Question
I’m interested in expanding my career outside of my current employer, but most of the job posts I find require a 5-year minimum marketing experience. In August, I will have 4 years experience with my current employer, and I already have 2 years of IMC experience for my MS.
Is the 5-year requirement something that will hold me back, or can I use both my current employment and MS experience together to leverage that 5-year mark? I want to consider my options now, because I don’t think my skill sets are being utilized in my current position and any opportunity for upward mobility seems stagnant. Silly question?
Answer
Not a silly question at all. In fact, I seem to get a number of questions on this same general theme: How do I land a job when I don’t have the experience they are looking for? When a company posts a job ad, they use “years of experience” as a way of weeding people out because, frankly, in the Web-era posting a job ad means that you are inviting an avalanche of resumes into your life. Anything you can do to discourage applicants before they hit “send” will make your life as a hiring manager or recruiter easier.
So, you don’t have to take the “years of experience” number literally, but you do need to wonder what the company is really asking for. In other words, what can you assume about someone who has spent 5 years in the “real world” of marketing? Beyond the fact that doing anything for 5 years means you’re relatively serious, consider that a lot can happen in 5 years. Not only can you run a lot of campaigns, write a lot of copy, generate a lot of reports, etc., but you can also meet a lot of people, encounter a lot of challenges, make a lot of mistakes, and, ideally, solve a lot of problems. In other words, you can gain “experience,” which is different from knowledge, because you have to live through it.
On this level, then, the amount of time in question is really just shorthand for “doing a lot of different things.” Of course, spending two years doing marketing at a start-up may give you more opportunity to do a lot of different things than spending 4 years in a large, established corporation. The critical thing is determining what the company is looking for -- variety and complexity of projects worked on, size nullof professional network, or whatever -- and then positioning the experience you do have in a way that fits that need.
Matthew T Grant, PhD
Minister of Enlightenment
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