Hi JayKay,
The thing about marketing it that it's one of the broadest discipline, many things fall under marketing, even your job as an IT professional has marketing elements to it - for example, building a search feature on a site to increase site usability. Everyone in every level of an organisation does marketing to a certain extent, from the company's courier who delivers stuff, to the customer service officer who attends to customers, all the way up to the managing director who plans on which global marketing to enter next.
If you want to move on into a marketing career, your IT background will be immensely useful - many of the most successful entreprenuers out there are able to build their product from scratch and then promote it to their target audience - your combination of skillsets make you very independent and self reliant. A great example of someone who possesses adept IT knowledge and sharp business acumen is Sean Parker, co-founder of the file-sharing computer service Napster and the first president of the social networking Web site Facebook.
Having a formal education in business marketing will be beneficial to you in the following ways:
1) It concretizes your knowledge of marketing
Whereas at first you might have just been 'feeling around' and using your instincts to do marketing, you now have knowledge and insights of the strategies and processes you're implementing, how and why they work, and a clear and actionable concepts and theories that you can apply with a higher level of proficiency.
For example - salespeople may know how to make people buy stuff, but if they knew about the 5 stages of consumer decision making, they'd be able to move customers much more quickly into a purchase decision.
2) It expands your knowledge
People who don't have formal marketing knowledge might not feel the need to study business marketing because they think they know all there is to know - this is a very myopic perspective and it only hinders their true potential and growth as a business person. Marketing is a very broad subject, it's very easy to have a shallow understanding of many different marketing related topics like economics, accountancy, finance, business strategy, etc, but having a good comprehension on each of these topics and bringing them altogether for critical decision making is another thing altogether.
I'll stop here first, do let me know your thoughts on my comments
JayKay wrote:
I am an IT professional with 5 years work ex. Marketing has piqued my interest and am exploring whether it makes real sense to change. Based on the info on the web, marketing seems to offer exciting opportunities to people who got a sense of how to persuade people / manage public perceptions / promote an idea / communicate essence of a brand or benefits of products.I consider myself good in the above areas based on extraordinary performance in the below roles. These roles were outside my core responsibilities and i had engaged purely out of enthusiasm. The big question is "Do these successes make me a good fit for marketing jobs ?". In other words, "Are the tasks involved in these roles representative of tasks in marketing at least to some extent" ?
1- Head of Marketing campaign for a week long technology festival in 2010 @ my workplace. The festival engaged about 1000 people. The Campaign included designing posters, banners, email communications, roadshows, email based teaser events , outdoor teaser events and newsletters. The Success of the fest was well attributed to the successful marketing campaign. I had headed a similar campaign for another week long back in 2009.
2 - Founder of a points based system to continuously (not just during appraisal times) remind employees of their appraisal goals and encourage even baby steps taken towards their goals. The system did not practically workout but the idea was very well received by the management.
3 - Head Election campaigner for my gang in students union election. Had single handedly planned the election campaign, sold the campaign ideas to my gang, executed the plan flawlessly and successfully got our candidate win (against a very powerful candidate) in a long drawn, fiercely fought election.
4- Besides, i had engaged regularly in planning & organizing college cultural festivals, technical festivals , fun events and slide shows.