Step 1: Figure out what you are passionate about

Mid-life crisis? Early-life crisis? I wasn’t even graduated from college when all of a sudden I realized my chosen career path wasn’t going to be the right fit for me. I was in my senior year, a biology major planning to apply to medical school, and while enrolled in my very last premed prerequisite class I decided I really didn’t want to spend 1-2 years in a low-paying application-strengthening gap year role in order to then apply to medical school, attend 4 years of medical school, and then spend 4-6 years in residency/fellowship to become a doctor, all the while racking up boatloads of debt. I wanted a career path with upward mobility that I could start then and there, earn money, and start gaining real work experience. I also wanted a career I could leverage both my analytical and creative thinking skills, and I didn’t see medicine filling that desire.

In a stressed discussion with my mom, I confided that I didn’t know what career path I should choose. I didn’t want to work in laboratory research, an obvious choice for a biology major. I mentioned I had always loved my psychology classes, and I even enjoyed certain aspects of my time working retail, such as seeing which products sold and which sales seemed most effective at getting people to buy. I was a relentless couponer and deal shopper myself, so these things fascinated me. In college, I worked at the creative services office doing graphic design and making posts for campus events. Originally a creative outlet for me to balance out all the rigorous STEM courses I was taking, this campus job ultimately helped carve a path for me into my chosen field.

After hearing about the things that fascinated me, my mom said to me, “You might enjoy marketing.” Marketing is something I had never considered since nobody in my circle worked in marketing, and there was no marketing (or even business) major at my small liberal arts college. But it made perfect sense. After graduating from college, I set out on my job search to find a suitable marketing role.

Step 2: Test the waters

I updated my resume, making sure to highlight any transferable skills. For me, this meant calling out my retail and graphic design experience (relevant to marketing), as well as any leadership roles I had held in extracurriculars at my college. I applied primarily to marketing internships across practically all industries.(Note: I later learned that my premed and biology background were valued quite heavily at health insurance and MedTech/BioTech companies. Depending on your interests, it might make sense to apply to specific industries you have experience in when trying to switch careers to a different department, for instance.)

A word of caution: a-not-insignificant number of these very junior roles are either scams or very misleading job titles. For instance, I remember coming across some sort of marketing associate role that, when I read the reviews on Glassdoor, turned out to be extremely high turnover minimum wage sales jobs that involved standing outside Walmart, etc. and trying to sell something for hours and hours. Pay careful attention to Glassdoor reviews when applying to roles that tout “no prior experience necessary.”

My first month or so of applying to marketing jobs was relatively unsuccessful, but it allowed me to feel out the market, test the waters, and figure out what gaps I had in my skill set based on what was listed in the job descriptions. It also gave me more familiarity with the types of roles and job titles in marketing, but I still had more to learn–more on this later!

Step 3: Hone your skills and your resume

After realizing that a lot of junior marketing roles wanted someone who could manage a website or do video editing, I decided to enroll in a course at my local university. I learned how to build sites from templates and manage content in WordPress, how to edit videos in Adobe Premiere Pro, and other basic digital marketing and digital art skills. After the course, I spent another month applying to marketing jobs. While I got interviews that time around, I wasn’t very passionate about the roles and realized it was going to be a struggle moving to my chosen city and affording the cost of living on what these roles were paying.

I came to realize I still needed more true marketing knowledge and experience to make myself more competitor for entry-level marketing roles. Therefore, I started researching marketing certificate programs in my hometown. I even drove to the local community college and spoke with the director of the marketing certificate program to learn more and decide whether it was a good fit. She told me the program was going to be very basic and that I’d be better off taking courses at the local university.

I researched my desired marketing courses and the prerequisite courses at the university’s business school and had to reach out to professors to get permission to enroll simultaneously in a prerequisite microeconomics course and an intro marketing course. I lucked out that I was able to enroll in several useful courses only about a week and a half before the fall semester started. I also developed rapport with the very nice admin who managed course enrollment for the business school and helped me enroll in courses I would otherwise have only been able to get in on the waitlist. Lastly, I very quickly applied and interviewed to student marketing jobs and landed a part-time job as a communications assistant, which perfectly leveraged my background in biology/ecology and my creative skill set.

Step 4: Network, apply, network, apply

In those two semesters, I completed all the courses of a marketing major at that university, save for ethics and business law. Despite not having a true marketing certificate (I was enrolled as a full-time guest student), I added the experience and course names to my resume, along with Marketing GPA: 4.0. This addition to my resume made all the difference when I applied to junior marketing roles for a third time.

I started networking, and I spoke with a couple of people at the career center at the Continuing Education office, including someone working in digital marketing. I was able to get a little more context on what kinds of roles I might be a fit for given my experience. I also started researching earning potential and upward mobility for each of the three major marketing specialities I considered, including digital marketing, marketing communications, and marketing research. Given both my experience and the higher earning potential based on my findings, I decided to focus my search primarily on marketing communications and digital marketing roles.

Yet again, I was getting crickets. What was I missing? After doing a little more research on the marketing career ladder, I figured out that I hadn’t been searching for and applying to the most entry-level job titles. Contrary to my belief, “marketing communications coordinator” ranked below “marketing communications specialist” on the marketing ladder. This was a critical learning for me. I updated my LinkedIn job search terms and applied to 10-20 marketing coordinator roles that week.

Shortly after, to my delight, I started getting interviews for full-time, salaried marketing roles–and lots of them! Only a few weeks later, I had competing job offers and leveraged them to negotiate a better offer for what become my first corporate job as a marketing communications coordinator.

Step 5: Keep sharpening those skills

Even after landing a my job, I kept seeking out opportunities to beef up my marketing skills and knowledge. It took me months to overcome imposter syndrome in my new role. I kept thinking someone would question my background, and I wondered how I compared to those who had an actual undergraduate marketing degree. I channeled that imposter syndrome and used it as motivation to complete free online marketing courses on LinkedIn Learning and HubSpot Academy. Eventually, only a year after starting my first corporate role, I applied to and was accepted to an MBA program. Consistent with my original desire to gain work experience, I completed my MBA part-time over 2.5 years while working full-time. The knowledge, experience, and confidence I gained over these years was paramount and allowed me to triple my compensation package in that short period of time.

Classes won’t necessarily be the right solution for everyone, and there are many free alternatives as well. But for my case, the tuition cost was almost immediately offset by the higher pay I landed after the fact. For mid-career professionals, it’s also important to factor in the cost of forfeited wages while seeking a degree or certificate (if it’s not possible to work full-time while taking the courses). The rise of part-time degree programs has made this much less of a factor, but it is still a major time commitment.

The most important lesson I learned during my the search for my first full-time marketing role was not giving up when I wasn’t hearing back from job applications. It took three rounds of applying and 9 classes at my local university to really make a difference in my search for my first full-time marketing role.