October's Expert: Randi Martin
Randi holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing and has been helping to match Marketing & Creative professionals with great jobs much of her career. Having both the marketing education foundation and years of successful staffing experience she has helped marketing professionals across all disciplines of Marketing find great consulting opportunities they can get excited about! Since joining Aquent over 9 years ago, Randi has made more than 1500 successful matches!
Question: I'm a senior marketing major and I'm not exactly sure what kind of marketing I want to get into. Marketing is a very broad major and I was wondering if you had any information on different types of marketing careers?
Answer: I was also a Marketing Major at Penn State University and can totally relate! That “where do I go from here” feeling can be overwhelming but there are tons of great resources and learning tools out there that can help guide you.
There are a wide variety of resources regarding the wide variety of marketing career avenues you can choose to pursue.
Among the ones I find most helpful are:
The AMA.org Career Management section>http://www.marketingpower.com/Careers/Pages/default.aspx
Aquent.com’s resource page which includes salary surveys and other helpful white papers and tools.>http://aquent.us/learn_more/resources/
About.com has a good deal of content regarding Marketing Careers and a great general overview>
http://marketing.about.com/od/careersinmarketing/u/marketingcareers.htm
The Quick MBA. Great place to learn more about Marketing by category/topic >
http://www.QuickMBA.com/marketing/
MarketingJobs.com Career Articles Section. Here you will find hundreds of career and job related articles and blogs on a variety of topics including networking, interviewing, salary negotiation, diversity and career development > http://careers.marketingjobs.com/Articles/default.asp
My other suggestions would include getting involved your local alumni groups and networking groups such as the AMA, BMA chapters etc. Members in the area where you’ll be job searching can often give you inside scoop on local companies. Job descriptions can also be of some help in digging down into what’s expected of a professional within a certain marketing function. Try searching a site like indeed.com by category and read a few job descriptions, you can learn a lot from them and hopefully get a feel for where your interests, personality and skills will fit best!