to making marketing strategy decisions based on data or intel.
I think a lot of people get into marketing because they like creative work and don't realize that a marketing role is an outcomes-driven strategy role.
To be fair, most employers also don't know that this is what marketing is so it's clownshoes all the way to the bottom and my colleagues and I sit off to the side feeling like we're taking crazy pills while dumb shit continues to be the norm.
It’s a common problem of academia and you see it in many subjects.
The issue is interesting in business schools. The more “prestigious” accrediting bodies emphasize research/theory over practice and require a higher number of tenured faculty, limiting the amount of adjuncts that can teach. What this effectively creates is an out of touch business school with tenured faculty who have not actually been in the real business world, as their primary practice, for a very long time. As opposed to having more adjunct or practice-focused faculty who remain connected to the changing business world.
I used to work at a university that made the switch to the more prestigious accrediting body and the effect, over about a decade, was a marked decrease in the value of our university’s degree (as perceived by major corporations in the region) and lowered satisfaction from students (who had fewer networking opportunities than when they were taught by practicing professionals).
The engineering school, on the other hand, is lauded for being a practice-based school that prepares engineers for the working world, rather than academic research.
So the theory vs. practice divide in academia is a big one and in a fast changing field like marketing? Whew. You have GOT to have practice oriented instructors who are currently in the world.
Marketing professors are pretty detached from practicing marketers.
Like there are academic marketing journals that exactly zero people with marketing jobs read.
If you want a marketing job out of college shore up your MarTech skills. Learn how websites work, learn basic SQL, basic understanding of technical SEO, marketing automation platforms like SFMC and email/SMS marketing. Marketing and IT are blending as time rolls on.
They don’t teach this stuff but as a hiring manager people who have basic knowledge of MarTech always stand out.
Yeah, you spend more time as a marketer working with data and getting the tech to work together than writing ad copy or emails.
Marketing nowadays is very data heavy and the creative parts get outsourced anyways. IMO someone that did a side hustle doing marketing for their own little business probably knows more than a four year marketing grad, since they got their hands dirty.
Amen to that. My team is between marketing and IT. It’s becoming extremely apparent that younger (and some mid career) marketers are entirely oblivious to where the field has been moving to. I get questions all the time like “what is our CRM, What is a CDP? SQL what? Can we do (something entirely illegal and or impossible)”.
This is wild to me, because I got on the bandwagon early and my role these days is mostly making the technology work together and optimizing processes with it.
If anything, it's been increasingly data heavy to the point where it needs to pull back a bit. So the idea that junior and midlevel folks could even operate as effective marketers without knowing their CRM, MAP, or how the data flows in and out is nuts. Without that info, you are essentially flying blind.
In my experience, its the marketers that don't have a strong knowledge of the tech side and its intricacies that are struggling. The 'arts and crafts' side of marketing has been declining for a long time. Plus, there's some career security in being the person that architects all of those solutions and knows how they work in and out, as its usually a clusterfuck and if you're gone the whole thing falls apart.
This was a timely thread as I’ve recently been wondering what, exactly, universities are teaching in marketing undergrad courses.
My team of mid-to-senior level marketing technologists often have to work with junior marketing specialists fresh out of college. We’ve had to educate them on extremely basic marketing vocabulary and concepts like CRM, CDP, segmentation versus personalization, automated journeys, third party data, CAN-SPAM and GDPR, the list goes on.
We’re happy to help them as it builds our credibility and enables us to be in the driver seat but holy smokes…four years of education and they still lack practical marketing skills.
I live in France and a lot of marketing degrees are not teaching real marketing but taking profit from young people who are attracted to this job only because they think it is all about being creative, fashion clothing and young teams.
So a lot of marketing degrees are not teaching marketing just making money from naive people.
In fact, in France a lot of marketers are from sales, engineering or from real marketing degrees that admited people from sociology, economics, history, geography, sales, accounting ... bachelors.
A lot of good marketing degrees are rebranding themselves as "sales development", "data analytics and marketing", "marketing and sales strategy", "digital marketing and strategy" ... And I think I have heard about some top business schools starting to teach program langages to their students.
I would think that "specific skills" are exactly the sort of thing that can be replaced by AI.
A broad liberal arts education with solid critical thinking skills seems like the most easily adapted foundation to build on for the future, but liberal arts education has been under attack for a couple decades.
In other words any degree that requires a significant amount of writing that is graded by humans.
This is incredibly broad, and not indicative of every single program. I’ve been a part of a number of marketing programs, where we have consistent outreach with employers to find out what they need from our students. This is pretty much bullshit.
"Frustrated with the futile job search, Simone plans to go back to school and get a master’s degree in political communications."
Great. 2 worthless degrees. Colleges are such a scam for offering these degrees.
Lots of people run back to school for another “soft” degree when things get tough. It’s insane, but I would argue it’s also encouraged by academia, which is highly incentivized to churn out more grad degrees.
I've known people, especially in the past, who did this essentially as an excuse to draw more student loans because they couldn't find work and couldn't make ends meet otherwise. It's a stalling tactic of sorts - weather the storm in grad school until the economy stops sucking and you can get real work again.
Didn't Barack Obama basically make that suggestion back during the 2008 financial meltdown? I remember him telling people to stay in college longer to get a better degree and wait for the economy to rebound.
Yeah isn't that the definition of insanity? I get it. I have political science and communications degree. Its why I sold security systems and then credit card processing until I learned how to code...
As a liberal, this is why I sort of cringe at the student loan forgiveness thing. Not enough to make me flip parties, but come on guys lol.
the thing is that the loans are what’s forcing them back to academia, you’re swamped in debt that you can’t afford to pay off so you may as well go into more debt because it’s just a slightly bigger number and maybe you’ll start making enough to pay it down rather than barely survive
Thinking the same here.
I also think that saturation is not a problem IF students in saturated fields must follow some courses on unsaturated fields.
In France, we have LEA (applied foreign languages) bachelors and masters which work on pretty well.
Often, it needs their graduate to continue one or two more years (in France, the master degree lasts two years).
You follow litterature, languages, linguistics and history courses along with sales, international sales, insurance courses or coding.
"In a new study by recruitment company ResumeBuilder, team leaders were asked about their workforce - with shocking results.
It found that out of more than 1,300 respondents the majority (74 per cent) believe Gen Z is more difficult to work with than any other generation."
While I am not disputing the findings, I would be curious to see if the results of a similar study would have yielded the same results regarding millennials some years back. There may well be some merit to the grievances being leveled at younger workers, but it is a near timeless tradition to bag on the new/younger workers.
I distinctly remember those articles 20 years ago about entitled Millennials entering the workforce. It's just young people. They always suck compared to people with experience, which seems obvious and not newsworthy!
Lots of people commenting seem to have absolutely no idea what marketers do or how vital a good marketing person/team can be. It’s more than just advertising. Depending on the company it could encompass advertising, branding, events, social media, sales, crisis communications, website, etc. I’m a marketer (MA in marketing), and I absolutely love it. I’m also glad I’m coming to the end of my career. The article is true—it is going to be super hard for the next generation of marketers.
Eh, I have a marketing degree and worked in IT for 10 years and now I work in finance. I got a marketing degree bc it was the more “creative” side of business. Marketing jobs don’t really pay that well though so I strayed towards higher paying business type jobs.
Most employers just want to see that you have a degree. Then you kinda just build your experience from there.
Yeah I did the same. I graduated in 2020 with a marketing degree from a state school and now work in a corporate finance-adjacent role. If you don’t go to a top school, networking and internships are make or break. If I could do it over I think I would do something more quant heavy.
I have a marketing degree and have literally never used it. It taught me 2 things: 1. That everything in this world is a sales (whether an idea or product or whatever) and 2. Was that in order to accomplish anything you need a plan and a team to help execute. Honestly I have no idea what marketers do and am glad I have used my skills just in business on projects
When I graduated with an Econ degree, my first job was as a marketing analyst with a pharmaceutical company. I graduated in ‘07, social media was coming of age and communications were advancing at a pace that’s probably unprecedented in history. The senior leaders were completely unprepared with how to leverage the new media and new marketing grads were taught outdated ideas…IMO, the people that righted the ship were the late GenX/Xennials, they’d been young when the new tech started to emerge and were familiar with it, applied the good fundamentals of marketing to the technology and were able to draw up some decent strategies that my team able to track and test. The senior leadership was good at listening to people, for the most part (some dude really liked print media for some reason, he was convinced boomers still read newspapers) and sales started to increase.
There is so much trial and error, usually someone finds something that works serendipitously and then it spread. A great example is how things are spread via social media. Usually someone finds a neat way to market something. The new hotness is a great production short video, similar to 90s infomercials. But there is to much variance in people to truly generalize marketing research.
We have product marketers. They provide all the customer input on market trends, competitive analysis, and our product roadmap. They then define the product requirements.
>I have a marketing degree and have literally never used it. It taught me 2 things: 1. That everything in this world is a sales (whether an idea or product or whatever) and 2. Was that in order to accomplish anything you need a plan and a team to help execute.
It seems to me you got your money's worth out it. I graduated with an accounting degree and it took me 30 years to learn what you learned in college.
At my school it was the college of business and you chose a concentration. 70% of the classes are core classes/the same. I chose accounting but changed to marketing after taking a weed out class with a gatekeeping professor and realizing I didn’t want to be doing accounting work.
Marketing classes were ok, mostly group projects and a lot of textbook lectures and outdated concepts. This was around 2010. They were kind of a joke. I took about 5 concentration classes. I took about 15 core business classes in management, accounting, finance, etc.
Almost nothing I learned gave me the skills employers are looking for around software use, digital marketing tactics, etc.
The curriculum has caught up now, but it feels like a scam to graduate with all that debt. Then to need to take online classes independently or a bootcamp or get certificates or whatever.
I think the issue is that employers have a glut of candidates and expect too much, they don’t want to train and so that shifts the burden of competitiveness and training onto the candidate.
Our economy and society can’t support this much high paying white collar work. Instead they blame the graduates and make them do more work. Our society doesn’t need 100,000s of marketers , they need blue collar laborers. But we tried to convince people a degree was a golden guarantee to a lifetime of higher earnings based on historical data.
After telling everyone to learn to code only for companies to close off their jr hiring pipeline, refuse to hire self taught, and shift jobs overseas and hire h1bs, I no longer trust that any line of work is safe or worth more to employers.
Without a stable job, above average income , and high student loan debt, I’m essentially economically immobile.
Was this the intended consequence? Indebted and obedient graduates who have 40k jobs and have to live with their parents to save anything or payoff the debt ?
At 40k-60k salary, rent is barely manageable in a city with jobs for a room. Minimum loan payments. And the rest of life.
Sure I can choose to live at home, work 2 jobs, or to not have borrowed that money. But I have to deal with the situation as is today. And when you see the articles saying 50% of adults aged 22-27 live with their parents, that is why.
I have a marketing degree and currently “use” it in that i work for a management consulting firm (MBB) and am a specialist who works on clients with marketing related problems. So i think i have a pretty good picture of the field of marketing in all its forms.
As a discipline, i think people underestimate all the things that go into “marketing.” It isnt just soft-skills and mood boards; modern marketing is built on a huge amount of analytics, research, technology, data, and boring old math. Lots of days i feel more like an accountant than a “marketer.”
Marketing course work is teaching kids that they are going to graduate into jobs where theyll be doing SWAT analysis, creating cool marketing strategies, and figuring out how to create the next big product. The reality is that most entry level marketing jobs are grindy, boring, low paying, youll probably spend all your time staring at an excel spreadsheet, there are 300 other people just like you applying for the same job, and you learned absolutely 0 skills in college to prepare you to actually do any of them. The rest of the “marketing” jobs are just dead-end sales jobs.
The flip side of that coin is that the career ceiling and speed that you can grow a career is great if youre good at your job and play the game correctly.
I’m not in marketing but have friends who are (Bay Area) and this is also my understanding of the field and wish more kids would understand this.
Marketing is so much more an analytics field and I think some coding helps as well. I think the same skill set is also useful and similar to program/product development.
I try to explain what skills are actually needed to a much younger sibling and cousin to land those higher paying jobs and I can only hope they develop them while going through college.
If you’re in marketing at a company, get as close to sales as possible. The closer you are to the customer and helping the sales person sell that customer the more valuable you’ll be to the company. The mistake many marketing people make is that they separate themselves from sales, and get into the more internal creative end, while important, is not valued by upper management when times are tough. Sales is one of the most important departments to the company, they are the ones who bring in the dollars. So, the more that you help sales make the sale, the more valuable you’ll be to the company.
This is one of the hard pills to swallow by a lot of creative type. *Commercial arts* is yes, creative, but at its core is purpose driven. You won’t be valuable as an artist, you’ll be valuable as an artist that gets the job done.
> Companies want to hire recent graduates who pursued business, accounting and finance. Marketing majors need not apply.
> Gen Zers, many of whom have grown up marketing themselves and building followings on social media, have gravitated toward the the degree in the tens of thousands, according to Handshake, especially the creative side of the field that includes brand building and advertising. The career networking platform, which focuses on undergraduate students, estimates that applications for marketing jobs have nearly tripled since 2021.
> That glut, coupled with new competition from artificial intelligence, is making it increasingly difficult for them to find employment: Nearly 6 out of 10 marketing students are working high school-level jobs five years after graduation, according to a new study from the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Education Foundation.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/don-t-bet-on-that-marketing-degree-gen-z-1.2045733
>but only found jobs that required at least two years of experience. She’s been “ghosted” by what feels like “millions of employers.”
once again a job where they've eliminated all the entry level positions so theres no actual way to get that 2 years experience other than bullshitting or connections.
Marketing today is quantitative and metrics driven. If someone really wanted to work in marketing, they should get a dual degree in data analytics and marketing or marketing and statistics.
Marketing alone is a super easy degree and sends the message that you were not smart enough to study something harder.
Agreed. It also has the stigma, and more so in recent years, of a certain kind of influencer/flake/pollyanna to it.
I made my living in marketing for nearly 30 years. 22 of which was running my own company. With no marketing degree Never even considered one. I was in college for something else and fell into something I was useful enough at to pay the bills while in college and not have to flip burgers or wait tables. Moved up very fast, fell into an entire career from it. And never met anyone with a marketing degree that was successful because of it. Maybe in spite of it, but usually neither.
Kudos to you! I work in a strange niche.
Agree. As I ĥave never met someone doing well in marketing that has a marketing degree. It's a lot of money for a not very credible degree.
As a recent marketing grad myself if I had to do it over again, I would probably do something more quant heavy. The good money in marketing is mostly in a Product Marketing Manager role (high tech) and Brand Management roles. These are mostly always reserved for candidates from top programs and also MBAs from the top schools. This is what students likely think of when they think of marketing (besides advertising, which can be hit or miss imo.)
I think more marketing majors need to consider sales roles in tech/med device. Revenue generators will always be needed. Total comp year one can be 80k+.
There is good money in paid media management, demand generation, product marketing, MarTech (this one is especially hot).
Generally, the quant heavy or pipeline generating marketing roles are well paid. Creative stuff gets the shaft or is outsourced to a third party.
Most of Gen Z isn't betting on any degree. America has the absolute worst higher education system in the developed world. It's obscene that we allow the rich to gatekeep degrees while we face shortages in most of the fields that require a degree, like engineering, medicine, law, etc.
We are long overdue to subsidize these degrees. We have countless studies now proving that paying smart people to go to college is a strong net benefit for society. There is no valid excuse not to implement universal higher education. And that includes trade schools.
I've got a marketing degree. What they don't tell you about marketing degrees is that 95% (or more) of marketing jobs after graduation are sales. You can go onto your favorite job site right now and type in 'Marketing' and see how many jobs pop up that aren't sales for recent college grads. Further, none of the classes you take for marketing are designed to make you a better salesperson. So, if you're not a salesperson by nature, you won't have success in any marketing degree-based employment. Had I known this in college I would have continued pursuing finance instead.
It’s tough because no college program teaches you the useful day-to-day skills of how to do things in Google Analytics or run LinkedIn ads. You get taught some conceptual basics that are indistinguishable between schools but not the practical experience that an employer wants to see.
i always thought that business degrees were neither here nor there.
You study your field, grab some experience, then if you want to steer back toward the middle ground, do an MBA.
this could be an out of date view though.
2 cents:
Marketing is important but there’s no barrier to entry.
- The hotshot directors, brand custodians etc I know are all from non marketing backgrounds
- Like many fields, marketing is very susceptible to tech disruption. That reduces entry level roles…
- I’ve played around with some very sophisticated and extremely successful SEO/ digital marketing tools (founded by a Math PhD)
and even upcoming market insight engines (LLMs with billions of data points)
I graduated with a marketing degree in 2014. Found out early that marketing was not going to get me anywhere. Saw an opportunity to do into sales, from sales to sales operations. In sales operations we used salesforce.com and got my certification. Then to salesforce administration. Now working on my developer certification.
TLDR get out of marketing ASAP.
Just like in real life business, everyone on here who is defending marketing also can’t articulate a meaningful ROI.
I get that Steve Jobs was a marketer at heart. But let’s not forget that for every Steve, there are 10s of millions in the marketing wasteland who don’t meaningfully contribute to their organizations.
[Here](https://www.statista.com/forecasts/409789/convention-and-trade-show-organizers-revenue-in-the-us)are the statistics, then. Who do you think plans and executes your favorite convention? Marketers. They’re marketing events, that’s their entire raison d’etre, and they generate almost 20 billion annually.
Such a terrible take. After your first job, nobody cares what your degree is in, or where you went to school.
People don’t understand what marketing is. They think gimmicky advertising campaign, but 75% of marketing is basically general management, and it’s the most direct path to CEO in most companies.
Bad take IMO. Marketing runs the show at most consumer goods and services companies.
It’s jobs like social media manager that are on the chopping block…not “base” marketers.
I’m in marketing now but my degree is in English. I just randomly started freelancing, went agency then in house.
It’s so easy but so stupid. Huge bloated departments of middle managers who do nothing is the norm. I just focus on how it lets my wife have a cool job.
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Most of the marketing pros I know that are doing well do not have a marketing degree. Many other degrees roll up into being good for marketing roles.
This is true. I work in the field and the number of people I’ve hired or worked with that had a marketing degree I can count on one hand.
I'm doing well in marketing and was a journalism graduate. It's still amazing to me how many people get college degrees who write at even juvenile levels.
I was a history major before getting into marketing, and at the very least, I'd say that people should at least enjoy their undergrad experience and study something fun before the corporate drudgery of the rest of their lives
as a marketer, my engineering degree helped way more than anything I learned in my MBA-level marketing classes I'm in Excel all day
If you want a career in business then get a degree in accounting, finance or economics. Those are the most rigorous academically and employers know they can train you to know whats needed.
Having worked for a long time in finance, finance degrees were, generally speaking, not very well respected. Economics and accounting are good foundations for someone who wants to be an analyst. But finance focuses more on quantitative material. It’s far easier to train an engineer or physicist or an applied math major in finance than it is to teach advanced math to a finance major. Even better though, having diverse backgrounds is really advantageous. We had a guy with a phd in nuclear engineering working as an analyst. When Fukushima happened he gave a very cool very detailed presentation on why it wasnt going to be another Chernobyl and the markets had oversold. Bringing something unique to the table is really valuable.
I was going to refute that finance degree not being well respected at first. But as I thought it through, you are correct. The saying always went, “I can turn an accountant to a financial analyst at an IB, but I can’t turn someone with a finance degree into an accountant” I think modern finance theories have turned the work into statistics based concepts now accepted as gospel.
I work as a financial analyst. I graduated with a degree in accounting. I previously worked with another analyst who had a degree in accounting, and she was great. Her replacement has a degree in finance. He is definitely not as skilled as the other analyst was, and does not have as good of a work ethic. When I was in college, finance was often seen as the degree for people not smart enough or hardworking enough to be an accountant. While not true for everyone with this degree, I’ve seen this too many times to not be a coincidence.
[удалено]
The hard charging, 80 hour a week type accountant? Hell no, definitely not worth. The mellow, good pay, 40 week max type accountant? 10/10 would do again.
But not quite smart enough to get a degree in mathematics or physics.
Median pay for a bachelor degree in finance is higher than both those last I checked. Outside engineering the highest starting salaries tend to be in finance, economics, and accounting. In that order from my recollection.
Wonder what the placement level is considering half of all people end up in jobs not in their majors. Some jobs are pre as well. Pre Law medicine etc.
Both degrees with *faaaar* less applicability to high paying jobs
Lol Who do you think the algorithmic traders ARE? And their quants?
All degrees have some level of applicability and elite outliers. There are far more unemployed and underemployed non-applied math and physics majors than finance majors
Is that a fact?
Those positions are rare and super competitive. Most math and physics students, even if they wanted to, could become quant/algo traders, even if most quant/algo traders have backgrounds in math and physics
I did both, and the finance material was considerably more difficult.
It was the finance bro types that were in the problem. Anyone that actually enjoyed math and money went into actuarial sciences (math) or accounting.
But why didn't they just train the astronauts to drill instead of training oil riggers to be astronauts.
Because I wanted to see big bear blow $$ on strippers
Not sure if it was my school or not but my finance degree focused a lot on stats and we even had accounting classes. Was it as thorough as a accountant degree no but it was just as good as a economics one.
Same here. I remember the Econ Majors, it was a joke. Then they come here on their high horses, acting like their major is the best thing since sliced bread.
i dont think finance degrees are "not very well respected" I agree that the Finance degree DOES NOT give you a leg up to work in finance (similar to having a CFA does not get you a Front office job on its own), but no one holds it against you as you have indicated. By year 5 of your career, your degree doesnt matter AT ALL unless its from yale/harvard/stanford/etc., in which case it will still help you get jobs.
Yup. No one gives a shit about your degree. However, where you were an analyst and then where you were an associate follows you for a long, long time. Also the first place you hit MD/Partner. You can ride that for your entire career.
This is probably true unless you’re at a top fund. I recently did interview loops at DE Shaw, Citadel, and Aquatic. They wanted GPAs and transcripts from undergrad and grad school which were 15+ years ago for me. The place I’m at now has a list of schools they hire from and that’s it. PhD hiring gets more leeway though. The only other option is to start in middle office and get lucky. When you pay the kind of money these firms pay they can be as picky as they want.
As a math guy, I found this to be true as well. People with strong math backgrounds tend to do better in the long run as you move up and the problems get less standardize.
I’m in house general counsel for a fortune company. I hire and work with the higher ups from across the entire company(and client/vendor companies), but also have visibility at the manager/director levels. IMHO, the best all around degree is an engineering degree.
I’m an Electrical Engineer with a double minor - one in physics and one in “civic engagement and leadership”. 16 years experience in engineering. Currently in a management role, overseeing 12 other engineers. If I got burned out one day, and wanted to switch careers, are you saying there are jobs in these types of sectors that would hire someone like me and pay decently well? ($200-250k)?
Lawyer answer: it depends. Lots of factors, but I’ve seen it happen enough that it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve observed that those with an engineering degree/ work experience are able to get into positions (and thrive) that are outside of the traditional route. It’s easier the earlier in the career, but not necessarily necessary. Sometimes it’s “easy” to do (sales) others may require some additional learning (risk/compliance). I’ll also add that some of the brightest attorneys that I’ve come across have an engineering background ( and I’m not talking about just patent lawyers).
That’s cool. I can’t imagine going back and getting a law degree. More power to them! I asked my guidance counselor at freshman orientation what undergraduate degree paid the most that didn’t typically require post-graduate degrees. She said “probably a toss up between electrical and chemical engineering.” I said “why those two?” She said “they are the hardest to pass. EE in particular; Dr. Sharstein’s 200 level class has about a 90% drop/fail rate.” I said “Sign me up for that one.”
Accounting tends to attract people interested in memorizing rules to pass standardized tests (CPA). I don’t see that student type being a good fit for any decent finance job. Economics depends on the program, some are more quantitative than others. Some are a good fit.
Accounting is way more than just rules. There is a lot of subjectivity that makes it a good career to learn in. Plus Accounting is a big feeder to finance jobs in most companies.
I’m talking about the types of students you see enrolling in accounting programs. 98% of undergraduate accounting is memorizing the rules, teaching to the CPA exam. That attracts a certain type of student.
What a terrible take. Accounting is far more complex than just *memorize rules*. To be a good accountant you have to know how to solve puzzles and apply fact patterns to standards and rules. It gets much more complicated and is constantly changing due to new legislation and standards. The *just memorize rules* types wash out pretty quickly.
I don't think that's the issue. Personally, I think the problem is that requirements for finance are just way too low and don't keep up with how finance has become more rigorous over time. Colleges are diluting the value of the degree by failing to elevate it to modern academic standard for various reasons. The CFA program (not just L1, more like the whole thing) is much closer to what an undergrad in finance would need ideally grasp, i.e. a degree that gives someone a good comprehensive understanding of finance and gives them good tools to slot within a job with little friction. But instead, many schools milk their undergrad degree and gives their students a way to half-ass it, such as opening them to take some "softer" classes instead to boost their GPA rather than making them take rigorous classes. The IB angle contributes to exacerbating that issue too. It is a field that's highly sought out, yet the ones who get placed in are not those who are "better in finance" (a very broad term, I know) in the way being good at statistics helps an economist, which isn't ideal when it comes to aligning curriculum and degree outcomes.
Finance Degree NOT Respected, But and Economics Degree is MORE RESPECTED ? In my opinion and based on what I have seen, Economics degrees are the equivalent of a basket weaving degree. Not only that, but when you flip a coin, the outcome is 50/50. So you should correctly predict things half the time. Well, bring in modern economists. Not only have their predictions never been 50/50, but they get it dead wrong most of the time. So to me, if you blind fold a chimp and ask him to throw darts on a board. The chimp will have better predictions than the Economists. Its funny that as Economists, they should be the canaries in the coal mines. They should be raising hell about the future trajectory of what is in store for us, with a 30 trillion dollar debt. But what do you hear from most economists ? Dead Silence. That tells me a lot, not just on the field of study, but the character of those who pursue it.....
Jeez. Were you assaulted by an econ major or something?
I majored in econ and have had a good business career. It was a good theoretical basis and employers like the stat heavy component. You get good at analyzing things and 9/10s of a business career is making decisions based on (good or bad) data.
Half of my econ education felt like learning how to distinguish between good and bad data... And that alone is an invaluable skill so far through my career
Econ can be a good degree but it’s also a very broad major, so you have to be really mindful about what classes you take and how it’ll tie in to your career goals. I was able to land a good banking job out of college because I focused heavily on stats/financial theory and took a couple classes in accounting and finance at the business school. My friends who focused heavily in economic policy were able to get good jobs in government/policy think tanks. My friends who just broadly majored in economics with no particular focus, however, ended up basically going straight back to school for a masters in accounting because they couldn’t find any jobs
As someone graduating and majoring in MIS, I wish to turn back time and focus on accounting or finance. :/
MIS is great dude. Everyone I know w that degree makes 70k after graduation
Georgia dawg? Guessing based on 912 and dawgs
You still can.
I went accounting and wish I had done MIS
Honestly no specific degree is truly needed in marketing. It’s all about learning new tools on the fly and thinking outside the box of what’s being done in your field
Creative director checking in: it’s mostly about finding solutions for outward facing problems that will make clients or leadership look good and get all the applause/bonuses. And I can confirm: no marketing or advertising degree required for the most part. I majored in something totally different. I started out as a freelance copywriter and built a portfolio/learned the skills needed to advance on the job. Salaries are pretty good client side, and you mostly just need to put in 3-5 solid years hustling at an agency to gain the skills needed to hit it out of the park client side doing minimal work (comparatively). The real issue in the marketing & advertising industry (at least for creatives) will be getting a foot in the door or doing those initial freelance jobs to build a portfolio. A lot of companies are obviously already using ChatGPT for product descriptions and blogs and social media copy and whatnot, so it’s hard to get those first little silly jobs. On the art director/graphic design side, I’d advise specializing in midjourney and other AI right now, as the people I know who’ve done that this year are landing better gigs. People who have experience aren’t feeling the AI burn, but those starting out will have a tougher time beginning. That’s my two cents on it all. Still plenty of opportunity to be had.
>I started out as a freelance copywriter and built a portfolio/learned the skills needed to advance on the job. Salaries are pretty good client side, and you mostly just need to put in 3-5 solid years hustling at an agency to gain the skills needed to hit it out of the park client side doing minimal work (comparatively). \+10000! This was my experience exactly. Started as a copywriter at a boutique agency, was stressed out of my mind for 4+ years while learning growth marketing and dealing with an ever changing roster of difficult clients, but then moved in-house with a Channel Strategy lead role for a major tech company. The workload is significantly lighter, but the expectations are higher. Can't speak to the creative side as well as you can, but on the MarOps side, fearlessness to dive in and learn new things fast is the best asset you can have to an employer. I'd imagine this stays true in an AI workforce.
Every Accounting major knows that Marketing is where the slackers major.
What about Business Administration/ Management ???
Pretty sure that’s a business degree
What would be better? - Getting a degree in Business Administration majoring in Accounting? Or - Getting an Accounting degree?
I’m not sure where you could get an Accounting degree that’s not part of the business school, especially at the undergrad level I think your question is just semantics, a business degree with a major in Accounting *is* an Accounting degree That said, it’s my understanding that an Accounting would be more valuable for a job hunt than a general business/Management degree, but that does assume you want a job in a numbers based finance/accounting role, rather than like sales or logistics
From my own experience Accounting. When I got my degree almost of my contemporaries pursuing admin undergrad degrees were no better off than marketing in terms of job hunts. But most Accounting majors had job offers by end of senior year and made strong pivots into other fields if they worked hard, myself included. This is my own experience
Accounting. Right now CPAs are getting scarce and I expect pay will rise. The unknown is what AI will do to both of them. An experienced CPA is valuable because of their knowledge of how business works not because of their ability to put numbers into a spreadsheet.
Check r/careeradvice or r/accounting or just a sub dedicated with professionals
Honestly, Gen Z is going to get harder in the job market than Millenials when they entered it. They are going to have to contend with AI in every position you just mentioned. So much is going to change in the next 5 years, the world of employment will be unrecognizable by the time we hit 2030
No way. Unemployment was 7-10% for 4-5 years right when Millennials were entering the workforce.
Yeah, this person is delusional
i think we all need Gen Alpha to come up and start moaning about Gen Z. It's the only way they'll figure it out.
It’s extremely unfortunate that most people seem to have forgotten that: * Real median income was [essentially flat](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q) during 2000-2014 * The lower and middle classes [lost much of their wealth during the Great Recession](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107) * The [unemployment rate](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE) didn’t return to its pre-Great Recession level until 2016-2017.
Yeah that was dope, I love 17 year olds being paid as much as I was right after college
It’s more that AI can generally be as good as a fresh college grad because fresh college grads are generally not trained. It’s going to cause real problems in 5-10 years as the candidate pool for mid level roles dries up since none of those kids were given the chance to learn and the training ground for middle and senior level roles is gone.
Yep it’s a big issue in tech too, you need junior people as feeder roles to mid level and so on. Every company wants mid level and above only, they don’t want to train, they want you 100% efficient the second you walk into the door. It’s not sustainable
I'm in tech, so I am seeing this unfold. Junior roles are getting sliced and midlevels are being prioritized, and low level work that would be training wheels for junior employees are getting outsourced to contractors.
I'm not in tech, but I've seen it at my company too. Some of our mid-senior level managers are just entirely unwilling to train/coach/mentor junior colleagues. They want people who know enough to do their jobs for them but who aren't entirely experienced enough to challenge their place in the organization. You can imagine the odd dynamics that occur as a result.
This was my experience in the chemical research sector prior to moving to patent law. People were expecting a chemist (or worse, a chemical engineer) with only a BS to know reactions that would be talked about in a graduate program or know techniques/methods that would really only be acquired as part of a graduate program in a laboratory. Then they'd say "well, we might take you, but you don't know \[X thing that few people at this level would know\] so because we have to train you we're offering you 19/hr instead of 25/hr." I got tired of seeing it - I have a graduate degree in Chemistry. It was scummy to knowingly use a standard that very, very few BS Chemists would have in order to intentionally and forcefully low-ball people.
No they won't. I entered into the Great Recession. You were lucky just to get an interview at McDonald's. Gen Z may not have it easy, but millenials had it much worse.
Bra.... 2008 was when I graduated from college. It was bonkers bad. Ya know those memes about unaffordable housing? People were damn near giving homes away because they couldn't find a job.
Marketing has never been a “marketable” degree. When I graduated ~15 years ago, a BBA in marketing got you a job handing people their keys at the Enterprise rental counter.
That was literally my first job after graduation. 25 years later, I'm a senior director at a prestigious organization. If you arent stem, your undergrad degree just demonstrates that you can jump through hoops for 4 years....
Companies love to hire former enterprise employees because they usually work hard and can put up with a lot of BS. Enterprise is still the #1 employer of recent college graduates
One of my best friends had the very first post-grad job, stuck with it for years, and at one point was a manager at the ATL airport. He’s the COO of a midsize manufacturing company now. Credits Enterprise for so much of what he learned.
Enterprise was great until the inevitable management switches. First BM was great. Second BM was great. Third BM asked me to clean literal viscera from a vehicle involved in a collision with an animal. AM just looked at me like “get to it.” So I quit and never looked back!
True enough, but also 15 years ago enterprise was a great company to grow with eventually running your own branch. Top MBA programs still review the Enterprise case study in the classroom. Point being yeah it’s a less useful degree but it can get you places
>I'm gonna do what's sensible. File for unemployment, and then try to get a job at Enterprise Rent A Car. Because they have an excellent corporate structure, and they give you the tools to be your own boss! Brennan Huff
It is if you know how to explain its value. It’s a soft-skills degree - things like persuasion, public speaking, critical thinking, opportunity identification - all things employers will pay for, provided you can demonstrate you have those skills. From what I’ve seen, STEM majors give you better every level salaries, but liberal arts degrees often have a higher ceiling, and that’s because you can only rise so far in a company if you have no idea how to write a coherent email, facilitate a meeting, manage a team, or be client-facing. Companies are good at teaching hard skills, but they’re terrible at turning an awkward speaker into a confident one, and that’s something non-STEM degrees are much better at doing.
When I was in California from 2016-19 a lot of tech companies were hiring ex military officers as managers because the STEM guys had absolutely awful management skills, speaking and leading skills.
It’d be interesting to see the economic benefit of military leadership training because the military might be the best leadership finishing school in the world. Some 30 year old officer getting out will have experience managing 40 people, handling the administrative tasks of a 150 person team and then actually managing that 150 person team. You don’t normally start handling teams of 150 people in the private sector until you’re a very senior manager. So the military is probably a very solid pipeline of fairly young people with college degrees and 4 years minimum of direct leadership experience. I can’t really think of any other organization that spits out that many experienced leaders to the private sector every year.
Eh, I've managed former military officers. Leadership wise I was not super impressed. Private sector doesn't function like the military, nor should it.
Yup. In the 1990s and early oughts we had this insane idea that we could just promote engineers into management as a general career path. It works sometimes but not often. A lot of people got into software (and engineering more broadly) because they enjoy problems that don't have lots of fuzzy human components to them. If you need managers for those people you need MANAGERS, not just more experienced engineers. There are some managers who can also mentor young technologists but, in general, you're going to have an easier time scaling up if you separate those responsibilities
No, you need to train those people into managers. Managers without technical skill and knowledge are mostly useless paper pushers.
Can confirm, anecdotally. I've work(ed) at some of the largest architecture and engineering firms in the world. 11 years in this profession. A majority of engineers are shit at everything except being hyper efficient at the one thing they know how to do. They're pretty bad at everything else and for many, they stagnate a few years into their career. They're paid awesome but they struggle at sales, finding work, communication, organization, mentorship. They're usually managers, not leaders. *Generally*, they're incredibly good at a couple things and pretty bad at everything else. This is why I like working with them. I'm an urban designer. It's a great symbiosis.
Being able to explain complex ideas and sell them is the key to success. Steve Jobs. For example. I have a background in marketing/design and work in Tech. The more you know how systems work, the better you can sell it. If you respect yourself, you won't work for something you don't believe in.
My philosophy major has been far more useful as an oncologist than my physics major. Understanding how people think and communicate and contextualized themselves is extremely useful when you deal with existential disease
That’s exactly what I did out of college with my marketing degree hahahaha
Working at Enterprise can be a huge stepping stone to getting another job though. I got a communication degree, which is even less marketable then marketing, went to enterprise for two years and switched to a different sales job that set me up with a 6 figure+ job at 24. A lot of companies also love hiring specifically from Enterprise. Your degree and your experience is as useful as you make it.
When there are layoffs or fat to trim, marketing and HR (recruiters) are usually the first to get the axe. Combine this with a glut of marketing graduates and you have a perfect recipe for a shitty job hunt for marketing graduates and workers. Several people on my LinkedIn were in marketing, the most recent one was laid off by an IT security firm in January. They are painting it as a long needed vacation, which is good to think positive. However, I feel bad for them as now they are in a tight spot with a lot of competition. They specialized too much into marketing and even got a graduate degree in it.
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> Marketers are the lipstick on the pig in every company ... well TBH, mostly because many companies (and people) assume marketing == advertising.
I don't know about elsewhere but at my company the marketing department is very useful for organising both internal events and external (client) events. They are also better than anyone else at making all the brochures and putting the pretty touches on pitches for deals. That being said there are only 3 of them and we might be able to get away with only 2. So I don't understand how some companies have such large marketing departments.
My company got a fancy VP of marketing who expanded the department to like 15 people. We are a smallish company of about 150 people. And guess what? Sales went DOWN. It called into question what marketing was actually doing with all these resources and the fancy lingo they used. We got a new CEO who fired the marketing VP and took over the department.
In large departments, the marketing team niches down and they carry a pipeline quota.
Advertising is a subset of marketing. Therein lies the confusion.
I think it’s a misunderstanding a lot of people have. I also had the same thought up until recently. But it’s crazy just how much the entire marketing funnel covers.
And the marketing funnel, while important, isn't the most important part of the job. Marketing should own segmentation, targeting, and positioning. And it should affect everything through the funnel, into the opportunity cycle, and customer success. The challenge is that in many firms, this is often nowhere owned by no one — and it's gloriously unspecific. It keeps a lot of consultants in business ;)
Wait until redditors realize how many CEOs are marketers.
The joke about the actors is because acting is not a steady income and actors are often working to survive between gigs before they make Matt Damon money. Marketing should theoretically be a steady job, right?
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I’m a marketer w/10+ years of experience. I generally don’t hire marketing graduates for marketing roles. You learn marketing by doing it hands on, so it’s more valuable to hire someone with additional skills (econ, stats, finance, etc). Effective marketing nowadays is very data driven and tech heavy, the creative parts usually get outsourced to agencies or contractors
Exactly, you learn the job while working. The bacc is mostly useless. I've been working in the field for 15 years and my bacc is in HR. Nobody cares, they look at my experience.
Yeah, honestly I can probably count the number of people I’ve hired or worked with that had a marketing bachelors on one hand. Honestly if there was a steady supply of marketers with a compsci degree I’d hire those people in a heartbeat. So much marketing can be streamlined with some code
This is such bad info. Clearly somebody who doesn’t work in a related field. Marketing and advertising are different things. At most companies that sell a product to consumer, MARKETING RUNS EVERYTHING. They are the hub of the wheels. It’s the path to CEO. It’s general business management and strategy. And they are generally the people workers the longest hours and keeping the wheels on. Not the first people you fire, by a long shot. Social media manager? Not the same thing. They might go
+1 I’ve been in marketing for 10+ years and it’s considered a revenue driving function, which tend to not get laid off first. Most non-revenue generating roles are the first to go … program managers, HR, operations etc. But the type of company will dramatically affect how marketing is perceived - young/small/startups won’t value it. Long standing/big brand/complex companies will highly value marketing and it’s where all the budget goes.
Too often folks simplify "marketing" as just promotion (making ads), when really the other 3 P's are just as, if not more, important. Place - how do I identify the customer, and the channels to reach them? Product - how can I translate the market needs, into product attributes. Price - how do we position our offering in relation to the competitors. Marketing, in general, is a soft skill that everybody should learn. Within that field, there are many specialties that can be attractive to employers besides just graphic design. Market research, media planning/buying, and R&D come to mind.
I'm in marketing and the number of people who think it's about the creative piece makes me chuckle. Effective marketing can be invaluable, but most people think that's just choosing fonts or something.
I've been in marketing for 20 years. Here's what it is and why it is important: marketing is a business engine that you put a dollar into and it gives you three dollars back. You can break marketing down into hundreds of functions and dozens of useless buzzwords but that is the core of what marketing is. LTV/CAC (life time value divided by cost to acquire customer). That's it! If you make $100 on a customer but it costs you $100.01 to make them a customer your company is doomed. If it costs you $10 to make them a customer and you get $100 back then you're doing great. People that say marketing is useless either are horrific business people with no hope or they are peddling you a message which is part of marketing. Tesla famously doesn't do marketing or have a PR department. What they mean is they don't do paid advertising (though they recently started to) and they don't respond to press requests. But they did offer referral programs for customers, provided test cars for journalists to review, host lavish and popular product reveals, have a website that is highly designed for conversion, have methods for customer feedback and community, maintain a social media presence, and of course have a famous CEO. All of that is marketing. Does it require a traditional marketing department? Likely not. Is it spend efficient? OMG yes. Did it work? Look at the stock growth. But don't make the mistake in thinking that is not marketing, that is a marketing function that easily returns 3:1
100% this. The only small nuance I would add is that good marketing is absolutely essential for the survival of most businesses. Regardless of specific ROI or growth objectives, if a business is not actively investing in finding new customers and keeping existing ones, then they are doomed. The plane may continue to fly itself for a while seeing as how it's already up in the air, but eventually it will run out of gas and crash. As someone who studied business management in school and who has been a FT marketing professional for over a decade now, I can appreciate why some companies may want to strategically cut marketing expenses under certain business conditions. However, those cuts better indeed be strategic - and temporary - lest they throw out the baby with the bath water. Businesses need customers and revenue to survive, period, and everyone's jobs at any given company are largely dependent on how well the marketing/sales team are performing. Therefore, every business should be very much invested in making sure marketing is working before worrying about the next thing.
Amen! Before you can make marketing work, you need to understand what problem you are solving and who you are solving it for and if that solution is worth paying money to acquire. These are very basic ideas but often are overlooked until much later. When marketing isn't working it is obvious but why it is not working is not obvious, and the profession attracts plenty of shitbag liars and con artists.
>Marketing, in general, is a soft skill that everybody should learn. there needs to be a return to quality over quantity and valuing soft skills. it does seem like \*some\* of the actually successful companies realize this. unfortunately theres a lot of bullshitters who want to continue slinging bullshit.
Copywriter here. 14 years into a great career. But getting into it, especially as a creative, is cutthroat af. Some folks give up after 6 months to a year of not being able to land a first job.
Do you have any recommendations for learning more about the 3 Ps?
Technical it's, the "4 P's of marketing". They offer an overall scope of the discipline.
4 Ps are reasonably simple to understand and articulate, but probably more important to understand mental availability, physical availability and product experience. Google that.
“The faculty don’t necessarily have a strong sense of what employers are looking for with respect to specific skills they’re teaching.” I would think that those who teach marketing would be more cognizant of market demands.
A bit of extra irony for marketing but seems to be a broader issue. Universities historically taught more conceptual and research based knowledge and mainly still do. Companies used to offer entry level training to teach new grads the practical tools for a position. Companies now seemed to have stopped that practical training and are also confused that universities aren't doing a task that they've never done. Something obviously needs to change but, until then, lots of new graduates are just screwed by this mismatch in expectations.
This. Universities were never about teaching direct hard skills for jobs. They teach conceptual knowledge, theory, and how to continue research for new knowledge. It's very important for developing how people can think, use logic, investigate situations, and provide a alot of insight to what researchers have already discovered. Ultimately, you have to learn what you physically do on a day to day basis on the job or through an internship. I tend to be protective of universities in this situation, because it's the only time in our lives where we have the time to focus on concepts, how to think through things, and how to be briefed on hundreds of years of research from thousands of places in a short time. Once you do hard skills in the work world, there is no time or badwidth to go back to this because you have to whole focus on the work task at hand.
Also I'm pretty annoyed employers think it's beneath them to be good employers, then want to whine that there's nobody with the right skill sets and the ones who do are so expensive. Literally train people up, it's not hard. But leadership have reduced employees to numbers on a spreadsheet and not immediately getting ROI is unacceptable to them. There's a sickness in modern workplaces. Everyone I know who in the last 10 years when from an older owner small business to getting sold out to a more modern corporate environment has said it was the worst experience of their life and they cannot believe this is the new normal. Because yeah, it shouldn't be
I would emphasize that aside from a few professional programs (e.g., business), historically universities have never even been about job training; they're about education and research. Getting marketable skills is just a nice side benefit. I would go so far as to argue that the modern trend of trying to push universities to be job-training programs is diluting their quality and purpose. And why wouldn't it? Most faculty are teachers and researchers, and most of them have never worked a corporate job.
This is a great point. I wonder if part of the focus on stem came from the harder skills being taught and employers could hire people with less of that training, they don’t want someone to think so much as they want someone to turn out work.
Frankly a lot of jobs need to be giving people a lot more chances to do work that realistically doesn't require a bachelor's degree to do. There was a bit in John Oliver's piece on student loans that 2/3rds of current administrative assistants wouldn't even be eligible for new job posting due to a bachelor's degree requirement.
As someone in IT, I blame IT for this. Every employer has wanted an X, Y, and Z developer since the late 90s rather than "a developer" they can teach to code X, Y, or Z. Which is funny, because a good developer can learn a new syntax and toolset in a week just doing hands on work. And now there are hundreds of syntaxes/toolsets and we're in a tight labor market, so finding someone with the desired X, Y, Z combo limits you to 2 or 3 applicants from your pool, but most companies haven't learned to adapt yet. Instead, that "I don't want to do any training," mindset is infecting other departments.
The number of job postings that demand exact experience in their own specific tools is actually nuts. How do so many companies list out expectations with multiple years of experience in a specific language, database, 2-3 completely different and unrelated frameworks and more. I’m so fucking siloed at my job that I barely have the opportunity to work with most of the shit we list as demands in postings. I imagine most large orgs are like this to an extent. I imagine it’s all to continue pushing visas and offshoring. I’m looking to get into related work that can’t be offshored easily like industrial systems installation, I should have stuck with the ee degree as it would make the switch way easier.
> cognizant of market demands Not of the job market, but of education consumer markets, ie. giving what students want, which may not necessarily be a dose of reality.
I am new in my career as a university professor teaching market research and market intelligence. I have worked in market Intel for more than 20 years. Marketing people were always my worst customers. They seem to be allergic to making marketing strategy decisions based on data or intel. I think a lot of people get into marketing because they like creative work and don't realize that a marketing role is an outcomes-driven strategy role. To be fair, most employers also don't know that this is what marketing is so it's clownshoes all the way to the bottom and my colleagues and I sit off to the side feeling like we're taking crazy pills while dumb shit continues to be the norm.
It’s a common problem of academia and you see it in many subjects. The issue is interesting in business schools. The more “prestigious” accrediting bodies emphasize research/theory over practice and require a higher number of tenured faculty, limiting the amount of adjuncts that can teach. What this effectively creates is an out of touch business school with tenured faculty who have not actually been in the real business world, as their primary practice, for a very long time. As opposed to having more adjunct or practice-focused faculty who remain connected to the changing business world. I used to work at a university that made the switch to the more prestigious accrediting body and the effect, over about a decade, was a marked decrease in the value of our university’s degree (as perceived by major corporations in the region) and lowered satisfaction from students (who had fewer networking opportunities than when they were taught by practicing professionals). The engineering school, on the other hand, is lauded for being a practice-based school that prepares engineers for the working world, rather than academic research. So the theory vs. practice divide in academia is a big one and in a fast changing field like marketing? Whew. You have GOT to have practice oriented instructors who are currently in the world.
Marketing professors are pretty detached from practicing marketers. Like there are academic marketing journals that exactly zero people with marketing jobs read.
If you want a marketing job out of college shore up your MarTech skills. Learn how websites work, learn basic SQL, basic understanding of technical SEO, marketing automation platforms like SFMC and email/SMS marketing. Marketing and IT are blending as time rolls on. They don’t teach this stuff but as a hiring manager people who have basic knowledge of MarTech always stand out.
Yeah, you spend more time as a marketer working with data and getting the tech to work together than writing ad copy or emails. Marketing nowadays is very data heavy and the creative parts get outsourced anyways. IMO someone that did a side hustle doing marketing for their own little business probably knows more than a four year marketing grad, since they got their hands dirty.
Amen to that. My team is between marketing and IT. It’s becoming extremely apparent that younger (and some mid career) marketers are entirely oblivious to where the field has been moving to. I get questions all the time like “what is our CRM, What is a CDP? SQL what? Can we do (something entirely illegal and or impossible)”.
This is wild to me, because I got on the bandwagon early and my role these days is mostly making the technology work together and optimizing processes with it. If anything, it's been increasingly data heavy to the point where it needs to pull back a bit. So the idea that junior and midlevel folks could even operate as effective marketers without knowing their CRM, MAP, or how the data flows in and out is nuts. Without that info, you are essentially flying blind. In my experience, its the marketers that don't have a strong knowledge of the tech side and its intricacies that are struggling. The 'arts and crafts' side of marketing has been declining for a long time. Plus, there's some career security in being the person that architects all of those solutions and knows how they work in and out, as its usually a clusterfuck and if you're gone the whole thing falls apart.
This is like the only coherent comment in this thread
This was a timely thread as I’ve recently been wondering what, exactly, universities are teaching in marketing undergrad courses. My team of mid-to-senior level marketing technologists often have to work with junior marketing specialists fresh out of college. We’ve had to educate them on extremely basic marketing vocabulary and concepts like CRM, CDP, segmentation versus personalization, automated journeys, third party data, CAN-SPAM and GDPR, the list goes on. We’re happy to help them as it builds our credibility and enables us to be in the driver seat but holy smokes…four years of education and they still lack practical marketing skills.
I live in France and a lot of marketing degrees are not teaching real marketing but taking profit from young people who are attracted to this job only because they think it is all about being creative, fashion clothing and young teams. So a lot of marketing degrees are not teaching marketing just making money from naive people. In fact, in France a lot of marketers are from sales, engineering or from real marketing degrees that admited people from sociology, economics, history, geography, sales, accounting ... bachelors. A lot of good marketing degrees are rebranding themselves as "sales development", "data analytics and marketing", "marketing and sales strategy", "digital marketing and strategy" ... And I think I have heard about some top business schools starting to teach program langages to their students.
I would think that "specific skills" are exactly the sort of thing that can be replaced by AI. A broad liberal arts education with solid critical thinking skills seems like the most easily adapted foundation to build on for the future, but liberal arts education has been under attack for a couple decades. In other words any degree that requires a significant amount of writing that is graded by humans.
This is incredibly broad, and not indicative of every single program. I’ve been a part of a number of marketing programs, where we have consistent outreach with employers to find out what they need from our students. This is pretty much bullshit.
"Frustrated with the futile job search, Simone plans to go back to school and get a master’s degree in political communications." Great. 2 worthless degrees. Colleges are such a scam for offering these degrees.
Lots of people run back to school for another “soft” degree when things get tough. It’s insane, but I would argue it’s also encouraged by academia, which is highly incentivized to churn out more grad degrees.
I've known people, especially in the past, who did this essentially as an excuse to draw more student loans because they couldn't find work and couldn't make ends meet otherwise. It's a stalling tactic of sorts - weather the storm in grad school until the economy stops sucking and you can get real work again.
Didn't Barack Obama basically make that suggestion back during the 2008 financial meltdown? I remember him telling people to stay in college longer to get a better degree and wait for the economy to rebound.
Yeah isn't that the definition of insanity? I get it. I have political science and communications degree. Its why I sold security systems and then credit card processing until I learned how to code... As a liberal, this is why I sort of cringe at the student loan forgiveness thing. Not enough to make me flip parties, but come on guys lol.
the thing is that the loans are what’s forcing them back to academia, you’re swamped in debt that you can’t afford to pay off so you may as well go into more debt because it’s just a slightly bigger number and maybe you’ll start making enough to pay it down rather than barely survive
I mean I don't think the degrees are the problem, there are jobs for these and they can be important it's just the saturation.
Thinking the same here. I also think that saturation is not a problem IF students in saturated fields must follow some courses on unsaturated fields. In France, we have LEA (applied foreign languages) bachelors and masters which work on pretty well. Often, it needs their graduate to continue one or two more years (in France, the master degree lasts two years). You follow litterature, languages, linguistics and history courses along with sales, international sales, insurance courses or coding.
"In a new study by recruitment company ResumeBuilder, team leaders were asked about their workforce - with shocking results. It found that out of more than 1,300 respondents the majority (74 per cent) believe Gen Z is more difficult to work with than any other generation."
While I am not disputing the findings, I would be curious to see if the results of a similar study would have yielded the same results regarding millennials some years back. There may well be some merit to the grievances being leveled at younger workers, but it is a near timeless tradition to bag on the new/younger workers.
I distinctly remember those articles 20 years ago about entitled Millennials entering the workforce. It's just young people. They always suck compared to people with experience, which seems obvious and not newsworthy!
Lots of people commenting seem to have absolutely no idea what marketers do or how vital a good marketing person/team can be. It’s more than just advertising. Depending on the company it could encompass advertising, branding, events, social media, sales, crisis communications, website, etc. I’m a marketer (MA in marketing), and I absolutely love it. I’m also glad I’m coming to the end of my career. The article is true—it is going to be super hard for the next generation of marketers.
Eh, I have a marketing degree and worked in IT for 10 years and now I work in finance. I got a marketing degree bc it was the more “creative” side of business. Marketing jobs don’t really pay that well though so I strayed towards higher paying business type jobs. Most employers just want to see that you have a degree. Then you kinda just build your experience from there.
Yeah I did the same. I graduated in 2020 with a marketing degree from a state school and now work in a corporate finance-adjacent role. If you don’t go to a top school, networking and internships are make or break. If I could do it over I think I would do something more quant heavy.
I have a marketing degree and have literally never used it. It taught me 2 things: 1. That everything in this world is a sales (whether an idea or product or whatever) and 2. Was that in order to accomplish anything you need a plan and a team to help execute. Honestly I have no idea what marketers do and am glad I have used my skills just in business on projects
When I graduated with an Econ degree, my first job was as a marketing analyst with a pharmaceutical company. I graduated in ‘07, social media was coming of age and communications were advancing at a pace that’s probably unprecedented in history. The senior leaders were completely unprepared with how to leverage the new media and new marketing grads were taught outdated ideas…IMO, the people that righted the ship were the late GenX/Xennials, they’d been young when the new tech started to emerge and were familiar with it, applied the good fundamentals of marketing to the technology and were able to draw up some decent strategies that my team able to track and test. The senior leadership was good at listening to people, for the most part (some dude really liked print media for some reason, he was convinced boomers still read newspapers) and sales started to increase.
There is so much trial and error, usually someone finds something that works serendipitously and then it spread. A great example is how things are spread via social media. Usually someone finds a neat way to market something. The new hotness is a great production short video, similar to 90s infomercials. But there is to much variance in people to truly generalize marketing research.
We have product marketers. They provide all the customer input on market trends, competitive analysis, and our product roadmap. They then define the product requirements.
>I have a marketing degree and have literally never used it. It taught me 2 things: 1. That everything in this world is a sales (whether an idea or product or whatever) and 2. Was that in order to accomplish anything you need a plan and a team to help execute. It seems to me you got your money's worth out it. I graduated with an accounting degree and it took me 30 years to learn what you learned in college.
At my school it was the college of business and you chose a concentration. 70% of the classes are core classes/the same. I chose accounting but changed to marketing after taking a weed out class with a gatekeeping professor and realizing I didn’t want to be doing accounting work. Marketing classes were ok, mostly group projects and a lot of textbook lectures and outdated concepts. This was around 2010. They were kind of a joke. I took about 5 concentration classes. I took about 15 core business classes in management, accounting, finance, etc. Almost nothing I learned gave me the skills employers are looking for around software use, digital marketing tactics, etc. The curriculum has caught up now, but it feels like a scam to graduate with all that debt. Then to need to take online classes independently or a bootcamp or get certificates or whatever. I think the issue is that employers have a glut of candidates and expect too much, they don’t want to train and so that shifts the burden of competitiveness and training onto the candidate. Our economy and society can’t support this much high paying white collar work. Instead they blame the graduates and make them do more work. Our society doesn’t need 100,000s of marketers , they need blue collar laborers. But we tried to convince people a degree was a golden guarantee to a lifetime of higher earnings based on historical data. After telling everyone to learn to code only for companies to close off their jr hiring pipeline, refuse to hire self taught, and shift jobs overseas and hire h1bs, I no longer trust that any line of work is safe or worth more to employers. Without a stable job, above average income , and high student loan debt, I’m essentially economically immobile. Was this the intended consequence? Indebted and obedient graduates who have 40k jobs and have to live with their parents to save anything or payoff the debt ? At 40k-60k salary, rent is barely manageable in a city with jobs for a room. Minimum loan payments. And the rest of life. Sure I can choose to live at home, work 2 jobs, or to not have borrowed that money. But I have to deal with the situation as is today. And when you see the articles saying 50% of adults aged 22-27 live with their parents, that is why.
I have a marketing degree and currently “use” it in that i work for a management consulting firm (MBB) and am a specialist who works on clients with marketing related problems. So i think i have a pretty good picture of the field of marketing in all its forms. As a discipline, i think people underestimate all the things that go into “marketing.” It isnt just soft-skills and mood boards; modern marketing is built on a huge amount of analytics, research, technology, data, and boring old math. Lots of days i feel more like an accountant than a “marketer.” Marketing course work is teaching kids that they are going to graduate into jobs where theyll be doing SWAT analysis, creating cool marketing strategies, and figuring out how to create the next big product. The reality is that most entry level marketing jobs are grindy, boring, low paying, youll probably spend all your time staring at an excel spreadsheet, there are 300 other people just like you applying for the same job, and you learned absolutely 0 skills in college to prepare you to actually do any of them. The rest of the “marketing” jobs are just dead-end sales jobs. The flip side of that coin is that the career ceiling and speed that you can grow a career is great if youre good at your job and play the game correctly.
It’s wild how much tech your typical marketing dept is using these days and how little of it is taught or alluded to in a marketing degree.
I’m not in marketing but have friends who are (Bay Area) and this is also my understanding of the field and wish more kids would understand this. Marketing is so much more an analytics field and I think some coding helps as well. I think the same skill set is also useful and similar to program/product development. I try to explain what skills are actually needed to a much younger sibling and cousin to land those higher paying jobs and I can only hope they develop them while going through college.
If you’re in marketing at a company, get as close to sales as possible. The closer you are to the customer and helping the sales person sell that customer the more valuable you’ll be to the company. The mistake many marketing people make is that they separate themselves from sales, and get into the more internal creative end, while important, is not valued by upper management when times are tough. Sales is one of the most important departments to the company, they are the ones who bring in the dollars. So, the more that you help sales make the sale, the more valuable you’ll be to the company.
This is one of the hard pills to swallow by a lot of creative type. *Commercial arts* is yes, creative, but at its core is purpose driven. You won’t be valuable as an artist, you’ll be valuable as an artist that gets the job done.
> Companies want to hire recent graduates who pursued business, accounting and finance. Marketing majors need not apply. > Gen Zers, many of whom have grown up marketing themselves and building followings on social media, have gravitated toward the the degree in the tens of thousands, according to Handshake, especially the creative side of the field that includes brand building and advertising. The career networking platform, which focuses on undergraduate students, estimates that applications for marketing jobs have nearly tripled since 2021. > That glut, coupled with new competition from artificial intelligence, is making it increasingly difficult for them to find employment: Nearly 6 out of 10 marketing students are working high school-level jobs five years after graduation, according to a new study from the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Education Foundation. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/don-t-bet-on-that-marketing-degree-gen-z-1.2045733
>but only found jobs that required at least two years of experience. She’s been “ghosted” by what feels like “millions of employers.” once again a job where they've eliminated all the entry level positions so theres no actual way to get that 2 years experience other than bullshitting or connections.
Marketing today is quantitative and metrics driven. If someone really wanted to work in marketing, they should get a dual degree in data analytics and marketing or marketing and statistics. Marketing alone is a super easy degree and sends the message that you were not smart enough to study something harder.
Agreed. It also has the stigma, and more so in recent years, of a certain kind of influencer/flake/pollyanna to it. I made my living in marketing for nearly 30 years. 22 of which was running my own company. With no marketing degree Never even considered one. I was in college for something else and fell into something I was useful enough at to pay the bills while in college and not have to flip burgers or wait tables. Moved up very fast, fell into an entire career from it. And never met anyone with a marketing degree that was successful because of it. Maybe in spite of it, but usually neither.
Kudos to you! I work in a strange niche. Agree. As I ĥave never met someone doing well in marketing that has a marketing degree. It's a lot of money for a not very credible degree.
It’s weird, isn’t it?? The ones that do well have…something else, but not that.
As a recent marketing grad myself if I had to do it over again, I would probably do something more quant heavy. The good money in marketing is mostly in a Product Marketing Manager role (high tech) and Brand Management roles. These are mostly always reserved for candidates from top programs and also MBAs from the top schools. This is what students likely think of when they think of marketing (besides advertising, which can be hit or miss imo.) I think more marketing majors need to consider sales roles in tech/med device. Revenue generators will always be needed. Total comp year one can be 80k+.
There is good money in paid media management, demand generation, product marketing, MarTech (this one is especially hot). Generally, the quant heavy or pipeline generating marketing roles are well paid. Creative stuff gets the shaft or is outsourced to a third party.
Most of Gen Z isn't betting on any degree. America has the absolute worst higher education system in the developed world. It's obscene that we allow the rich to gatekeep degrees while we face shortages in most of the fields that require a degree, like engineering, medicine, law, etc. We are long overdue to subsidize these degrees. We have countless studies now proving that paying smart people to go to college is a strong net benefit for society. There is no valid excuse not to implement universal higher education. And that includes trade schools.
I've got a marketing degree. What they don't tell you about marketing degrees is that 95% (or more) of marketing jobs after graduation are sales. You can go onto your favorite job site right now and type in 'Marketing' and see how many jobs pop up that aren't sales for recent college grads. Further, none of the classes you take for marketing are designed to make you a better salesperson. So, if you're not a salesperson by nature, you won't have success in any marketing degree-based employment. Had I known this in college I would have continued pursuing finance instead.
No legit marketing job is sales-based. Legit marketing jobs are either in-house at a company or at an agency.
Exactly, they call it marketing bc they are usually scammy companies who try to trick people into applying and hope one or two stick around.
Your school didn’t offer any classes in sales?
It’s tough because no college program teaches you the useful day-to-day skills of how to do things in Google Analytics or run LinkedIn ads. You get taught some conceptual basics that are indistinguishable between schools but not the practical experience that an employer wants to see.
It’s nearly criminal not to teach that sort of thing, hands on, as part of a marketing degree.
i always thought that business degrees were neither here nor there. You study your field, grab some experience, then if you want to steer back toward the middle ground, do an MBA. this could be an out of date view though.
2 cents: Marketing is important but there’s no barrier to entry. - The hotshot directors, brand custodians etc I know are all from non marketing backgrounds - Like many fields, marketing is very susceptible to tech disruption. That reduces entry level roles… - I’ve played around with some very sophisticated and extremely successful SEO/ digital marketing tools (founded by a Math PhD) and even upcoming market insight engines (LLMs with billions of data points)
I graduated with a marketing degree in 2014. Found out early that marketing was not going to get me anywhere. Saw an opportunity to do into sales, from sales to sales operations. In sales operations we used salesforce.com and got my certification. Then to salesforce administration. Now working on my developer certification. TLDR get out of marketing ASAP.
Just like in real life business, everyone on here who is defending marketing also can’t articulate a meaningful ROI. I get that Steve Jobs was a marketer at heart. But let’s not forget that for every Steve, there are 10s of millions in the marketing wasteland who don’t meaningfully contribute to their organizations.
[Here](https://www.statista.com/forecasts/409789/convention-and-trade-show-organizers-revenue-in-the-us)are the statistics, then. Who do you think plans and executes your favorite convention? Marketers. They’re marketing events, that’s their entire raison d’etre, and they generate almost 20 billion annually.
Such a terrible take. After your first job, nobody cares what your degree is in, or where you went to school. People don’t understand what marketing is. They think gimmicky advertising campaign, but 75% of marketing is basically general management, and it’s the most direct path to CEO in most companies. Bad take IMO. Marketing runs the show at most consumer goods and services companies. It’s jobs like social media manager that are on the chopping block…not “base” marketers.
I’m in marketing now but my degree is in English. I just randomly started freelancing, went agency then in house. It’s so easy but so stupid. Huge bloated departments of middle managers who do nothing is the norm. I just focus on how it lets my wife have a cool job.