What does it take to work in marketing: skills, knowledge or experience?

By: Professor Merlin Stone

Before choosing St Mary’s to study marketing, you might want to know a bit more about how we do our marketing teaching.

We base our courses, assessments and placements on the answers to some very big questions:

• What are the most important things you need to be able to do if you get a job which involves marketing?
• Do you need skills, knowledge or experience?
• Do you need contact networks?
• Do you need a particular view of the world, inspiration or some magic ingredient?
• Do you need the same things as other managers, or is there something special about what you’ll need in marketing?
• Do you need to be on top of the latest digital developments?

It’s easier to ask such questions than to answer them. But they are very important questions. So, let me try to answer them!

If you go into marketing, you’ll need the skills that nearly all managers need, such as flexibility, creativity, a positive approach, problem-solving skills, time management skills, the ability to work well in a team and even lead it, project management skills, self-confidence, and overall a healthy approach to life.

However, in some areas, you’ll need to be particularly good. You’ll need to be able to communicate, in words (whether on paper or spoken). You’ll need to build networks of valuable contacts. You’ll need to become customer-oriented, to put yourself in the position of customers. You’ll need to be able to cope with the stress of trying to manage people you can’t control. You need to know how to look at your organisation from the outside in. And you’ll need to learn how to use social media to further your interests and those of your organisation.

You’ll also need to bring together skills and knowledge from different areas. For example, if you are asked to plan a new venture, you should be able to produce a financial plan for it, probably on a spreadsheet, perhaps using it to predict the results of different assumptions e.g. about prices or the effectiveness of your website.

Depending on the job you get, you may not need all the latest digital skills, but you will almost certainly need to be aware of trends and to know how and where to acquire skills.

We’ve tried to build our answers to these questions in our marketing courses. We try to ensure that the work we ask you to do is not purely theoretical, but instead focuses on how you would use your learning in practice. We ask you to use different approaches to present your work, not just essays, but blogs, wikis, infographics and other techniques.

We know you’ll produce your best work if you can focus on what interests you. So, we try to ensure that you work on products, markets and companies that you love or respect or that intrigue you. Some of our students work on ideas that they want to develop themselves after university, or that they are already working on. Life is too short to waste your time working on things that are not your passion. Although we can’t guarantee that all your marketing work with us will suit you exactly, we can certainly guarantee that some of it will!