How can you boost your employability?
There are many ways to boost your employability alongside studying your marketing degree.
Here are some things that you can do as a marketing student that will help you stand out from the crowd:
There are thousands of free online marketing courses, both long and short.
From touching up your skills on marketing analytics to creating your own social media campaign, there are endless virtual opportunities to build your CV while studying your marketing degree.
Here are some useful online skills courses:
Google Analytics for Beginners – A great introductory course for those looking to enhance their digital analytics skills and learn the basics of google analytics.
FutureLearn – A website full of free online courses made by industry experts, designed to help advance your career (with many courses offering certification once completed).
Google Digital Garage – Another online resource providing a range of learning content, from individual modules to entire courses.
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Virtual internships & work experience
The idea of undertaking an internship can be daunting, especially given that securing work experience has become extremely competitive over the last few years.
As an alternative, I would recommend seeking out virtual internships or online work experience opportunities to boost your employability.
Doing so highlights to potential employers that you are proactive and provides you with valuable experience of working on real life projects.
For example, the Give a Grad a Go Student Guest Blog Programme is a great way to gain copywriting experience – a key skill for anyone looking to go into content marketing.
The programme is run in a competition format, wherein the best performing blog post wins a prize of £150 and receives a digital certificate, and is an amazing opportunity to gain real work experience coordinating with an established company.
As such, getting your blog featured on the Give A Grad A Go website is the perfect chance to gain real-life writing exposure and valuable material for your social media CV.
Volunteering your marketing skills to help emerging companies with their marketing functions is also a fantastic way to gain experience and build your employability.
Many start-ups, for example, are often seeking students or graduates with some marketing expertise to help them out on a voluntary basis.
In my own experience, there is nothing more rewarding than leveraging your knowledge and skills to help those who have no marketing experience and will truly listen to your advice.
Joining your university’s marketing society is a great way to start building your network with other students who are interested in the same industries as you and have similar career aspirations.
Alongside the social aspects, your university society will also hold events wherein you can gain insight into the more practical side of marketing from industry experts.
In this way, joining your university’s marketing society is not only a great opportunity to have fun and make like-minded friends, but it can also provide you with some really useful industry exposure.
This may seem like an obvious one, but it is really important that you keep up to date with industry news and market trends whilst studying your marketing degree.
Doing so will enable you to apply the theoretical knowledge you have gained from your degree to real-life contemporary examples, displaying to employers that you have a more well-rounded understanding of marketing than the confines of your degree.
Keeping up to date with market trends and industry news will also help when it comes to future interviews. With potential employers often asking questions to check you’re industry-aware, being able to share your insights on market trends is bound to impress!
