Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

Hi Hemakanth,

Always great to interact with a student wanting to upgrade! As a professor and consultant in quantitative marketing, my advice would be:

1) excel in a specific market research technique, which is tough to master for your colleagues. You need to find this for yourself, building on your current strengths and interests (mine is dynamic system modeling)

2) specialize in a specific market research topic, such as online click attribution, paid search optimization, return on marketing investment, ... Personally, I like to jump on a field that is just emerging to make an impact

3) certifications are less worthwhile than on-the-job experience at this point, unless the certification comes from an organization known as an expert in your chosen tool and/or substantive area

4) lots of marketing professionals,including myself, are open for joint writing of papers with distant co-authors. Once you have decided on 1 and 2, it should be easy to identify the movers and shakers to contact

Good luck!

Dear hems_anj,

Great advice from Koen.

You might want to contact the major poll and market research companies to figure out what certification they look for. Likewise, contact the Market Research Association https://www.mra-net.org/ and Marketing Power https://www.marketingpower.com/Pages/default.aspx to see what resources they have.

I hope this helps.

Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA