The Ideal Path to a MarTech Career

The path to a MarTech position isn’t clear cut.  MarTech practitioners need to pull skills from multiple disciplines including Marketing and IT.  Those looking for job opportunities or candidates should expect to have or see diverse experience in resumes, writes, Steve Petersen, Marketing Technology Manager at Western Governors University.

Recently I was speaking with one of my colleagues here at Western Governors University (WGU). As MarTech isOpens a new window a specialty at the boundary of a few fields, she was interested in how one could prepare for such a career as she was writing a MarTech blog postOpens a new window for our site. She concluded that pursuing education and training in marketing was the route, but — while she’s certainly correct — I explained that an IT route is also suitable. This interaction prompted me to recall my path to my current Marketing Technology Manager role, which I also spoke about on The Talking Stack podcast that aired on MarTech Advisor.Opens a new window

Scott Brinker discussed this on his Chief Marketing Technologist blog.  As the specialty is a hybrid spanning both business and technical realms, there’s currently no clear career pathway.  Regarding the MarTech routeOpens a new window , he said:

Most hybrid professionals have a rather messy career background — they’ve built websites or business plans, done sales or product development, studied engineering or the arts, learned finance or SQL, become self-taught designers or programmers, etc. There’s a high degree of variance in their experience and education.

Learn More: The Plus-One Mentality and Your Marketing CareerOpens a new window

Starting out With Technical Roles

I’m not sure how unusual or typical my path is, but here’s how I got to my current role. 

After earning a bachelor’s in International Relations (go liberal arts!) I looked for opportunities to apply my soft and analytical skills.  At the time, blogging required technical expertise, and my father wisely advised me to do two things: write and invest in learning a new related skill. So, I enrolled in a beginning HTML continuing education course at a local college. After completing that course and then starting a beginning Dreamweaver (which is nice, but NotePad is my favorite editor) course, I got a job at a small web development firm writing content for southwestern travel-related (travel directories, hotels, CVBs, etc.) websites. The HTML and Dreamweaver skills helped me directly work on the sites without always relying upon developers. While there I picked up some basic SEO, CSS, and Web 2.0 skills.

I followed a blog by a company in Washington, DC that discussed those topics.  One day it posted a job for client services associate position, and on a whim I applied and got the job. At this new job I didn’t write much but ended up as an intermediary between our clients and developers.  I wore many hats (account executive, project manager of sorts, site administrator, etc.) for a variety of clients. This allowed me to learn using a few different CMSs and support SEO, social media, conversion rate optimization, and marketing automation initiatives among others. I was even involved in software development while working on custom-built platforms for a few clients.  Although I didn’t specialize in many areas, I got exposure to a broad array of technical and business topics.

During my tenure there I completed the Master of Information ManagementOpens a new window degree at the University of Maryland. This interdisciplinary degree included Information Science, IT, and Organizational Behavior topics, and the general management specialization I pursued allowed me to deepen my understanding of information architecture, social computing, and user needs that were directly applicable to my job. In cover letter terms, it taught me to more effectively translate the needs of business people to techies and vice versa. I also had a graduate assistantship job at the University of Maryland University College’s Center for Intellectual Property that exposed me to various related issues to the Internet.

Learn More: Essential MarTech SkillsOpens a new window – from Beginners to CMOs!

Choosing an In-House Marketing Technology Option

Eventually, I desired to go in-house and ended up at WGU’s Marketing Department. Despite my lack of formal Marketing training and experience, I was hired since I had expertise with the university’s website CMS. That technical background is what got me the job with the understanding that I could develop my Marketing skills on the job. It was interesting to transition from supporting dozens of clients and websites to focus on a much smaller site portfolio, but this move enabled me to focus on different specialties like multivariate and user testing. I wore many hats back then, and as our department has grown throughout the years, we now have people specializing on functions that I could only devote a little time to. 

However, by having a chance to dabble in a wide variety of skills coupled with my technical background, I was able to support a variety of initiatives. I even got some experience and formal project management training as we transitioned to adopt the Agile philosophy and Scrum methodology. Eventually, a forward-thinking boss saw a need to better manage our MarTech Stack, and that’s my responsibility now.

I don’t have a formal business or technical degree (although I could’ve pursued a more technical specialization of my grad degree). However, my technical experience enabled me to reach my current role. This is why I encouraged my colleague to expand to consider multiple routes. As my career path indicates, such a career requires one to learn on the job regardless of their academic background.