Is it difficult to find a job in the field of marketing?

Invest some time finding out what it is you really like doing before spending more money and time on education. Taking a class in marketing might help, but experiencing it first-hand, even for a week, should provide insight on whether it is the right fit.

I know many people who earned a degree in the hotel business, and they didn’t last six months in the field. Some of the best people I worked with had a degree in something else or no degree beyond high school.

It is difficult to get a job in marketing if you are poorly skilled and consistently come up with bad ideas. It is easy to get a job if you are talented and consistently come up with good ideas. Funny how that works. But marketing is a business where you can become quite successful without much formal education IF you are really good at what you do.

At the moment, it’s pretty damn hard to get a job in anything.

Depends how good you are at selling yourself.

Okay, thanks guys but that doesn’t answer the second question. Can I have opportunities of a good job that’s unrelated to the field of marketing with this degree? I mean I know a lot of people who have a job unrelated to their degree…it’s not uncommon.

My sister majored in marketing and over a year later had to search for something else because entry-level jobs in marketing are few and far between. And my sister is a natural at that stuff. It is a really easy department to shrink in rough financial times.

Some people have a degree in marketing, but they find themselves teaching (marketing). That’s one spin on the second half of your question. Another spin on it is that people who are good at marketing become good at selling themselves… so if you want to work in a restaurant and you’re a marketer, you sell the owner on your skills and on yourself, and you get hired, and you use your creativity and marketing prowess to make the restaurant as successful as can be.

I think in this day you need to plan for alternatives to just about any field you go into initially. It’s such a fluid job market you will need to move between fields to keep employed in a job you find satisfying, so plan accordingly.

I’m not completely unbiased here. I did accounting for many years and the marketing people were the bane of our lives. There aren’t many marketing jobs in a money tight economy. To us, the marketing people sat around all day thinking up crazy, expensive ideas that were unusable, unmeasurable and unaffordable.

There IS a new twist on economics and marketing out there that is NOT what you find in the general text books. It’s called Irrational Economics. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89233955
This field deserves to be studied, in my opinion because it makes much more sense than the marketing class I had and the applied economics taught in the past.

In getting a business degree, you’ll have to take a marketing paper or two anyway, so you should be grasping the basics at least. It’s good to recognise when you’re being SOLD TO, as well as when you need to use a technique or two to sell.

I found learning even basic accounting skills help MUCH more in the end to find steady work.

In marketing, there is a big leap from getting a job and making a living.
Unless you want to work for Penny Saver. Then it is just getting by.

To be successful, it will be more about how you can sell yourself and the product/concept.
As @MarthaStewart has implied.

It is even more aggressive today with budgets being cut.
If you are not a self-starter and not self-motivated. It will be even more of an up hill battle.

And, being a narcissist helps. :-)

I probably should have added its more of a skills ability than a knowledge of a field that gets you into the workplace today.

Hm…I think I’ll leave marketing out of the option lol. Maybe try business administration.

Having an aptitude for marketing is important, as well as the training. The skills will help in every field.

There’s a difference between marketing and sales. Marketing is more strategic and targeted and often relates closely to communications, rather than selling. There have been lots of layoffs in marketing and and advertising because promotional budgets have been cut back.

Here’s a list of related fields that are related:
Direct-to-consumer sales
Business-to-business sales
Marketing
Advertising
Corporate communications
Public relations
Consumer communications
Community managers

Supporting these roles are all sorts of business analyst, project manager, graphic designer and writer roles.

The short answer is yes. I know several people with a bachelors in marketing that are either jobless right now or working at Wal-mart as a manager, or something along those lines.

Marketing is extremely competitive, you need to be on top of your game. Not only do you need to understand the basic principles very well, but you need to have the charisma and social/emotional IQ skills to compliment that. Being all about the business is a must. It’s not a field you can just dab your fingers in and get a lucrative job, you really need to work on and off the clock and really invest yourself into.

thanks disc I’m going with business admin

Make sure you take a lot of math and statistics classes; there are jobs in analytics and metrics.

I have a marketing degree and little to no regrets for doing so. It’s competitive to get a job in a field that you want to get into no matter what you do. Like someone else said already, competence and training go a long way. If you have a knack and an interest for marketing, then I would go for it.

A more important question might be this: when you pick up a newspaper, what do you read? If it’s marketing/product/selling stuff, then go for marketing. If it’s something else like designing/managing/technology or whatever else, go for that. That’s the rule of thumb I like to use—what do you read on your own.