Well how do you like your job? Was it easy or hard to get your foot in the door at a good company and are you making a good salary? Also, I am personally leaning towards going industrial marketing, is that a good branch of marketing or should I go towards another division? Thanks so much.
I wasn’t really a marketing major, but I work in marketing. Can I still answer? 
I don’t know about industrial marketing. So I’ll let you know the basics for any marketing position.
I love my job. I don’t particularly like my boss all that much, but I like my company, my co workers, and the work I do. Marketing is a good career. There’s lots of upward potential (many people move into upper level positions from the marketing department) and it’s very results oriented (if you’re good, you’ll have measurable results to back that up and you’ll move ahead).
It’s also a nice blend of quantitative and qualitative skills. You can go more towards the creative end (e.g. advertising), more toward the quantiative end (e.g. market research), or stick in the middle with something like product/marketing management (what I do). However, even at both ends of the spectrum you have to be reasonably competent in both the quantitative and qualitative areas.
You should have good math skills (you don’t have to know upper level calculus, but you should have a good knowlege of statistics and generally be comfortable dealing with figures). You must also be able to write well (don’t look at the quality of my posts as any measure of acceptable writing ability). You should be comfortable giving presentations. Above all, you need to be able to manage multiple projects at the same time.
The pay is pretty good overall though salaries vary by field, location, and company. Some areas (like advertising) offer notoriously low pay for entry level positions. They can because so many people are looking to get into that field. However, as you move up the ladder, your salary increases dramatically. You may find that bonuses are a large part of your compensation. Last year my bonus was 20% of my base salary. Some areas are even more variable in their compensation.
The biggest downside is that everyone thinks they can be a marketer. We have operations associates who think they can write copy, accountants who show us the drawing their 5 year old did thinking that would be a great idea for our next brochure, and everybody (I mean everybody) knows what you should have done differently in that campaign that bombed. The biggest objection you’ll hear is “that advertisement/brochure/presentation doesn’t appeal to me” regardless of whether the person saying it is even remotely in the target audience. Learning to tactfully tell a senior manager that a campaign designed for women 18-24 shouldn’t appeal to a 50 year old man like himself is vital!
I don’t know how the job market is right now. The past few years, it was really a dismal place for applicants. However, it seems to be picking up. I don’t know the industry statistics. I just know we’re hiring and the headhunters are starting to call again. There are lots of applicants, but we fight over the good ones. There are ways to make yourself one of the good ones.
I entered the job market in '92. It was a stinky time to look for a job in marketing. However, I didn’t have all that much difficulty finding a job. You just need something to set you apart from the field. For me, it was a really good internship. In addition, I interviewed with companies where my background set me apart in a good way.
As mentioned earlier, I was not a marketing major. I was an economics/accounting major in college. I worked for a while in public accounting, then went for my MBA. I was going to focus on finance and took an internship with a financial services company in London. Shortly after starting that internship, a woman in the company’s marketing group went on maternity leave. She was going to be out for 3 months. Since my internship was already in the budget and they knew (and liked) me, they offered me the chance to fill in for her. It meant staying in London for 2 extra months, so I took it even though it was marketing and I thought I had no interest in that field. Well, I fell in love with marketing and decided to pursue it.
After getting back to school, I took a bunch of marketing courses, but not really enough to get a concentration (my previous work was pretty slanted toward finance). So there I was in a stinky job market, competing with marketing majors, and hoping to get a job. I decided to focus my search on financial services companies rather than go after the consumer products jobs that most marketing majors covet. I thought my background in finance coupled with the fact that I had done marketing for a financial services company would help get me in the door. It did. Frankly, a lot of people working in marketing at the companies where I was interviewing were a bit defensive about not working in “real” marketing (with a consumer products company like P&G). Finding someone who really wanted to work in their area and understood their business was exciting to them. Moral of my (very long) story: find something that sets you apart in a good way and work it!
A lot of people have gotten an advantage by joing a professional association and working on projects there. That way, they meet and work with a lot of the people who are hiring. Even if it’s not in a marketing association, heading up a project for a volunteer organization can show that you have leadership and project management skills.
If nothing else, heading up a project gives you something to talk about in an interview. You do need to interview well. We love to hire people we’ve had a good conversation with. If you’re not a natural extrovert, fake it. Practice a lot for interviews.
Final word of advice: for Og’s sake, *proofread * your resume. Then have someone else proofread it. Then proofread it again. Every marketing professional has a personal horror story of letting something go with an error. They don’t ever want to repeat that, and they don’t want to hire someone who will do that. If you have an error in your resume, into the trash it goes.