Marketing/sales representative skills for your resume and career

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.

The number one skill we hear from employers that our graduates need to have in the workforce is strong written and oral communication skills. It doesn't matter what field our graduates enter; every workplace needs employees who can communicate their thoughts. Communication courses that help students develop their public speaking, argumentation, persuasion, and interpersonal communication skills are an invaluable resource. Leadership depends on strong communication skills as well, so the need to communicate does not dissipate after a new employee becomes more established.

I think the basics are still important - the feedback from employers still says that they want to see excellent skills in Excel - but if we are talking about changes as a result of the pandemic, job candidates that can also show a comfort level with remote meeting software will feel more natural and less awkward going forward. If you are going to meet on Zoom, make sure you know where to find the features on the screen and if you need to, practice with someone who knows you are just needing to mess around with the settings.

The last thing you would want to do is accidentally exit your interview halfway through because you didn't know where the "share screen" button was. Being familiar with other online collaboration software such as Teams or GoogleDocs is important, too. Even companies that are not working 100% remote are finding great use for these kind of sites, even just to house documents such as policy manuals that they want to share with a group of employees. The fact that a group can work together an collaborate asynchronously is a reality that many companies had not faced before, so the employee needs to be prepared to remember to follow up on team projects instead of waiting for a meeting to see where everything stands.

Be personable and a person someone wants to talk with and work with on a continuing basis. Listening and note-taking skills will be critical. Great employees listen well and ask good follow up questions. Be versatile and adaptable. If you find some downtime between projects, ask how you may help with another project.