Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

Dear Dazza

The short answer is yes, but you will find it harder to open vital doors. By the way do fill in your biography – if your moniker is not Dazza then this address looks silly!

In the UK at least, a degree in marketing will not automatically get you a job in marketing, be it for a corporation or an agency. It will however make it about 50-60% easier for you to get onto an interview and assist with propelling you to the shortlist if, all other things considered, you might not be there due to competition of similar skills and attributes exhibited by your fellow candidates.

Perhaps you could enlighten us to your general situation. What are you doing work-wise and how much of your time does it consume? The CIM course, certainly offers a worthwhile qualification which will be noticed on your CV. Without relevant experience, however, without a degree, it will not get you to interview if you have no background.

Taking a distance learning degree, say with the OU or one of the many Universities which now offer them is a hard slog and will take up to 8 years. Will you and will potential employers feel at ease hauling you in with the graduate intake for a graduate job-I doubt it – you will be too experienced and possibly already earning too much.

However, studying for a degree and a CIM qualification will be seen by HR officers as evidence of your work-ethic and desire to improve you value to their company.

Sales Managers would, by and large have you work in a relevant sales job for a year or two and show your in-job qualifications – 24 months of above target earnings.

Marketing Managers will likewise look for proof that you can apply your theory – a degree doesn’t prove anything in these fields apart from an ability to do research and work things out from scratch.

Study combined with relevant employment is therefore to be commended. Over the years I have recruited hundreds of sales and marketing people and my criteria were always at variance with HR. I also interviewed more than HR recommended because I wanted to understand a candidate’s attitude and ability to sell me their background.

If you want to judge the real world value of marketing degrees, just have a look at some of the twaddle asked on this forum, by people who are studying for a BA, Masters or and MBA. Given the level of initiative they exhibit and the poverty of insight within their existing skills, they would be better off doing something which does not require the intellectual rigour of a degree.

I would say therefore, go with the CIM course – you will learn a lot of irrelevant piffle, but by the time you finish, you will be able to utilise techniques studied on irrelevances, on tasks which impact on aspects of your potential job.

If you can afford the cost and the time, also enrol for the distance learning degree, but be sure to include sought after disciplines in its structure where there are shortages of imaginative, skilled people, such as statistic, brand management, applications of IT and specific marketing subjects which interest you such as CRM and process management.

Learning management skills in a degree course is about as useful as training goldfish to fly. You might succeed (If you understand the science of very small probabilities) but they will die due to being out of the water!

Good luck, fill in your Bio and provide some more details and perhaps then some other people will come back on this.

Steve Alker
Xspirt

PS I took the CIM exam course in the 1980’s and gave up because 40% of it was irrelevant to my B2B marketing job and I didn’t want to end up flogging cornflakes.

Instead my Chairman paid for 6 month of one to one tuition by the head of Marketing at Ashrigg College. Ironically, I am now eligible through my work to become a fellow of the CIM, but I haven’t done so. I don’t need to – this forum has more members than the CIM and, myself excluded, some of the finest minds in Sales Marketing and Academia.

Best wishes again and please come back to us.