Dr. Mark, I am an engineer recently laid off who has completed my MBA . How do I go about making a career switch into marketing?
Yours Sincerely,
I.M. Eager
Mr Eager,
I get this question quite often. As a former engineer myself my guidance to you is to look at starting as a product manager (PM).
It is the best way to leverage your business qualifications and still add value with your technical knowledge. Being a PM gives you real-life skills on how to manage a mini-business. A product line rollout involves many of the same elements as if you are running your own business. In order to be successful you will need to have very good people skills to have influence and get tasks accomplished throughout the product lifecycle. This is just one of the elements of a good PM.
For an excellent baseline of articles and courses take a look at www.pragmaticmarketing.com
They are widely recognized as the best place to learn about product management. Many of the major companies send their junior and even senior PMs to their courses.
How do you get a PM job with no experience? Unfortunately that is a little trickier, and more so given the current economy. You could intern (Google for example, is an example of a forward looking company that often has those types of opportunities, often listed on their website) or you could join a company as an engineer, and once you are established, express an interest in PM should there be an opening. Once you are familiar with the product that will give you a headstart for a possible PM job and you will then also have good relationships with the engineers which are very important
Once you are a PM you will execute flawlessly on inbound marketing, and you can start your outbound marketing career by working closely with your product marketing counterparts. The rest will be up to you!
There are many resources, but do read The Strategic Role of Product Management (by my good friend Steve Johnson, Pragmatic Marketing) to get you going in the right direction.
About Dr. Mark Eteer
Mark Eteer was born in the UK in 1966. He studied computer science at the University of Essex and after 8 years as a programmer, moved into marketing. He obtained his PhD entirely online. His successes marketing for major corporations and minor startups, combined with his no nonsense straight forward guidance on all matters marketing, has led him to be sought out by some of the most well known marketing stars in Mollywood. Although unsubstantiated, he claims that he was the marketing/PR mind behind Tom Cruise’s behavior on Oprah, although he admits that Tom took it a bit too far. He currently lives in an exclusive suburb of Mollywood.
As a leading provider of scalable, enterprise-wide, high ROI marketing ideas, Dr. Mark uses his cloud-based, next-generation approach and solar-powered, game changing methodology which leverages social media to answer paradigm shifting questions about marketing and product management.
Dr. Mark would like to thank Ramon Chen for allowing him to be a guest blogger here on Cloud ‘N Clear and understands that Ramon disavows any knowledge of any bad advice he might offer.