The Fit Between Marketing High Education and Required Skills for Marketing Practice

Marketing has evolved deeply along the years. From a secondary and empirical activity, when compared to other organizational functions, marketing has become broader, more relevant, more rational and a differentiating factor in competitive markets. Marketing concept has evolved, new paradigms have aroused and its activities have become more relevant for organizations. Nowadays, companies are searching for marketing competencies which connect with complementary competencies and also with soft skills. Given the increase of marketing relevance both for companies and other organizations, this paper aims to access the fit between marketing training offered by High Education Institutions (HEI) and organizations' demanded skills for marketing practice. This work's methodological approach is of qualitative nature was developed in three steps and focuses on the case of academic education in Portugal. The first step of the methodology process refers to the gathering of all marketing degrees' curricular plans of the Portuguese University and Polytechnic Institutions. On the second phase, all the Curricular Units (CUs) from 32 degrees were classified. Finally, the classified CUs were grouped and compared with the required marketing competencies, marketers should have. Being an exploratory study results should be carefully analysed. Nevertheless, it was found that there is a lack of adjustment between academic marketing education and marketing professionals demand. HEI should adopt a more interactive perspective, such as the “new marketing DNA” model for marketing education to prepare students for the market needs. In order to increase the fit between both, some actions are required, as follows. Marketing degrees should develop integrated marketing communications by adding digital marketing and other tools in order to develop skills about online and offline marketing communication, which deliver a multichannel message in a consistent manner; include courses from different marketing areas such as services, industrial marketing, tourism marketing and social marketing as marketing practice in each context differs; further, include seminars, laboratory, simulation and internships will be important for soft skills development, highly valued by marketing practitioners.Nevertheless, the results are very important for different stakeholders. Firstly, HEI which are willing to update and adjust their degrees, may find here important suggestions, secondly, students who wish to understand the potential results of their training and the need for complementary education and finally, for the market which can have a deeper knowledge of the HEI training abilities and therefore the skills of future marketing professionals.