Once you’re armed with your degree in communications and/or media studies, it’s time to explore possible long-term advertising and marketing career options. While your short-term plans are essential to paying the bills, it is never too early to look to positions where you’ll find a career instead of a job.
Maybe your specialty is based in writing – or your prowess lies with photography and graphic arts. Your technological expertise has been acquired by way of your education – but also by way of real life experience using electronic devices and computer software. You’ve familiarized yourself with technology since your childhood computer class where you spent hours working on Kid Pix.
A combination of education, experience and computer literacy can light the path to your future in advertising and marketing – and if you’re can’t see the end of the path just yet, here are ten options to help you get there.
- Social Media Manager. Millennials definitely have the upper hand in this arena – we have utilized social media since our high school years spent on MySpace. We graduated to Facebook with ease. It is rare to find a business without any social media presence – but finding a candidate up to the task of posting and promoting content on a daily basis? That is best left to us. We used hashtags before they appeared on Instagram.
- Graphic Designer. There’s formal training and natural creativity required for this one, but our generation-wide computer literacy gives us an advantage.
- Film/Video Editor. Your college-level iMovie training will finally come in handy. Job listings of this nature will generally require experience with Final Cut Pro and the Adobe suite. This listing found on indeed.com asks for it.
- Event/Conference Planner. Organizational skills – to the level that force you to utilize every Google app there is – are essential to event planning. Our guide to top apps for event planners will fill in the details.
- Photographer. A photographer works in tandem with other specialists. Photos provide content for social media, assist in publicizing the success of a corporate event, make up portions of slideshows and need to be edited by a graphic designer.
- Market Researcher. Another option that has potential to be tailored to millennials. Who knows our own demographic better than we do? We can provide input surrounding our likes, dislikes and habits – and are the best candidates to speak to other millennials on such subjects.
- Advertising Sales Representative. According to careercast.com’s Best Marketing and Advertising Jobs of 2013, “the advertising sales agent brokers and handles accounts on both ends of the spectrum, working with advertisers and agencies to position their messaging most appropriately.”
- Web Designer. Ah, the highly coveted master of HTML. Any coding experience is near guaranteed foot in the door.
- Public Relations Specialist. If you’ve learned the inverted pyramid during your college-level journalism courses, you can get to work writing press releases. Then go to the next step with distribution – company press releases have the ability for distribution with the click of a mouse via Cision PRWeb.
- And, of course, writers. Clearly I’m biased – but the demand for writers across the field will never cease. Between copy for websites, blogs, social media and advertisements across varied types of media, content is constantly changing.
While you’re still walking the path to your career, earn any experience possible while at your job. Companies will look to in-house millennials to help reach millennial clients. Offer to help Tweet, write copy for the company website, take photos at office events and contribute to millennial-based focus groups – and then be sure to add newly acquired skills to your resume!
