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Roadmap For Your Career: Your Personal Marketing Plan
by Ed Scribner, PhD; Eric Pratt, PhD; and Elise Sautter, PhD
You've marketed yourself successfully from school to the workplace. This
is only the beginning. Now it's time to develop your personal marketing
plan.
When you make that exciting first step into the accounting profession,
it's only natural and appropriate to settle in and concentrate on learning
the job at hand. But don't wait too long before planning your future.
You're only at the beginning of what promises to be a long and fruitful
career.
One thing that will set you apart is a sense of specific purpose and direction.
Whether you stay with your first employer your entire career or move elsewhere,
proper planning benefits both you and the organization you serve. When
it comes to gaining this kind of forward-looking perspective, there's
no substitute for developing your own personal marketing plan. (If you
can do this while still in school, so much the better!)
A marketing plan is a formal document that contains guidelines for business
programs. A personal marketing plan (PMP) does for an individual person's
work and related activities what a marketing plan does for a business.
In addition to guiding your future, your PMP helps you to decide how to
allocate your personal resources over a given period of time. The time
horizon of a plan varies according to the needs of the individual or firm,
but the typical time frame is one year. As you might imagine, very few
people take the time to write down a formal plan, so it's one major way
to get a jump on your competition.
These Questions Need Answers>
Your personal marketing plan should answer the following
questions:
- What is my current situation?
- Where do I want to go?
- How should I get there?
- Who or what is going to get me there?
- How much will I need to spend?
- How long will it take to get there?
- How much money can I expect to make along the way?
- Why did I or did I not do what I set out to do?
The Components Of A Marketing Plan
To answer these questions, your PMP should contain the following
eight basic sections. Begin each section with a separate heading or subheading.
Mission Statement
Much like the mission or vision statement of a business, a personal mission
statement in a PMP is a statement of (1) your activities, (2) your products,
and (3) your "customers." In this section, list your area(s)
of specialization, what you're trying to accomplish with your work, and
what further specialization or change of direction you might seek in the
future. As Stephen Covey writes in his popular book, The Seven Habits
of Highly Successful People, developing a personal mission statement may
require considerable time and reflection. This step may also require extensive
research so that you can identify the positions and industries that are
most attractive to you.
Current Marketing Situation
Borrowing from marketing strategies that have been used by successful
businesses, the personal marketing plan contains vital information about
the market, product quality, competition, and distribution. A corporate
marketing plan defines the market and major competitors and each of their
strategies for price, quality, distribution, and promotion. It also shows
the market shares held by the company and each competitor as well as sales
trends and developments in the major distribution channels. These ideas
can be brought down to the individual level. The information in this section
will serve as the foundation for proposing strategies and tactics for
your own professional growth. In this section, you should provide relevant
facts about yourself and the job market. Who are you? What kind of career
do you want? What does the market look like (salaries, growth rate, locations,
number of positions, experience/job requirements, technological change,
etc.)?
Swot Analysis
After compiling the information in Step 2, look for strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities, and threats that you face in your chosen market and industry
(career field). Having just started a career, this is an especially good
time to look for your own strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps you are good
at creative problem-solving or can speak one or more foreign languages.
You may be well equipped for work in the international arena. Perhaps
you honestly consider yourself more comfortable with the technical aspects
of "number crunching." Look candidly at your mission statement
and write down your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats,
given your desire to develop a career in your chosen field.
State Specific Objectives
Actually write down your personal/professional goals for this plan's time
horizon. For example, in business, a manager might strive to achieve a
15-percent market share and a 20-percent pre-tax return on sales. In a
PMP, some goals might be to pass the CMA exam, earn promotion within 12
months after starting a new job, secure specialized training, learn a
foreign language, or expand networking opportunities. These goals should
be as specific and measurable as you can make them and should be tied
directly to your career development plans.
Strategies And Tactics (Using A Marketing Mix)
This step is the action part of your plan. While objectives are narrow
in scope, strategy is a broad plan of action by which an individual or
organization intends to reach its objectives. A business strategy involves
marketing tools like product line, product quality, pricing, and promotion.
Tactics transform strategy into specific, shorter-term actions to implement
the strategy. Suppose your objective is to earn a promotion within 12
months after starting a new job. Talk to your peers and supervisors to
develop a strategy to achieve this goal, along with tactics to carry out
the strategy. Like a business, you should use all possible marketing tools
to achieve this objective. The tools that marketers use to achieve organizational
goals are called the "marketing mix." No tool is inherently
more important than another. What is important is how you "mix"
the various tools together. Here are the tools at your disposal in developing
your own "personal marketing mix."
Product:
What changes/improvements should be made in you (the product) to prepare
you for advancement in your market? Do you need to improve your computer
skills, learn a second language, improve your communication skills, or
get more business training?
Promotion: What can you do to improve communication between you and your
co-workers (or, as the case may be, potential employers)? What kinds of
appropriate networking should you be doing?
Price: What salary expectations are reasonable? What fringe benefits are
important to you? Are you planning for retirement? The way to keep from
having to be distracted by thinking about retirement is to start saving
at the very beginning of your career.
Place: Are there any geographic considerations? Are there any specific
locations where you want to work? Are there any locations that you find
unacceptable?
Budget: Your PMP budget must follow the action program to show how much
it will cost. In a PMP, the budget lists estimates of all the personal
expenses that you are likely to incur in achieving your objectives. For
example, it should contain the cost of business clothing, transportation,
suitable housing, entertaining, and so on, including costs you never had
to consider while a student.
Projected Sales And Profit
During your accounting coursework, you probably studied budgeted or pro
forma financial statements that a corporation draws up for its planning
horizon. In your PMP, this step is somewhat different. Rather than preparing
a pro forma income statement for yourself, you will forecast roughly the
amount of money you need to spend (Step 6) and how you expect to provide
for these expenditures (i.e. scholarships, bonuses, salary, consulting,
etc.). Remember, for a PMP, there are some non-financial intangibles.
For instance, so-called "psychic income" may be important. Being
in the best location for you may mean higher "profits" than
an increase in salary.
Performance Evaluation
An important part of any plan is follow up. Review your plan regularly
to see if it is working. A good PMP should have alternative strategies
for achieving the objectives in case the primary plan appears to be straying
off target. If at any time during your planning period your assumptions
change, you should switch to your alternative strategies or even find
new strategies.
Standing Out From The Crowd
Writing a comprehensive PMP is an ambitious but worthwhile project, especially
if you haven't developed one before. The plan and the thought that you
put into it set you apart from the competition. Therefore, it's a wise
move to begin the disciplined marketing planning process soon after you
enter your first position.
Ed Scribner is a professor of accounting, and Eric Pratt
and Elise Sautter are associate professors of marketing at New Mexico
State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico.
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