Question
Is an advanced degree desirable to pursue a career in marketing?
Answer
Whatever your personal goals are, if you want to be in marketing and you mean a marketing-related degree, the answer is a resounding NO at the moment (early 2011).
The higher-education industry in the field is still mostly caught in old paradigms, and almost none of the faculty have any experience with the new world, let alone rigorous and teachable ideas about it. This is the usual and expected lag between academia and the world of practitioners during times of extreme change. Unlike your friendly neighborhood social media "expert" who is ready to craft a "social media marketing with Twitter" seminar over a weekend, good teachers don't start teaching a subject until they've had time to think hard and codify and validate their ideas a little more thoroughly.
It will be a few years before they catch up enough that getting a Master's of some sort will be of value again.
The new realities, skills, concepts and ideas around marketing can frankly only be learned through hands on experience at this point. 80% of your time should be spent immersed in new media, keeping up with the patterns of decline and fall of traditional media, establishing your own online brand, doing hands-on work for others, learning about analytics etc. The other 20% of the time, simply self-study classic marketing ideas. And by that I mean people like Drucker, Al Ries and Seth Godin's early work. The 101 stuff you need (4Ps, channel mixes, etc.) can all be picked up that way.
Get a few years under your belt, and by that time, the universities will have caught up and created more rigorous curricula around the new realities than the enthusiastic but intellectually sloppy "social media experts" can.
Of course, marketing is too huge a subject (in fact that's one of its problems), so you can't learn everything. You should learn the parts that suit your strengths and immediate needs based on the projects and gigs you are getting into.
If you want specific reading/self-study recommendations based on your personal interests/strengths and whatever your BA was about, I'll be happy to provide some if you message me.
The higher-education industry in the field is still mostly caught in old paradigms, and almost none of the faculty have any experience with the new world, let alone rigorous and teachable ideas about it. This is the usual and expected lag between academia and the world of practitioners during times of extreme change. Unlike your friendly neighborhood social media "expert" who is ready to craft a "social media marketing with Twitter" seminar over a weekend, good teachers don't start teaching a subject until they've had time to think hard and codify and validate their ideas a little more thoroughly.
It will be a few years before they catch up enough that getting a Master's of some sort will be of value again.
The new realities, skills, concepts and ideas around marketing can frankly only be learned through hands on experience at this point. 80% of your time should be spent immersed in new media, keeping up with the patterns of decline and fall of traditional media, establishing your own online brand, doing hands-on work for others, learning about analytics etc. The other 20% of the time, simply self-study classic marketing ideas. And by that I mean people like Drucker, Al Ries and Seth Godin's early work. The 101 stuff you need (4Ps, channel mixes, etc.) can all be picked up that way.
Get a few years under your belt, and by that time, the universities will have caught up and created more rigorous curricula around the new realities than the enthusiastic but intellectually sloppy "social media experts" can.
Of course, marketing is too huge a subject (in fact that's one of its problems), so you can't learn everything. You should learn the parts that suit your strengths and immediate needs based on the projects and gigs you are getting into.
If you want specific reading/self-study recommendations based on your personal interests/strengths and whatever your BA was about, I'll be happy to provide some if you message me.