You are a college student now. In the next future you will be graduated, and you want to have a good career in marketing. 

The ultimate requirement for gaining your best career in marketing is prepare yourself for a competition. There are enormous people out there who have the same target. Only the well prepared people can win the competition and get a good marketing career.

Here are the preparation steps you must do persistently for your future marketing career

1. Start early, even if you are still a college student. Do not wait, and do not waste your time. You must prepare now. 

2. Learn marketing knowledge and marketing soft skills like psychology, sociology, demography, communication techniques, analytics (to perform valuable data interpretation), etc. 

3. Soft skill is important, but marketing hard skill is a must. You must learn and try marketing information system software. Some software that you can try are: Salesforce, Marketo, and so on.

Some marketing tools that you can try are: SEO tools, PPC tools, WordPress (for creating landing page), analytics tool (Google analytics, KissMetrics , and others), and so forth.

Some marketing subject that must be learned are: social media marketing, content marketing, search engine marketing, marketing research, and more.

Please read marketing skill set that you must have to know more about marketing soft skill and marketing hard skill.

You can browse all marketing subject in this blog. Try search things that you want to know in this blog and you will find some marketing subjects you can learn. 

4. Test your marketing theory which has been gained. Experience is more valuable than just a theory. So, after gaining marketing knowledge, apply the theory into real world by experimenting and implementing it. I have mentioned how to learn marketing at home and develop small business to test the strategy at previous article. Please see the article for get more insight.

5. This is related to previous step, once you find the product you want to sell, try it, use it, so that you can explain more detail and explain more comprehensive about the product to your prospect or your customer. Trust me, explaining the product that you have used is more easier and more appealing than explaining the product that has not been used. There is a fundamental difference here, you have understand the product more detail by using it. 

6. Sharpen you sales skill by sell your product by yourself, both offline (door to door, etc.) and online (commerce site, marketplace online, etc.). Why you have to sharpen and have the experience of sales? Because by undertaking this step, you will find fundamental knowledge that is needed in your career in the future, such as: you will know people behavior, human nature, communication skills, strong to face a pressure, familiar with a change, ability to adaptation against environmental changes, and many more. 

7. By having above experiences, it will be easier to learn marketing management. Because you have been accustomed to arrange and manage things that you have met above. Therefore, in this step you have to learn management skills and then implement them into your real daily activity managing your small business. 

Let me summarize this article for you, by doing a good preparation you will be ready to compete with other people to get good career in marketing. Some steps of preparation are mentioned above. Happy practicing, see you on the top of marketing career.