My whole family has a legacy of loving education. We like to learn stuff, and we all like to read. My dad is a huge history buff, and as an ex-Marine, you can often find him devouring a book about World War II and other conflicts. My sister, and brother to an extent, inherited this love of history. My brother has done school projects on famous generals and war machinery. His main interest, though, is building things, and he prefers to learn by watching YouTube. My sister, on the other hand, reads everything — history books, theology, care and keeping of farm animals — you name a topic, she’s probably read something about it. My mom prefers to read biographies and novels — we joke that “based on a true story” is her favorite genre. I’m more similar to her in reading taste than anyone else, but I read more popular stuff than anyone in my house.
The only similarity we all have is that we all read to learn. Even my brother, who doesn’t love reading, has done it. It’s part of being in my family. It’s in our DNA. Recently, I’ve been thinking about learning outside the classroom. I hope to go into the marketing industry, and I know that learning doesn’t end when classes do. So here’s what I’ve been reading to try to stay on the up-and-up.
Hubspot’s Marketing and Sales Blogs
I started following these as a result of my Marketing and Public Relations class. I’m genuinely interested in the Marketing blog, and often read (or at least skim) an article every day or so. The Sales blog is not my favorite, but since so many jobs are described as sales and marketing, I figured it couldn’t hurt. I kind of have to force myself to read the sales articles, though.
This is the blog of David Meerman Scott, a self-made marketing expert. He’s the author of our textbook for Marketing and PR, which I’ve enjoyed so far. He’s been studying the marketing aspects of the presidential election, and it’s been very interesting to read his take on the candidates’ marketing techniques.
Magazines
Inc., Fortune, and Entrepreneur are a few that I read articles from on a semi-regular basis. Honestly, a lot of times I’ll read articles because they touch on something I’ve had to research for a class. In a couple of my classes we had to take the day’s topic and find a news article that related to it, and these magazines were invaluable. I also follow all three of these on Twitter, which is easier than visiting each site every day since I’m not a legit subscriber to any of them.
Companies
Since I’m searching for full-time jobs, I spend a good chunk of time researching the companies that are posting on the job boards. I don’t want to waste my time applying to a company I don’t actually want to work for. While I don’t do extensive research on every single company I put in an application for, I make sure I at least visit the website and have a pretty good understanding of their mission, customer value, and company culture. I consider this learning because I’m finding out what companies like to emphasize about themselves, and I can compare this to what I’m learning in my classes about how this should be done.
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