General Summary

Kiran Kapur addresses a series of listener questions regarding careers in marketing. The discussion coveres the evolution of marketing career paths from traditional linear progressions to modern "squiggly careers," distinguishing between specialist and generalist routes. She compares the value of formal qualifications, which provide a standardised skill set, with ad-hoc training that follows personal interests. Kiran detailes the structure and benefits of apprenticeships as a practical, work-integrated alternative to university. The episode concludes with advice for job seekers, emphasising the critical importance of researching the prospective employer and demonstrating genuine enthusiasm during interviews.

Key Points

  • Marketing careers were described as having evolved from a linear ladder to more flexible, non-linear "squiggly careers."
  • Professionals could choose between a highly specialised, technical path (e.g., SEO) or a more traditional generalist path, with movement between the two being possible but challenging.
  • Formal qualifications were presented as valuable because they provided a standardised "roadmap" of skills that employers recognised, ensuring team members "speak the same language."
  • Apprenticeships were explained as a distinct form of qualification that was fully embedded in day-to-day work, combining practical experience with structured learning (an 80/20 split between work and training).
  • When comparing university to apprenticeships, the speaker noted that university offered deep subject immersion, while apprenticeships provided paid work experience and a qualification without student debt, potentially giving apprentices an "edge" with employers.
  • Kiran asserted that employers looked for candidates who worked hard, had researched the company, and showed a genuine "spark of excitement" for the role and industry.

 

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Announcer (00:01):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur, brought to you by Cambridge Marketing College. See their range of courses and apprenticeships at marketingcollege.com.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:13):
Hello and welcome. This week, something a little different. I've actually had a number of listeners questions come in so I thought we'd address some of the issues around careers and qualifications. Seems to be a big topic at the moment. Obviously it's coming up to the summer, people are starting to take their A levels and wondering about the next step. So I've had questions in about colleges or work. I've also had questions in from people that are finishing their degrees and wondering how to start in a marketing career and lots of questions as ever around apprenticeships. So I just thought this week we would talk careers and apprenticeships and deal with some of the issues that people have raised. So the first question that I got was-

Listener question (01:00):
How does a marketing career actually work?

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:03):
That sounds very odd, but I did understand what the listener meant. So traditionally you would start as marketing assistant doing the very tactical day-to-day marketing work such as proofreading. You would then move on to becoming a marketing executive where you would have slightly more overview, perhaps be looking at a project-based level rather than a purely task-based level. And then you would move up to being a senior marketing executive and then move into being a marketing manager, by which stage you are possibly managing assistants and executives and you're having a wider strategic view. At marketing management level, you're starting to bring in strategic planning and managing the metrics. And then from there you move into senior marketing management and then depending on the size of the organisation, you might become a director or move up into what's called C-suite and so on. However, of course, we all know now that careers don't necessarily work like that.

(02:04):
So we have now what tends to be called squiggly careers and squiggly careers might well start at a marketing assistant or they might start as a marketing apprentice and I'll talk about apprenticeships a bit later on. And there are two ways to go at that point. You can go very, very specialised and there's some hugely specialised areas within marketing, particularly digital marketing, getting really expert in things like SEO or moving into really complicated personalization work. There's some digital optimization. This is all very, very complex technical work that needs specialists. Or you can go into the more generalist route, which perhaps was the more traditional marketing route where you might be managing those technical specialists, you might be briefing agencies who are technical specialists. And of course there's always the dilemma between the client side, working in an organisation or working on what's called agency side where you're an agency servicing organisations and traditionally one went agency side or client side and now in fact it's quickly.

(03:18):
People move between one or the other and actually getting that experience being both sides is seen as very important. Whether you want to become technical or whether you want to become a generalist really is what suits you. Both are perfectly good career routes.

(03:37):
Neither really anymore stop you from moving from one to the other. But if you've been used to being in a very technical role, becoming generalist can be quite a strain and quite a stretch. And equally, if you're used to being very generalist, you're going to have to do quite a lot of work and learning and training in order to get those technical specialist skills. There is no right answer I think is what I'm really trying to get across. It's what works for you whether you like the very technical side, whether you like the very more generalist side. How do you get into those? You get into both of them through training. Training and obviously I work for a marketing college. I'm going to say qualifications are great. The next question I had was ...

Listener question (04:19):
Should I look at qualifications or should I do training instead?

Kiran Kapur, Host (04:23):
It's a great question. And I said caveat, I work for a marketing college. Clearly I'm going to say the qualifications are important, but I want to explain why. Qualifications set out a roadmap. Somebody somewhere, probably the Chartered Institute, if it's CIPR for public relations, CIM for marketing, a group of experts have sat together and worked out what the competencies and skills you need at a particular level are. And they will have done that in consultation with employers and consultation with practitioners and also with academics. And they will have put that together as a syllabus. So if you are taking that qualification, an employer knows that you have followed that syllabus and you have these skills. For an employer's perspective, that can be very helpful because it means that everybody in their team speaks the same language because they've covered the same syllabus and that is the real advantage of qualifications.

(05:29):
For the training side, and I personally do both, I do qualifications and training in my own life. The training side allows me to sit and go, "No, I'm not going to do what the experts that I needed. I'm going to follow my interest and this month it's going to be because I want to work on my presentation skills or this month it's because I want to understand more about SEO." Either to be able to do SEO or to be able to brief someone else to do it and to understand what they're telling me when they come back to me on it. So the two do go alongside, but there are advantages to following a set syllabus. There are equally there are advantages to following your instincts and following what interests you.

Listener question (06:10):
Where do apprenticeships fit in?

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:12):
Again, it's another good question and to some extent the word apprentice itself is possibly leads us to think in some very old fashioned ways that we have apprentice car mechanics and not apprentice marketers or PR professionals. Apprenticeships, again, they set a syllabus. There is a set syllabus and it encovers knowledge, skills and behaviours that people have decided you need at particular levels. So in marketing, there's a marketing assistant, apprenticeship and marketing assistance it has been deemed by employers need these knowledge skills and behaviours. There's a marketing executive apprenticeship and there's a marketing manager apprenticeship and in PR there's a PR and communications apprenticeship and all of those work to knowledge, skills and behaviours. So again, an employer and the apprentice knows that they have covered this syllabus, they have learned these skills. However, the difference between an apprenticeship and a different type of qualification is that it's absolutely embedded in your day work.

(07:16):
So if you're a full-time employee, you will work four days a week, 80% of your time in normal everyday marketing work and 20% of your time, the equivalent to one day a week will be spent training. But clearly that means that week by week you're learning more and bringing that back to your organisation and week by week as a training organisation we see the new skills you've learned in work, which also influence your training. So the practical work and the training go alongside each other all the way through the time that you're doing your apprenticeship.

Listener question (07:53):
Should I go to university or do an apprenticeship?

Kiran Kapur, Host (07:56):
It's another good question. And again, it depends on what you are trying to do and what you want to achieve. So degrees are fantastic if you are passionate about the subjects you are going to learn. It's a wonderful way of spending three years or four years absolutely immersing yourself in a subject about which you are passionate, but obviously you come out with the student loan or whether you want to call it a tax or a debt or a loan, however you want to view it, you do come out with that and you haven't got work experience in that time. An apprenticeship, you're paid while you're learning. It's literally earned while you learn. And so at the end of your apprenticeship, you not only have practical work experience, but you also have an apprenticeship qualification. The downside of it is of course you don't have that wonderful going away from home for three years and just learning to do different things.

(08:54):
The upside is I suspect an employer looking at two people, one with a degree and one with a three years apprenticeship will probably think the apprentice has got the edge. So that was a whistle stop overview of some of the questions that I've had very recently from people that are obviously very concerned about thinking about their next steps in their career and my advice would be to sit down and think what you want. There are a lot of jobs around out there. So the final question I get asked a lot is

Listener question (09:27):
What is it that employers are actually looking for?

Kiran Kapur, Host (09:30):
Employers obviously want people that will fit in with the company and most importantly will work hard. It sounds obvious, but clearly an employer wants people that will work hard and will commit. I would say the biggest mistake I see less experienced people make when they come to interview is they haven't bothered to research the company. It doesn't take long. You can spend 10 minutes flicking through the company's website and at least be able to mention some of the products that they've got. I've had people in interview for my own organisation where they haven't even realised that we're a college because they literally haven't bothered to find anything about us and those that say, "I had a look on your website. I can see that you offer such and such and such and such product. Can you tell me more about them?" At least tells me that they're bothered to make the effort and I've employed people just because they have sounded passionate about marketing or about an area of marketing that they're interested in because they've got that spark of excitement and I always say I can teach the rest, but I can't teach excitement.

(10:41):
So I know it's tiring doing the job interview round. There are days when it's really hard to sound enthusiastic and motivated, particularly if you've just had a rejection and now you've got to go on and try again. But actually spending that time doing that little bit of background research, walking in with a smile or beaming in with a smile if you're being interviewed over Zoom, that all makes a huge difference. It's a first impression because I'm sitting there as an employer thinking, "Do I want this person to work in my organisation? Do I want this person to represent my organisation?" Come with some spark of enthusiasm. If you can't get enthusiastic about the company that you are planning to spend your time working for, why are you applying to them? So I hope that was helpful. If you would like to send any other questions, we will do periodic roundup of questions as I get sufficient numbers in.

(11:36):
You can contact me via the Cambridge Marketing College, any of our social media and a message dislabeled podcast will always reach me. Thank you very much for listening.

Announcer (11:48):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College, training marketing and PR professionals across the globe.