Marketing Degree Not Required
Repeat after me, please: Being a marketer does not require a marketing degree.
Just like there are thousands of ways to approach any marketing challenge, there are endless possible ways to build a marketing career. A real one. One that makes an impact on the industry, builds brands that matter, and maybe even helps change the world.
And yet, this idea that marketing (or business) degrees are required for building a successful marketing career persists.
And that’s not just among hiring managers in traditional industries or among academics whose livelihoods depend on people buying (at very steep prices) into the idea. It persists among a lot of marketers, too.
What’s the problem with thinking a marketing degree is the only way to be a real marketer?
Hardly anyone does what they went to school for these days.
Only 27%of college graduates work in a field related to their major. So, how does this work for people who went to school for one thing, and then want to go into marketing? Are we all supposed to keep going back to school over and over again every time we switch careers, racking up four-year degrees or masters’ degrees like candy?
Of course not. We spin our experiences into career shifts. We do the work. We learn how to do it better.
Marketing is always changing. So how long is a degree even relevant?
What will a traditional academic marketing degree teach you that will still be useful in a year? Five years? How about 20 years?
Mastery, especially of emerging elements of the profession, can’t be demonstrated by a degree. A marketing degree earned 20 years ago would lack any basis in inbound, SEO...even data-driven marketing analytics would be completely different today; that degree would only be marginally helpful.
When I started in marketing, email was relatively new. Google was relatively new. People were just starting to figure out that they actually needed websites. Like, real websites. I was here for the inbound marketing shift.
There was a time before blogs. There was a time before facebook ads. There will be a time after both of them.
Case in point:
So what was learned in that coursework? How to plan campaigns with methods that will no longer be relevant in a decade? Or maybe, you’re learning business and marketing examples from bygone eras and totally devoid of context and purpose, in an old definition of business that totally ignored collateral damage to humanity or the planet. (It’s ok to learn from those things, as long as you know what you’re learning and are conscious about where it’s problematic.)
By measuring a marketer’s value by their degree, especially senior-level marketers who’ve been in the profession for a decade or two, we’re measuring decades-old knowledge and assuming it translates to mastery of emerging trends and the ability to be forward-thinking.
Most marketers don’t have marketing degrees.
A 2019 survey found that 54% of professional marketers had not studied marketing. Does that mean that 46% of us are really bad at this? That 46% of us should stop doing the things we’ve learned to do, by actually doing them in real life, because that’s now how marketing works? We need to learn the “right” way to do it first?
Remember back when Rand Fishkin put up this twitter poll? (It’s ok if you don’t.) As unscientific as a twitter poll is, his following is large enough that the results brought to light a reality in the profession: most of us studied things other than marketing in our academic lives.
We’re former filmmakers, musicians, designers, English majors....I mentored a filmmaker-turned-marketer this year. She’s building a great career. One fast-growing startup after another. She clearly knows what she’s doing. And she had imposter syndrome.
For two reasons. She didn’t have a traditional marketing degree. And she’d been told by more than one person that she needed a degree, and she needed to have “real executive presence.” (I’ll tackle that old-school executive presence thing another day.)
That same week, I mentored two guys who both had business degrees and had studied marketing. They’d landed their first startup jobs. And they fully admitted they didn’t know what they were doing. They were buying lists and spamming people and then wondering why their email campaigns weren’t driving new business. They were amazed at my lessons in being timely, relevant, and useful in their marketing, in not arriving in someone’s inbox unless you’re invited, in connecting and convincing rather than demanding.
Those are things I learned over the course of 20 years of actually doing the work. Somehow, no one taught these lessons in the college marketing classes these two had completed.
And yet, so many marketing job descriptions still use that tried and true line, “marketing degree required, MBA preferred.” Why? (For real, if you’re in that camp, I want to hear from you. Let’s talk about this.)
Still not convinced? Let’s look at some examples.
Are you thinking, sure, maybe most marketers don’t have marketing degrees, but to be really successful or really senior or really know what you’re doing at a really awesome brand you have to have a really solid degree?
The CMO at Salesforce has a bachelor’s in chemical engineering. The CMO at HubSpot has a BA in journalism. The CMO at Drift has a BA in design.
There are also people making an impact on the field without working in-house. Margo Aaron has a psychology degree. And has taught thousands of people how to do marketing and sales better and is teaching The Copy Workshop for Akimbo. Adrienne Barnes is the founder of Bestbuyerpersona.com and has an English degree. And, um, of course, Rand FIshkin…also no MBA, didn’t even finish his Bachelor’s, and I think he’s kind of done ok.
Having studied marketing does not mean having a degree in marketing.
We *all* study marketing. Every day. By doing it. By learning how to do it better as we go. Even the ones who have the *right* degrees.
And formal training, as some academics would call it, no longer applies only to accredited undergrad & grad degrees. Training can take a lot of forms. And in marketing, that training is probably only useful if it happened yesterday. In fact…
Everything I know, I learned on the job or through nontraditional means.
I’m not stacking myself up as being on par with those leaders I mentioned earlier. But...I have 20 years of marketing experience behind me. That includes leading marketing in nonprofit, enterprise, and startup settings. (And we will save the b2b vs b2c vs b2b2c marketer debate for another day, but the brands I’ve led span those, too. Marketing is marketing.)
I ran a solo consulting practice building brand strategies and ideal customer personas for a wide range of clients (I found my niche working with tech founders who’d hit a growth ceiling).
And...I don’t have a single business- or marketing-related degree. I have a bachelor’s from Berklee College of Music. (There are things I learned studying music the first ~20 years of my life that have helped my marketing career. But, the classes I took on sightreading basslines don’t really contribute to building brand strategies.)
In addition to just doing the work, I’ve learned through really valuable resources outside of traditional academia.
I learned through programs like Seth Godin’s altmba, Dan Martell’s SaaS Academy, MIT Executive Education’s digital marketing analytics course, and even a spate of mediation and negotiation courses when I wanted to switch to a career in mediation -- but the secret is all of that stuff is about understanding people’s motivations and how to convince them to move in a certain direction, so it’s all marketing.
There’s a reason why so many people look to HubSpot Academy, CXL, Skillshare, Udemy, and on and on. Because they need to learn, from people doing the work now, what works now. In real life.
The nature of this fast-changing profession mixed with the ever-evolving online course world is making bootcamps and other nontraditional certifications both more valuable than traditional degrees and more useless. How? The good ones are great. But there’s a wide spectrum between useful and usury.
I’m not saying no one should ever get a degree in marketing. If you want one, get it. But don’t require it as the price of entry.
I’m also not suggesting that people shouldn’t go to college, or that we shouldn’t value traditional higher education degrees.
There are plenty of marketing leaders who are making an impact on the profession and their industries and do have marketing degrees or marketing and business degrees. In their experience, their degrees are useful to them. There’s a difference between useful and necessary. Marketing and business degrees can be useful to some. They are not necessary to all.
I mean, yes, the Godin has an MBA. And a degree in engineering & philosophy. But also, of course, some of the world’s most impactful founders -- even in marketing tech -- don’t have a bachelor’s degree at all or don’t have a marketing-related one. And they’ve kind of done ok. But they wouldn’t get past most hiring software algorithms.
Having a bachelor's degree helped me get my foot in the door with my first job, even if the degree wasn’t related to the work. But, what also got me through that first door was a cover letter that showed great cultural fit, effective communication skills that could be sharpened, and the ability to write with intention and passion.
I ended up raising more money every year than had ever been done before through the campaigns I ran, and reinventing the flagship campaign in a way that was so effective, they still use it nearly 20 years later. What worked so well there. Without a marketing degree.
If I’d had a marketing degree, maybe I would’ve known that I was using story-driven marketing and the identifiable victim effect. I didn’t. What I knew was that what we were doing wasn’t working. And that my idea was the right thing to do, or at least worth trying. Because I understood how people work. I understood that piling on to people about the massive scale of human rights issues would be overwhelming and leave people feeling helpless and definitely like putting change in a box would be almost literally a drop in the bucket. But tell them one story about one person and how their life was changed by our work, and you’ve made a connection.
Was my work any less effective because I didn’t describe it, or even understand it then, through academic terms? The numbers would have something to say about that.
So, especially in marketing, let’s not require post-secondary business or marketing education as table stakes.
It’s a start, the way some employers have started adding to their job descriptions things like, “If you want to work here, we want to hear from you. If you don’t fit all of the qualifications, please apply.”
But I still see way too many “marketing degree required, MBA preferred.” And I know those hiring software algorithms are weeding out the people who don’t fit.
That mindset is not only holding back your brand. It’s holding back the whole profession.
With all of these nuances, how’s a startup founder to decide what marketing talent to hire, and when?
I’m talking to founders about how they’re struggling with this or solving for it. And I’m exploring a potential side hustle that could solve it for you. I can help you figure out who to hire, how to attract the right talent with the right job description, and how to be sure your new marketing exec. is set up to succeed from day one.
Want to my help? Contact me to talk about options & pricing for solving your marketing talent needs.