When you don’t have specific marketing experience because you’ve spent the last 3+ years on the science, there are skills and attitudes that can indicate to employers that you’d have the potential to be a great marketer. These are the sorts of things you can deliberately practice throughout your degree – especially during your final year project and any time you get to work with others in a team.
Over the last 20 years, I’ve hired and worked with many marketers and the best ones have some fundamental characteristics in common – characteristics that you can identify, develop and practice before you are in a marketing role. Here are the top 5 things I look for...
1. Excellent Project Management
You have to be highly organised to be a marketer. That’s because you’ll have lots of projects and activities running in parallel, little control over deadlines and it’s all about actually DOING the ideas to get results. The best project managers know that this level of organisation doesn’t happen by chance. They create and adopt systems and tools that enable them to stay in control and adapt when things don’t go as planned. They are accurate about time and how much of it tasks take. And they understand the detail so they can proactively identify the sequence of events and any flexibility associated with it
2. Energy and Enthusiasm for the Science
The best marketers are the ultimate champions of the product, service and company. This is the passion that drives ambition, creativity and confidence in a marketer. To have this level of belief – the sort of belief that can’t be trained – it starts with an overall energy and enthusiasm for science. One of the first clues I look for is how well someone has performed in their degree and their final year project – not only as a sign of intellect but as a sign of commitment to the science. Because that commitment comes from a deeper, more emotional place of motivation.
3. Strong Writing Skills
The vast majority of marketing strategy and activity depend on the creation and curation of content. If you can demonstrate strong writing skills and experience in writing 1000-word articles and succinct social media posts in an engaging way, this will mean you can be operational from day 1 and save the employer from outsourcing to content writers.
4. Proactive about Engaging with Others
...both externally and within the team. The best marketers have the ability to put themselves in the shoes of others and proactively connect with them in a way that empathises with their situation and builds rapport. There are many ways that this skill can be developed and practiced during your degree and extracurricular activities such as sport, societies and managing social media accounts. With point 2 above in mind, the Marketer needs to be the ultimate champion not just in their heads but with other people.
5. Strong, Objective Analytical Skills
Excellent marketing is as much about objective analysis as it is about creativity. Anyone can be creative but the real skill in marketing is to be creative in the right direction with the right sorts of people in the right place at the right time. This requires objective analysis of the customer and their behaviours. It also requires the ability to identify assumptions and subjective opinion both retrospectively in response to input received but also proactively so that market research projects or surveys are designed to minimise subjectivity.
But above all, there is nothing like bringing some real evidence to the interview table that demonstrates your aspirations to start a marketing career – evidence that you’ve researched the latest thinking, you’ve practiced what you’ve learnt in any way you’ve been able to create for yourself and that you are willing to take responsibility for learning this new subject. Because marketing can absolutely be trained, you simply need to show you’ve started.