Marketing professional skills for your resume and career

The pandemic is accelerating the general trend of digitalization. By far our most in-demand graduates are those with social media and digital marketing knowledge. Remote work, e-commerce, and internet-enabled services will be growth areas during the recovery from the pandemic's recession.

Strong written and verbal communication skills aid employees in serving both constituents inside and outside the organization. Assessing when action is needed, planning a response, and having a positive attitude go a long way in developing a professional reputation.

In any business role, employees that can analyze data and craft strategy are really important. In a coordinator role, those skills may not be as necessary but will certainly make them stand out and gain attention for additional roles and responsibilities.

Many marketing jobs require a blend of customer insights, data analytics, and strategic marketing decision making. So developing these skills may be helpful to be ready when the right job comes around. Skills in sales are often overlooked, but these are valuable too and have three advantages:
-There are many excellent opportunities in careers in sales that some students overlook.
-Even if one does not take a job in sales, the skills of deals involving business development, problem-solving, and communication are valuable in any career.
-Getting a job in the first place often involves selling oneself.
So having sales skills are also worth having.

If you can't find a job right away, volunteering is an excellent way to develop skills, make contacts, and stay optimistic. Look for opportunities at non-profit organizations, for example, where you may help out a cause that may be important to you and give you a chance to learn about skills that you may lack. Often, serious volunteers are given access and opportunities that paid employees may not get. It is also not uncommon for a volunteer position to become a paid position when opportunities in the organization arise.

In marketing and business, there are also many excellent one-year master's programs being offered to help students develop focused skills in marketing management, data analytics, and customer insights. Some are even focused on particular industries like health care or technology. These programs offer students a year of in-depth learning as well as career coaching and access to recruiters. They can be a treasured addition for students who have healthy non-business undergraduate degrees who may now want to focus on marketing career goals. Also, the starting salary and responsibility level tend to be significantly more than that of a recent graduate of an undergraduate program.

That all depends on the available position. For animation, they want someone with a strong understanding of how to bring an inanimate object to life and how to apply the twelve principles of animation. For VFX, an understanding of physics, how things work, and they would fall apart. And for games, one must know the game engine a company is using. They should have a set of well-rounded skills in the foundations of modeling, texturing, lighting, and effects. And they should be familiar with and be able to adapt to a company's style.