Don’t Underestimate the Role of Marketing in Your Career
We have all heard about college courses people had to take, but took away nothing from the course that they could use in their careers or life. Not so with marketing courses. No matter your career path, the concepts in JU marketing courses will help you!
We also know of students whose total focus is to get a diploma, a piece of paper that they think will guarantee them a better career. The sad reality that these students eventually face is that careers aren’t shaped by diplomas, but by personal initiative and hard work. Loving your profession helps too.
When I started as chief marketing officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida in 2002, I polled the marketing staff — all 157 of them — to find out how many had marketing degrees. Only 3 had. The other 154 people (me included) majored in something besides marketing, but ended up there because of their creativity, their analytical skills or because they are leaders and choose to be front and center in the business. The academic major most often cited by the other 154 was “management.” If you are a management major, you have about a 1-in-3 chance of ending up in marketing instead.
Even if you don’t become a marketer, you will work with marketers. Successful businesses today require cross-functional teamwork and solution fertilization. The more you know about the functions and framework of marketing, the more likely you will be to influence marketing outcomes and help your company win in the marketplace.
If you’re not a marketing major still consider how important taking marketing courses can be to your career and then step up to the challenge. As a marketing student, consider how you will retain and put into action the knowledge to which you are exposed in a marketing course. People learn best through interaction with others, by experimenting, putting concepts into practice and by failure requiring restarts. To ensure learning, set a goal to engage, to participate in classroom and on-line discussion and enthusiastically embrace an opportunity to put it into action in a project or simulation. In my classes, I award a significant portion of student grades based on participation in class and discussion boards. And all exams are on-line. Therefore, they are open-book, but require students to “think through” the questions to find THE BEST ANSWER (not perhaps the only correct answer). This approach seems to be antithetical to the testing experience of most students who have become comfortable memorizing answers for closed book exams. However, employing techniques at JU such as cerebral exams and discussion engagement help students retain the most important concepts and principles that will, in turn, help them throughout their careers.
John Kaegi // Executive in Residence, Davis College of Business
