Major and Career Objective Analysis

Communications Marketing

My action plan for choosing a major begins with a couple of points of analysis. I first will be looking at my personality and interests, and then try to align themselves with potential career paths.. From there, I will look at the majors that might be available to help put me on that path. These different things will be done here, but then there are other facets of the action plan. For example, I will begin to envision the different positions in this pathway and the types of companies/industries in which I might want to ply my future trade.

I want to have three major goals. First, I want to gather enough information for me to make an informed decision. A sub-goal that is associated with this is to look at different jobs in my fields of interest, and gather data about career prospects. A second goal will be to determine what majors will be most useful in helping me to get to these career pathways. It is more important to have a concrete sense of my major than it is to have a concrete sense of career pathway at this point. A sub-goal here will be to determine what majors are out there, and maybe to have a first choice of major-minor outlined by the end of the exercise. The third goal will be to identify what other skills or knowledge I might need to acquire to excel. This is an interesting one, not really related to the major, but it will help me to know what else I will need so that I can begin to prepare for that.

There are definitely some potential barriers for each goal. For the first goal, I feel that it might be difficult to gather all the information that I need. For example, there are websites that provide me with some basic information, but these sites may not provide enough. At some point, I will probably need to do some interviews, talk to people in the businesses I am looking at, to overcome the information gap. In terms of determining majors, I wonder if a barrier to that might be that the courses of study that are the best might be available. I like to think in terms of possibilities, and best case outcomes, and I hope that there are no barriers to pursuing the education I want -- but I understand this might actually require special permissions from departments if the best course is something I have to design myself. On the last goal, I may find that I have no pathway to learn what I think I do. If it is not something you learn in school, I might not have a place to learn it, or might not have the time. So there are certainly some potential barriers that I need to overcome.

Identification of Majors

I see communications and marketing as the two best majors for me to focus on (Pace, 2016). First, there are always good careers in these fields, and they suit my personality. Second, these are established majors so there are no barriers to pursuing these studies. These majors both help me to understand how to define an audience, frame a message, and to build my communication skills. I feel that either one, or some combination of both, would be ideal for the career that I wish to pursue.

Personal Mission Statement

It is my mission to graduate with the skills and knowledge required to pursue a career in either fashion marketing or in public relations.

Occupations

I see either public relations or marketing as two key occupations for my course of study, and would like to focus on the fashion industry for both. . Public relations is a niche market profession, but one with a fairly high rate of compensation. The mean annual wage is $119,390 and there are around 60,000 such positions, but with a slow growth rate of 1.2%. The fashion industry is not listed as being a major employer, but PR firms are, and they work with fashion companies (BLS.gov, 2016).

There are a few different professions listed under marketing. Advertising and promotions managers are few in number (29,000) with 2.6% growth rate, but with a mean wage of $113,610. So this is a good position. There are a lot of entry-level positions in this field, so it is competitive to move up into a managerial role. There are more positions available as marketing managers (192,000), and they pay well at $140,000; sales managers are even more common (364,000) with good pay as well ($130,000) (BLS.gov, 2016). The fashion business probably pays towards the high end, because it is a very large business and there is a lot of money there.

Most positions in these fields prefer somebody to have a degree in marketing, communications or public relations. For higher level positions, an MBA is recommended but not always required. The most valued skill is excellent communications skills.. For public relations, communications and journalism courses are important, where marketing might require understanding computers, finance and economics as it tends to more quantitative analysis.

Strong interpersonal and organizational skills are required.

Geographically, these positions are concentrated in major cities. It was interesting to note that the lowest paying location for PR jobs is non-metro Hawaii -- that sounds wonderful but it is an expensive place to be the lowest-paying. In general, the high pay for these positions is to compensate for higher costs of living in New York, Chicago, LA, Atlanta and other areas where these jobs are most concentrated. In fashion, New York is the preferred location.

Personality

I took the Myers-Briggs test and scored ENFP, which is "the Inspirer," or extroverted intuition with introverted feeling. I live externally, and am generally a warm, enthusiastic personality. This is a great fit for marketing and public relations, especially positions that involve dealing with people. ENFPs benefit from jobs that are different each day, and roles that maximize my people skills (BSM, 2015).