Why my MBA in Marketing doesn’t hack it anymore.

I was sitting with some of my friends a few weeks back talking about the world of work and how change is accelerating. Two of my friends are in their 40s and 50s and both studied marketing about 20 years ago, back in the late 90s and early 2000s. They told me that they feel that the skills they learned back then would probably only scrape the surface of what is needed in today’s working world. They agreed that the basic concepts of SWOT, Porter’s 5 force model, understanding the customer, and trying to understand the needs and wants of a potential client still stood, but the way and speed in which data is gathered, research is conducted and the means to contact the market had really changed so much that they felt they needed to upskill themselves to stay in touch with developments.

And so I did a little more research myself and found that the impact on marketing was a little bit further down the road (compared to only 8 months ago) than what I had originally anticipated. When I say further down the road, I am of course referring to the impact of Deep Learning, AI and Machine Learning. (For those of you who are not really sure about these three terms, just think about them as AI is the big umbrella at the top, which covers everything, then ML comes next and the core root is where we find Deep Learning. This is where all the excitement is happening.)

One piece I came across was on how AI is impacting our traditional marketing. And I don’t just mean data auto-gathering or smart bots working out what questions you may ask on a website. I’m talking about smart apps that write copy for your content, draw pictures and design advertorials as well as create and design websites. Only last week Meta (the old Facebook) came out with an app that makes short videos for you based on a few text or speech prompts.  And then of course all the data analytics that goes along with every single step.

To read more about this, check out Marketing Artificial Intelligence by Paul Roetzer. A 2022 book with all the latest tech, tips and accessible apps that you can use.

And it’s not only marketing. There are many leading academics, including Andrew Ng, the famous  American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and AI, who state that AI now has to be a part of almost every Higher education curriculum. But most curricula don’t. At least not yet.

And so I guess we again are reminded that we live in a fast moving, ever changing world. One that probably isn’t going to slow down, and one that requires us to remain “a few steps” ahead of the tech-affected job world. Contact us at FutureProofMe.io for a friend who will help you stay ahead of your peers.