The marketing world is a lot different than the reality painted in college marketing courses. While you whizzed away your time analyzing markets, creating focus groups, and building promotional packages in order to quantify metrics you could pretend were real, the outside world was doing circles around you. At the entry level, your chances of landing a job where the skills you practiced in college will be utilized are about 1 in 5000. In other words (or useless statistics), you are just as likely to die in a car crash as you are landing a job relevant to your college coursework. One of the most critical and new pieces of working in marketing is big data, and chances are your experience is probably zero.

If you’re not good at reading tarot cards, and you enjoy giving people misguided information that could drastically change the course of one’s life, there’s always a place for you in recruiting. I don’t blame recruiters for their information woes, because according to an unenforceable fact circulating the internet, an American Marketing Association study found that 90% of 300 college administrators surveyed thought marketing was selling. See how easy it is to be transparently ambiguous?

Think Deeply About Going Back To School

It might help. While many large companies only hire M.B.A’s in professional marketing roles, it still doesn’t guarantee you a job. Problematically, as an undergrad, you’ll be competing with these same sandbaggers who are forced to seek positions for which they are overqualified. Even having an M.B.A has lost respect because employers realize that no textbook will ever provide you the preparation for working with concrete data, dynamic conditions, and the stress of solving problems that carry a real risk.

When facing the world, your goals need to align with a reality in a way that can provide you a strategic approach. Wasting time applying for jobs you are exceptionally unqualified for is wasting everyone's time, most importantly yours. This may mean having to apply and accept jobs in fields that you feel overqualified for in order to prove that your skills are both versatile and valued.