The good news is you don’t necessarily need any formal qualifications to persue a career in marketing. Anyone with the drive and skills can make the transition into marketing. 

Marketing employers will look for skills including:

• excellent written and verbal communication skills
• initiative
• An eye for detail
• knowledge of social media production and communication
• management skills
• people skills
• Basic IT skills

Yes, anyone can be a marketer! Some of the world’s best marketers began from scratch with limited formal qualifications. It’s possible to work your way up to a paid marketing role through activities like: 

• creating a blog
• setting up your own website
• networking with marketing influencers or high profile companies through social media channels
• Reaching out to organisations and gaining unpaid experience

You can definitely do marketing without a degree. However, it goes without saying that having a degree or other qualification in marketing or a related subject or indeed having been educated to degree level in any subject, will probably make your journey getting in to the marketing industry easier.

Other than perhaps, well, marketing… there’s no particular subject you need to have studied for a marketing career. Marketing roles can be suited to graduates of all subjects, particularly graduates of relevant courses that develop some of the skills that are essential for a career in marketing including:

• advertising
• business and management
• psychology
• humanities
• media, art and design
• English language or literature
• languages
• computer studies or IT

If you have no previous marketing experience, one of the easiest and most effective ways to break into marketing is through a marketing qualification.

While you don’t necessarily need any qualifications for marketing, it can dramatically improve your chances of employment and get you into a role quicker by giving you the relevant training and experience.

Most marketing employers aren’t too concerned with what education level you’ve achieved in other subjects, but they might expect you to have undertaken a marketing qualification to evidence that you understand the theories behind and are operating at a competent level in marketing.

Undertaking a Marketing qualification can be a great way to kickstart your career in Marketing. 

That’s when previous academic study might come in. If you’ve already got a degree, even as a beginner to marketing, you’ll probably be operating at a high enough academic level to do a marketing course which is level 5, 6, or 7, (equivalent to a foundation degree, degree and postgraduate course- masters- respectively) because these courses are designed to be the next step up academically. However if you’re entering a marketing course with no formal qualifications or just GCSE’s or A-levels for example, you might be better suited to a level 2, 3 or 4 marketing course. 

This is just to make sure that you’re studying at the right level and on the right kind of course for you. Once you have a marketing qualification, you can always study further, higher-level marketing qualifications, but any level of marketing course will put you in a better position to start finding opportunities and gaining relevant experience and make you an attractive candidate to potential employers.

Entry requirements to courses can vary, some higher level course might require you to have a degree or other equivalent qualification or at least some experience in the marketing field, but many will just require you to be able to read and write English to a good level making them ideal for people wanting to get a foot in the door.

There are many different Marketing courses to choose from provided by various different study centres. Which qualification is right for you will depend very much on where you are in your career and your level of education and experience and also what goals you are personally hoping to achieve from a course but with so many options to choose from there’s certainly one that’s right for you and if you’re looking to start a career in marketing there’s no better place to start.

Check out our further reading on marketing courses FAQ’s and MMC’s course content, teaching, benefits and much more!

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