Marketing career pathways: How to get ready for your first marketing job

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Getting your first marketing job can be challenging – especially in a crowded market and without much experience. But there are ways to set yourself up for success. After all, all of us start with no experience at some point.

Of course, before jumping in, it’s good to evaluate whether or not marketing would be a good career for you, which you can reflect on in one of my three marketing series books – “Is marketing a good career?”

In this article, I discuss the following:

• How to get a marketing job with no experience
• Is digital marketing easy?
• How to work in marketing
• Entry-level marketing job description
• Marketing career pathways

How to get a marketing job with no experience

I go back to when I was finishing my studies at the University of Iowa and wanted to start my career in journalism. The overwhelming question was, “But what experience do you have?” Now, mind you; they weren’t asking if I had interned at the New York Times or anything fancy like that. But, some kind of experience is necessary.

In those days, before digital content, I got experience and references anywhere I could.  I volunteered for nonprofits to interview folks and write stories for their printed newsletters. Anyone that needed any work close to journalism done, I was talking to them. At one point, I set up a Geocities website to highlight some pro football content. Yes, it was all done to move from no experience to a little bit of something I could talk about.

Of course, today, there are other options as well:

• Start a blog and have a strategy for it. Then talk about what you’ve done with it when applying for jobs.
• Target your perfect employer(s) with ads and other outreach. After all, that’s a big part of marketing: Reaching your target audiences and helping convert them.
• If you are in college, consider working with departments and helping with their digital marketing – even if it has to be unpaid for a semester, it can be a resume builder.

There might be jobs that would consider hiring somebody with absolutely no experience, but it’s hard to win out against an applicant pool with more experience.

Read next: Should you be biding your time in content ops?

Is digital marketing easy?

Anything that people aren’t doing themselves can seem easy. That’s just a blog post; how long can it take to write? Launching an ad campaign just takes a moment in my head! Once you get in the swing of things, digital marketing becomes easier, but it’s never easy. Markets shift, platforms evolve, and audience attention is always a moving target.

That’s something to keep in mind looking for that first marketing job:

• What are your core skills?
• How do they help drive digital marketing results?
• What steps do you take to keep learning and evolving?

How to work in marketing

To even start in marketing, consider practicing marketing, learning, and connecting with the right people (easy enough now with social media). Reach out to leading marketers at the companies you want to work for. But it’s important to get the right experience as well. Consider an internship or highlight your own experience publicly on social media or a website.

Follow my tips on setting up a good LinkedIn profile for more.

Also, learn new technologies – like artificial intelligence – in a meaningful way to help you stand out from the crowd.

Entry-level marketing job description

There has been a trend to ask everyone to do everything. But the reality is the wider a marketer goes, the more shallow they can go in specific areas of marketing strategy and implementation. Entry-level jobs, however, can offer a good starting point to learn a lot of areas in marketing. For example, in journalism, new reporters used to start as general assignment reporters. That would give them experience in a variety of areas.

As you are getting started, look at jobs that offer a breadth of experience but also signal management support. It’s impossible to learn all these tasks and strategies without support and mentorship. Keywords in job descriptions might be: “This role supports our email marketing efforts through xyz.”

Read next: Stop the scroll: Mastering the new job announcement on LinkedIn

Marketing career pathways

Career pathways are important, but I wouldn’t recommend making that the most important piece in the first job. After all, many marketers switch jobs every few years anyway. So, if the first job offers some great learning experience, but there are no marketing career pathways after, that pathway can just be followed at another company.

I discuss at length in “Is marketing a good career?” how to think about career advancement. Consider what you want to achieve. Do you even want to lead a marketing function, and would you be good at it, for example? So it’s something to think about as you embark on getting your first marketing job.

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