Business Degrees

straightadmit
Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:49:12 +0000

That is a huge question and unfortunately can’t be answered with a single person’s perspective or in a forum. It is something you will have to explore with faculty, friends, mentors, career services personnel, and others to develop your own understanding of the many options in each field. They are both big areas with lots of sub specialties, each could be written about extensively.

From my finance experience, I’ll describt finance management development training programs. I sought these and took one option in a Fortune 500 company. The “FMP”, “FLD” programs are firmly part of the culture of some of the largest companies (like GE, one of the most famous programs) and are considered premier entry positions. These rotational programs typically rotate through different business units on a 6 month to 2 year per assignment basis and expose the participant to different job functions like general accounting, cost accounting, treasury, capital investments, sales analysis, etc. The idea is at the end of these programs, the person can go into many areas and have lots of experiences to draw on. Sometimes they require relocation to be in different parts of the company. For my time I was a general accountant at a manufacturing facility and did capital investment analysis, general plant accounting, and some sales support. Then I took a role in a consumer facing division and was a financial analyst doing profit and loss forecasts for proposed sales deals for our large national accounts.

When I moved into marketing it was for the international travel component of my position at the beginning. I never wanted to be in sales. It was soon clear that the data analysis skills from by earlier background really helped with assessing our marketing initiatives, develop better data management policies, and improved processing time in our back end operations. I’ve been lucky enough to deal with lots of other issues since then, like media relations, advertising, social media, experiential marketing, etc. I have not specialized in a particular function and that may be why it has been so interesting. I also realize that marketing and sales are intertwined and each is a component of the other, just like customer service is. I am not a sales expert or a marketing expert, but I see these roles as important at different times and appreciate the skills each side uses.

Enough about me. Get other people you come in contact with in these fields to tell you their stories, what worked for them and why, what didn’t and why. Start drawing your own impression about work and you will be much better informed to make decisions.