teachthe4ps.com - For instructors of marketing.

As regular readers know, my introductory marketing students write a personal marketing plan.  I often post articles and links — here and at Learn the 4 Ps — with information to help students better create their own personal marketing plan. Last week I listened to The Startup of You, a book that describes how people should look at their careers through the eyes of an entrepreneur.  For an interesting visual overview of the book, click here.  One of the authors, Reid Hoffman, is a very successful entrepreneur who helped start PayPal and cofounded LinkedIn.  While the book sometimes gives a bit too much explanation of how to use LinkedIn (chapter 4) most of the book is very relevant to students looking at making career decisions (see particularly chapters 1 – 3).

The book has great advice for the rest of us, too.  The “security” of tenure doesn’t quite feel the same when you wonder if higher education is the next major industry to be disrupted by a technological breakthrough.  The more prepared we are for a rapidly changing working world, the better we will be in teaching and advising our students (and children).  Also posted at at Learn the 4 Ps.

You might find this graphic fun to show in class when you cover advertising.  As with most good jokes, there is a ring of truth to it — and I think that many of my students believe the “friends” panel.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

US News & World Report‘s  ”The Best Jobs of 2012” (February 27, 2012) includes links to a number of different lists.  You might want to be aware of this if your students are writing a personal marketing plan.  For more, see an extended post I made at Learn the 4 Ps.

Fortune magazine just published its list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” (January 20, 2012).  The usual players — Google, Boston Consulting Group, SAS Institute, and Wegmans Food Markets — top the list again.  Many of our students would love to work for these companies and reading the list will give them ideas about what companies they want to work for as well as what to look for.

What I really like about this year’s list is a slide show feature titled “They’re Hiring.”  This feature lists 25 companies that have at least 700 job openings.  Even better, each featured company includes a section where one of the company’s recruiters offers “Secrets to impressing their recruiters.”  I found some really useful advice here — advice that will benefit our students.  You might find this especially helpful if your students are writing a personal marketing plan.  So I have also posted this at Learn the 4 Ps.

Fast Company magazine often takes an idea and pushes the boundaries — but I find their observations are usually prescient.  They point out that the business world is becoming increasingly chaotic — making career planning darn near impossible, at least in the long-term.  This brave new world  rewards the agile and opportunistic.  This article, “This Is Generation Flux:  Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business” (January 12, 2012) introduces you to seven people — representing a broad demographic cross-section — who are thriving in this macroenvironment.  The article suggests the skills that may be needed as well.  A companion article, “The Four-Year Career” describes a 28-year old woman’s early career path (Fast Company, January 12, 2012). The idea here is that our students should probably be career planning for relatively short time horizons — four years as opposed to twenty.

For another perspective on career planning, read “To Find Happiness, Forget About Passion” (HBR Blog Network, January 13, 2012) the author suggests that young people should be focused on problems they can contribute to solving.  Reading the comments (189 and counting as of today) — will give you a much richer perspective.

These articles have also been posted over at Learn the 4 Ps — since they are most relevant for your students — especially those developing a personal marketing plan.

I have a new post for your students over at Learn the 4 Ps.  The post “How to use social media to help your job search,” is part of our ongoing efforts to promote student development of a personal marketing plan.

That post reminds students that employers look at Facebook profiles and refers them to an article at Social Media Today, “How Social Media Will Help Your Job Search” (September 18, 2011).  The post also provides links to one person’s rather extreme efforts to get a job at Google through social media.

Regular readers of T4Ps and L4Ps (our sister site for students of marketing – Learn the 4 Ps) know that one of the assignments I use in the introductory marketing class has students write their own “Personal Marketing Plan.”  This plan requires each student to write a plan to get a job (or go to grad school — I also let students who already have a job use it to identify a later career option or to write a short plan for a business).  The personal marketing plan is consistently rated one of the most valuable experiences students take away from my introductory marketing classes.

Are you interested in using the personal marketing plan assignment in your classes?  Here are some suggestions:

• In our text books, Appendix C “Marketing Career Planning” — provides some guidance, though it mainly focuses mainly on jobs in marketing, so…
• If possible, I suggest you involve your career services office.  Orr college’s career counselor loves the opportunity to talk to 180 juniors about career planning.  She also tells me that the marketing plan structure we use in class aligns perfectly with what she wants students to do.  She is thrilled to come to class and I give her an entire class session about mid-semester, when I introduce the assignment.
• Give the students a clear structure and outline.  I have a handout that includes a two-page outline that details the assignment plus a one-page grading rubric.
• I suggest you give them a 4-6 page assignment (I have them use single space and double-space between paragraphs). I also encourage the use of bulleted lists where appropriate as they are easier to read.
• Send your students to Learn the 4 Ps – we currently have 27 posts in the “Personal Marketing Plan” category to give them a lot of ideas for writing a better plan.
• I can also share the PowerPoint slides that I developed with our career counselor — it aligns with the model we use in the text book.

If you would like the handout and PowerPoints I use for the Personal Marketing Plan assignment — just send me an e-mail at Joe(dot)Cannon(at)ColoState(dot)edu and I will be happy to send you the package.  Do me a favor, put “Personal Marketing Plan” in the subject line.

Fortune magazine’s annual ranking of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” just hit the streets (February 7, 2011). The package includes a listing and thumbnail sketches of the top employers, a list of 25 from the list that are currently have at least 700 openings each (137,000 available jobs), a slide showing of 25 top paying companies, and more. You can also link to videos to see some of the best employers in action.

My students write personal marketing plans — so they like this information.  Many of them would love to work at Google and from this photo you can see that it looks like a fun place to work.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.