Doctors, lawyers, engineers. All examples where a degree-to-job pipeline makes perfect sense.
While you technically could learn how to remove an appendix via YouTube videos, I’m pleased the doctor who took out mine had gone through a standardised university course so they were able to do their job safely and correctly.
But what about Digital Marketing?
Over the past decade in this industry, I’ve worked with hundreds of smart, talented and able colleagues. When I first started, most of these people had degrees, generally in Marketing, English or Maths. In the past five years there’s been a huge change as more and more people join the industry without a degree, instead coming with knowledge they’ve gained via their own use of digital channels or as a result of self-guided learning from digital marketing content creators sharing their own lessons and experiences.
To be clear, I’m not against degrees at all - I paid for one! But as this industry evolves and we continue to question best practice and approaches, we also need to look at the recruitment pipeline and whether an insistence by some businesses that applicants have a degree is limiting the talent pool in our industry.
To kick off 2025, let’s look at why Digital Marketing degrees may not be necessary for a successful career.
1) The Speed Of Change
Putting together a degree programme is a costly, involved and challenging exercise. Course structure and content needs to be planned years in advance and has to remain relatively consistent to ensure students are building on what they’ve learned. To oversimplify medicine as an example, the structure of the human body hasn’t changed a great deal in the past 25 years so a first-year anatomy student is still learning the same bones and organs as a student in 2000.
In contrast, the digital marketing landscape is completely different now to where it was just ten years ago. Mass automation has revolutionised the industry, TikTok has gone from launch to being one of the most used apps in the world & digital marketing has become a must-have part of the marketing mix for businesses.
With such rapid change, how can a university possibly put together a programme that will account for the huge industry changes that happen over any given year of a degree while still trying to gradually build on what was learned the previous year? When marketers themselves are rewriting their approach every few months, universities have their work cut out for them in trying to do the same.
2) Knowledge Sharing, Content Creators & Industry Accessibility
There are some exceptional lecturers out there who’ve had great digital marketing careers before switching to academics. They know the industry, what does & doesn’t work and they know how to clearly communicate this information to their students.
However, there are equally exceptional digital marketing content creators who are regularly posting information to help marketers build their skills with the added advantage of these concepts being free and extremely up to date.
Is it more useful for a new marketer to be in a classroom learning concepts from five years ago, or to watch videos from creators discussing last week's campaign updates in real time? As long as the student is diligent about their self-directed learning and the creator is reliable, the second option seems to give more immediate value.
Perhaps more importantly, recognising the importance and validity of self-directed learning via content creators and free courses means we open up our talent pool to all those who may have wanted to attend university but weren’t able for various reasons. This creates a more accessible industry and means we’re not missing out on smart new marketers who will make an impact.
3) Changing Expectations
This may be slightly circular reasoning, but Digital Marketing degrees are becoming less of a necessity because the industry is starting to view them as less of a necessity. More and more, agencies are recognising the value of self-directed learning and are expanding out their grad programme to everyone with an interest in marketing regardless of degree status.
As an industry, we’re increasingly focusing on bringing in smart new marketers with a positive attitude, trusting that we can train them on up to date techniques as they go. Learning in real time means they’ll deeply understand how quickly things can change and what remains consistent regardless of year, platform or client.
So, if you’re doing a Digital Marketing degree - that’s great! You’re building valuable skills, certifying that you have a base of knowledge and creating relationships with other students that you’ll run into again later in your career.
If you’re not - that’s also great! You’re learning in real time from people who are actively running accounts and solving problems as they occur. As long as you’re taking your learning seriously and building on what you know with more advanced content, any forward thinking business would be happy to have you.
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