Matthew T. Grant, PhD
Minister of Enlightenment
AQUENT
Question
I want to make a career transition our of engineering to technical marketing. I worked for 5 years as a hardware engineer and recently switched to pre-sales engineering. However, I want to know what I should do to make a transition to marketing. Eventually someday I would like to be VP of Marketing. I know this is a lofty goal for someone that is 28, but I would like some career advice on how I should proceed to do this.
Answer
It’s always important to have a goal and, frankly, VP of Marketing doesn’t strike me as too lofty. In fact, we’re experiencing such an unprecedented convergence of marketing and technology right now your engineering background will probably turn out to be a real asset.
Of course, the devil is in the details and I think that you’ll have to define your goal a little more precisely before you get there. Specifically, what sort of organization do you want to be VP of Marketing for? If you want to work at a big company like IBM, you’re probably going to have to get an MBA and product manage your way up through the ranks. On the other hand, if you want to work for a small start-up with a handful of products or fewer, then you might actually be able to get that title right off the bat.
That is, it all depends on what you want to be doing as VP of Marketing. If you want to be overseeing strategy for a large product line or brand, that will require following a more traditional career path into an established company. If you want to play a lot of different roles and steer the development of the organization itself, then you should lean towards the start-ups.