The sales and job-seeking processes are very similar; the trick is to be enterprising and entrepreneurial. You wouldn’t dream of selling a product without researching the market and developing a game plan. The same is true in the job market. Be early, be professional, and use processes to market yourself.

As you explore your options, make sure your expectations are realistic. Many students envision retail sales or corporate marketing after graduation; however, you may be hired for business-to-business selling. Companies are looking for polished, educated, professional graduates who can create value fairly quickly.

While businesses are offering some nice packages, your first job won’t be in the executive suite.You will find, however, that sales is a fertile ground in terms of customers, competitors and products. Companies are putting sales people in places of responsibility, so make the most of every opportunity. In the end, if you can market yourself successfully, you can do the same with a company’s product or service.

In any discipline – whether you’re studying marketing or another area in business – what you put into it is what you’ll get out of it. Once you’re at Notre Dame, make every effort to avail yourself of our Career Center. The Notre Dame Career Center is one of the best in the country. You’ll have countless resources, opportunities to research and connect with companies who recruit at Notre Dame, and help with resume preparation and interviewing skills.

Also, it’s becoming increasingly important to secure a summer internship. Of course, you can always talk to practitioners and receive a sense of what an industry or job offers; it’s difficult, however, to judge until you’re on the job yourself and can decide if a career, company, or industry is right for you. Life is a series of experiences, and working in a discipline is more important than classroom study in confirming your career aspirations. Interestingly, internships can and often do lead to full-time jobs for our graduates, a significant outcome that is good news in the present economy.

In the marketing arena, change could be the buzzword of the day. Companies are shifting their marketing strategies to utilize social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace or to employ vehicles like Twitter to reach their customers on a one-to-one basis.

Beyond new media trends in marketing, an important phenomenon today is analytics. It’s entirely possible that your first job out of college could be analyzing marketing data to pinpoint trends, forecast sales and increase market share.

Another job path for graduates is business-to-business selling. Take, for instance, a cell phone. When you consider all of the opportunities for sales activity – marketing research, technology sales and sales of parts – that go into the process long before the latest and greatest smartphone is marketed to the consumer, there is ample opportunity for B2B selling.

All of these avenues in marketing offer a way for you to get your foot in the door; after that, the results are up to you.