A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE FOR ENTRY-LEVEL MARKETING JOBS: A DELPHI STUDY

Abstract

While the marketing education literature has contributed to our understanding of the skills that are important for successful employability, there has been limited effort to study both technical and non-technical skills together and second, their relative importance. This study addresses these gaps by conducting a Delphi study with a panel comprising of 12 human resource managers and 15 marketing managers. Among the list of 51 skills identified, the panelists selected and ranked 20 skills as being the most critical for entry-level marketing graduates. We further compared our results with four different industry studies and discuss their implications for marketing education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Senior level executives (e.g., Bailey & Mitchell, 2006) versus individuals who manage hiring or recruiting (e.g., Finch, Hamilton, Baldwin, & Zehner, 2013).

² Examples include the industry hospitality (e.g., Weber, Crawford, Lee, & Dennison, 2013), retailing industry (e.g., Wesley, Jackson, & Lee, 2017).

³ Linkedin Research Network http://download.linkedin.com/corporate/product/sales/LinkedIn_Surveys_for_Market_Researchers.pdf.

⁴ Given that this study’s focus is on establishing the necessary skill set for graduating students seeking any entry level marketing jobs, skills that were associated with specific career tracks (e.g. digital marketing) were excluded.

⁵ Kerlinger (1986) describes an unstructured Q-sort as “a set of items assembled without specific regard to the variables or factors underlying the items” (p. 511).