Pathways to Marketing

Alumni help current students with career workshops

This June, alumni from a broad range of professions returned to campus to deliver workshops designed to give students unique insights into specific career pathways. 

Students received a week of targeted training, followed by an additional week’s work placement.

Current student, Maria Gibson (Liberal Arts), tells us about the help she received from alumni on the Pathway to Marketing:

In a job market where you need experience to get experience, it can feel like a losing race for us students. This is why the Pathways Scheme here at the University of Exeter is a perfect way to gain insight into a sector you may not know very much about or may not know how to get into, and put skills learned into practice. With employers invited in, many of whom are Exeter alumni, we were offered the chance to ask questions and hear about the transition between studying and the workplace.

I was on the Pathway to Marketing scheme and the speakers proved to offer a wealth of information. Their talks were passionate and engaging, incorporating various marketing techniques and theories without feeling like a lecture. Many of the speakers were local employers offering internship placements to students on the scheme the following week. Having the chance to hear about the speakers’ personal stories and ask them questions made their experiences seem more relatable and gave us confidence to throw ourselves into the marketing world.

Sales Director at Bigwave Media and former Exeter student, Nick Masson (Education & Physical Education, 1985), gave an engaging and energetic talk on marketing, with specialism in sport and high performance. It was a great realisation of the never-ending possibilities in Marketing and how you can incorporate other interests, such as sports, into your job. Having alumni lead talks and question sessions was a great way to help us build our networks, when in other instances it may have been much harder without that initial connection. From a personal perspective, I gained a lot of confidence from seeing how well these speakers have done since their degree here, whether it be working for a big local agency, or setting up their own successful marketing business like Alastair Banks (BSc Computer Science, 2000, now Director at Optix Solutions).

In the second part of the scheme, we got the chance to put the skills we’d learnt in the talks and through the group project into practice. Using the University’s many relationships with local businesses, or arranged by alumni, we completed internships. With a competitive application process narrowing it down to a select number of students on the scheme, we were all passionate and ready to work hard to learn the most we could in a week. I learnt a variety of new skills, from website management and analytics, to creating newsletters and writing articles.

If you would be interested in getting involved in the scheme, as a speaker, employer, or both, learn more here.

Date: 9 July 2018