MBAs with a background in marketing can quickly go from student to boss.
If graduates work in product management or brand management, popular career tracks for marketing professionals, for example, “it’s an opportunity to manage a business,” says Hillary Schubach, who worked in marketing before and after graduating from Harvard Business School. She has worked as a brand manager for Kraft Foods and now helps MBA applicants get into school.
Brand managers may have to manage a budget, analyze data for how a product is selling, figure out how many people will buy a product and do supply chain and demand planning. “It’s a role in which you’re wearing a lot of hats,” Schubach says. And, as history has proved, there’s always a new product to sell or market, which gives employers a reason to always keep marketing professionals on their radar.
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In 2015, 54 percent of employers plan to hire business school graduates this year to fill marketing and sales jobs, according to a May report from the Graduate Management Admission Council. Those numbers remain consistent from 2014.
Most business schools offer classes in marketing, but some may be a better fit than others for prospective students interested in a marketing career. Applicants should look at a variety of criteria when deciding which school to attend.
Students who graduate with an MBA and have focused their studies on marketing can work as pricing specialists or in marketing research, health care marketing or international marketing, says Praveen Kopalle, a professor of marketing and the incoming associate dean of the MBA program at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.
One way applicants can understand how equipped a school is to prepare students for these roles is to review a school’s employee statistics for alumni.
“Look at the placement,” says Kopalle, who, along with Tuck students, spearheaded Tuck’s first marketing symposium in May.
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Aspiring MBAs can ask the school what kind of marketing companies recruit at the school for summer internships and full-time jobs, Kopalle says. They can also ask to speak with someone from the school’s marketing club to get a sense of how active that club is, he says.
Juan Giovaneli, a June graduate of Tuck, was part of the marketing club that helped Kopalle organize the school’s marketing symposium, which brought together top leaders in the industry and Tuck alumni to discuss marketing strategies in a digital world. In the fall, Giovaneli will be working in marketing for Colgate-Palmolive.
He encourages prospective students to see if the schools they’re considering offer classes that will strengthen them in areas where the applicants are weak.
“I didn’t have a strong background in quantitative courses,” says Giovaneli. After completing core classes, he made a concerted effort to fix this skills gap.
“I focused on those electives that were as quantitative as possible for me, in terms of marketing,” he says.
For Giovaneli, the school’s electives offering helped him to become a better candidate for marketing jobs, he says.
“The amount of electives that you have here at Tuck are really great to prepare yourself to go into a marketing position, such as assistant brand manager or brand manager,” he says. The school offers classes in global marketing, pricing strategies and tactics, sales promotions and related subjects, say Kopalle.
Speaking with current students is often a sure way to find out if a school caters to students interested in marketing, experts say.
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“You’d want to ask them how they enjoyed the classes. Were they learning material that they can take back to their jobs the next day? Were the classes rigorous enough?” says Joseph DiAngelo, dean of the Haub School of Business at Saint Joseph’s University, which lets students narrow their marketing interests to niches in the industry such as food marketing, and caters to students who want to go to school part time, online or in a traditional classroom.
When discussing recruitment of marketing students with a school, applicants can also ask how many graduates were hired in the industry and what their salaries were.
Prospective students should be careful when asking an admissions officer about anything that’s already on the schools website though, says Schubach. Applicants may unintentionally show how much they haven’t researched a school, she says.
While clicking around online, applicants can learn about professors and see if a school has a strong roster of marketing teachers, which can speak to a school’s dedication to preparing students for the field, she says.
Some prospective students may also consider getting a specialized master’s degree in marketing instead of an MBA, but experts say an MBA can be beneficial if they want to broaden their business acumen.
Even if MBA students specialize in marketing, they’ll still learn the basics of subjects like accounting and finance, which can be critical for a career in marketing that requires someone to interact with various departments within a company.
“Marketing does not live in isolation,” Kopalle says. An MBA with a focus in marketing “will give you that more integrated, broader and a more global perspective.”
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Sharpen Skills in Marketing, Sales With the Right Business School originally appeared on usnews.com
