Categories
associate careers internship marketing

Step Up Your Marketing Career: Essential Guide to Landing Your First Associate Job

Day 2 of my new series – how to advance each career level in Marketing. Today’s stage: Associate
 
Reminder: Stages I’ll show: Intern, Associate, Manager, Sr. Manager, Director, Sr. Director, VP, 2x VP, CMO.
To see each stage, follow me & click the 🔔 icon on my profile for the next stage posts.
 
To get your first Marketing job as an Associate/Analyst (for those who go to college, this is probably your first job out of college)
 
– An internship(s) or full work experience. Ideally in Marketing too.
     – If you have 1 internship, you can hopefully get by
     – 2-3 internships – likely to find something
     – 4-5 internships – you’re setting yourself apart

– Extracurriculars that ideally have a Marketing focus to them. (s/o Reyna Olivares for this idea in the comments)

– Same experience listed previously for getting an internship (see below)
 
Reminder for how to get a Marketing internship:
– Have a strong referral from someone
– Do a side project so there is something tangible to show for your experience
– Analyze the Marketing of the company you’re applying to and share that with the hiring team and post it on LinkedIn
– Use perseverance, curiosity, and tenacity to find the first internship
– If you can’t get a referral and you’re following the steps above, you might need to apply to a lot to get your first one.
 
 
Background to this series:
Each level in Marketing builds on the experience of previous levels.
 
My framework assumes you want to manage people and become the general VP of Marketing or CMO; not just a VP/SVP of a specific discipline in Marketing.
Although most of the requirements would be similar.
 
These are not hard & fast rules and it’s geared more toward people working in startups rather than big enterprises.
 
Many people will be exceptions to these in some way in their journey. Nevertheless, hopefully, it can help guide you.
 
 
Was this similar to your path, or did you
have something else to get into your 1st Associate job?