Marketing education: investigating the skills and tasks essential for the establishment of marketing careers

By examining the perceptions of marketing managers skills required to enable career establishment, the study extends the knowledge of the skills required within the contemporary marketing environment. The study identifies key skills as well as highlighting a number of areas where the curriculums of post-graduate marketing programs are perceived to be inadequate. The results found a wide range of skills were perceived to be important for career establishment, but the key skills were people management. These findings provide an opportunity for academia and policy makers to reflect on the higher education curriculum to ensure that the skills required in later career stages are indeed delivered.