Is a career path in marketing even a thing anymore?
As we approach Content Marketing World 2024, I’m struck by how much has changed in just 12 months.
In my opening keynote talk last year, I proclaimed, “Content marketing is marketing.” It felt slightly provocative at the time.
As it turns out, the entire marketing practice has evolved to embrace something familiar to those practicing content marketing: delivering value through trusted content-driven experiences.
Independent of the paid, owned, and earned media approach, most marketing organizations focus more on creating trust than grabbing attention.
To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that classic direct marketing and advertising techniques are dead. Nothing is dead.
I just mean that modern marketing techniques require teams that have assembled their operations like a media organization rather than as a trading desk, arbitraging attention, clicks, and search results.
The old marketing career ladder doesn’t fit the new model
It’s been a weird year in marketing. I’ve been saying that for 18 months, but it’s still true. There’s the quiet recession in B2B marketing. There are challenges in the job market. And AI continues to suck the oxygen out of every discussion of possible innovations.
But as much as marketing seems to have changed, many things remain the same.
For example, many mistakenly believe that people stay in their jobs for much shorter durations than they used to.
In fact, the average job tenure has remained about five years since the early 1980s. While more tenure differences exist with age and gender, it’s a myth that young people have become drastically less loyal to working for the same company.
But how can young people be called the “job-hopping” generation if their average tenure is similar?
It would be easy to chalk it up to young people’s impatience. Gallup research finds that only half of workers ages 25 to 40 strongly agreed they would be working at their company in a year, while 60% of older workers said the same.
However, those numbers are too similar to be distinctive. After all, if 40% of one part of your workforce and 50% of another aren’t confident they’ll be there in a year, something else is at work.
We found a similar tension in CMI’s 2025 Career Outlook for Content and Marketing Professionals.
Overall, marketers are optimistic about their jobs and careers. More than three-quarters (76%) are somewhat or very satisfied in their marketing role. Even so, more than a third (35%) say they’re actively pursuing or highly interested in finding another job. That’s up 4 points from last year and 7 points from two years ago.
What gives?
The answer stems from the redefinition of “career management” in marketing and the corresponding lack of response from many businesses.
Put simply: Organizations have evolved their marketing operations, but the related career paths are dead-end labyrinths.
How it started …
In the 1990s and into the 2000s (yes, I was around then), businesses would hire bright young people fresh out of college or university and plug them into entry-level marketing positions.
The company laid out a path — a ladder — to climb for more responsibility and higher pay. The person would advance from coordinator to manager to senior manager to director to vice president, senior vice president, and perhaps even the C-suite.
The ladder reflected an employee’s ability to advance from a “skilled player” contributor to a manager of people, teams, divisions, geographies, and companies.
The employee’s marketing specialty dictated how they might move across different ladders. Product marketing, brand, sales, and communications had distinct, functional career paths.
Then, digital entered the picture. Companies started distinguishing between “digital marketing” and “other marketing.” (Some companies still do that today. Yes, it’s weird.)
But worse, companies chopped digital marketing into channel-based silos like web, email, and social. It created confused and siloed versions of career paths.
Is it any wonder content marketing grew to be yet another marketing silo without a clear career path?
Career silos have also arisen because of the flattening of organizational structures. With the rise of tech-driven marketing, many businesses removed middle management in favor of more agile, fast, and multifunctional digital teams. Practitioners focused on channels, and leaders spent time de-siloing (or de-duplicating) the channel teams.
This chaotic organization obfuscates what it means to manage your marketing career in one organization. And it changes the nature of what managing a marketing career even means.
If marketing leaders care about retaining great talent, businesses must redefine, clarify, and communicate the pathways in their organizations.
How it’s going…
In almost every business I’ve consulted with in recent years, content and marketing managers have three choices after they reach a specific level. They can:
- Move into a more siloed technology-driven marketing role, leaving integrated marketing and content behind to optimize one aspect of the marketing portfolio. (Senior director of social media, anybody?)
- Depart for a lateral position at another company.
- Leave to build a solo practice.
Again, the 2025 Career Outlook for Content and Marketing Professionals validates that experience.
We asked marketers why they think it’s more challenging to find a marketing job than it was five years ago. Most (75%) attributed it to financial/economic pressure on companies, but the next four responses were:
- More competition for jobs (69%)
- Marketers not valued (55%)
- Poorly defined career path/ladder (34%)
- Poorly defined job responsibilities (34%)
Content and marketing professionals have lost their identity inside companies. Typically, there is no obvious next career move. Therefore, they must prioritize avenues that lead to a better (if still siloed) marketing job.
That’s why most respondents (76%) agreed they need to “master specialized/niche skills to remain relevant.”
This isn’t surprising.
Most businesses are still (almost five years later) trying to evolve in or out of remote work and other digital disruptions of the pandemic. Many, if not most, younger marketers likely have never seen a clear marketing career path.
Why we need new marketing career paths
When I was CMO of a fast-growing startup, a mentor told me hiring someone is the only truly expensive thing a company does. So, he said, “Make sure you do it carefully.”
If hiring is expensive, so is losing a great employee. Some reports place the cost at 21% of the position’s annual pay on average.
The answer to retaining great talent can’t be to tie the content and marketing practitioner to some traditional siloed digital marketing career ladder. That misses the point of modern marketing — and jeopardizes your organization’s ability to retain the talented communicators of tomorrow.
Your HR department almost certainly has an established career ladder for some traditional marketing roles. It has job descriptions for entry-level marketing specialists, marketing managers, senior email managers, social media directors, etc.
But do those roles and descriptions match what’s really going on with marketing teams in 2024?
In my experience, many don’t. I’m often asked to help organizations create new roles.
For now, I’m not suggesting the roles, titles, or even the kind of team you should build. (If you’re interested in my recommendations for content marketing-related career paths, read The 7 Core Roles of a Content Marketing Team.)
I’m working to create new career path resources that reflect the reality of modern marketing organizations, so look for that later this year. In the meantime, consider this column the beginning of the new marketing career path discussion, not the end.
Creating valuable content-driven experiences has become a foundational element of modern marketing. Businesses that differentiate to attract and retain their talent will build the career paths that support it.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about the marketing career ladder. Look for me on LinkedIn to continue the discussion.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute