Sourcing With Skills

Where Companies Should Hire Marketing, PR, and Sales Talent

Where should companies hire marketing, public relations, and sales talent?

Business and/or communications degrees might seem like the obvious choice. Marketing majors go into marketing. Communications majors go into public relations. Business majors go into sales, and so on.

But what if that was only part of the story? In Sourcing With Skills, we look at key business roles like operations, management, marketing, public relations, and sales—all of which have grown at least 20% in the last decade, rivaling the growth in IT.

Contrary to what we might expect, it’s not just business and communications majors that work in these essential jobs. We analyzed the following six programs and discovered many of them move into major business functions: language and philosophy, social science, business, communication, IT, engineering.

We also identified their top skills, many of which lean toward digital marketing.

Of the graduates we analyzed in our latest report, Degrees at Work, from the six popular degrees mentioned above, 54% actually end up in major business functions.
Such business-related roles have grown significantly over the last decade, rivaling the demand we see in IT roles.
The education-to-career pathway is non-linear, and these critical business roles are filled by people from a diverse array of degrees.
Language and philosophy, social science, business, and communications graduates who enter marketing all show a strong concentration in the theme of digital marketing.