How I discovered digital marketing as a career

Posted on by Audrey Ampofo in How I started

This is the story about how I discovered digital marketing as a career… I hope you will find it helpful if you are thinking of going into digital marketing as a career as well.

When I was at university…

I studied Information Technology. It was a good degree, having learnt about social theory and a few technical topics such as web design. After graduating, I did not have an interest in working in the IT field as at the time I felt that jobs were too technical. However, after doing some work placements across a variety of sectors, I came across an education charity called City Year where a role came up for a full-time volunteer. 

During my time with the charity, I first came across digital marketing when I decided to take part in a work shadowing placement in the marketing department.

This placement gave me a chance to work in a career field of my choice and to find out how it felt like to be as one of the team. In a short space of time, which was two days, I learnt a lot about what digital marketing is about, such as, researching ideas for campaigns, testing websites, jobs in marketing and how to analyse data. It influenced me to find out more information about marketing so I decided to search online for courses I can do to give me an introduction.

Digital marketing as a career…?

As I was searching, I came across some websites that offer digital marketing courses but they were either too expensive or too long so I then took some time to carry on looking for the right course. I wanted one where I can learn in a short period of time and would result in me finding a job with the skills that I learnt from the course. Before, I was worried about not finding work in time because every time I applied for jobs, I will always get emails saying that I was not successful which discouraged me.

One day…

I found the Digital Grads website. After reading the background of the site and also the founder Lucy’s profile, I started to get interested in reading more. When I realised that there was a free course offered in marketing, I decided that this was a good sign for me to go ahead because I was positive that I will get the skills and knowledge that I will need to pursue a marketing job.

So far, I have completed the search marketing course on the website and I have started the social media marketing course as well which I find interesting. As I continue on the course, I will have a greater understanding of why marketing is important in the world today.

Here is my advice…

My advice to anyone that wants a career in digital marketing is to go ahead and learn as much as you can about the industry because it changes so fast.  I recommend DigitalGrads to begin with because it can give you lots of practical experience; you can write blog posts just as I am doing now, or practice social media marketing. I wish you luck!

Time to kick start your career? If you want to gain more digital marketing experience, sign-up to take our training and learn from practical training to see if it’s something you enjoy. 

About post author

Audrey Ampofo

A university graduate and current volunteer with City Year UK, I am a person that is helpful, willing to learn with a friendly and patient personality that is passionate about children and young peoples' education. I am also interested in how people communicate using technology and how their actions influence them. I would like to start a career in digital marketing after finishing my leadership development programme. On this one year programme, as a volunteer at a primary school in East London, I support children with their learning, motivating them to work hard and maintain good behaviour, interacting with them in the playground, at breakfast clubs and after school clubs. I also supervise them on trips as part of the school curriculum. I had the opportunity to take part in work shadowing during a half term holiday in the charity office in the marketing and communications department, doing tasks including researching social networking sites that can be used to communicate with various organisations and volunteers and coming up with ideas to increase social media engagement. I enjoyed these tasks because it gave me an idea of what the marketing sector is about which has now influenced my career plans. Furthermore, I prefer to work in an environment where I can help people and build relationships in a positive way, making them feel happy. I would like to be able to learn new things everyday to improve my personal development such as public speaking, networking with different groups of people, for example, company directors, talking to university students about what City Year is as a youth charity and delivering presentations. My education involved a degree in Information Technology which was a Social Sciences degree, focusing on how technology has influenced society. I studied topics and modules such as security systems and globalisation.
Posted in How I started