Michelle Dorsey (mdorsey13@gmail.com), Shelby Heydon (heydon@ksu.edu), and Amy Hein (alhein@ksu.edu), seniors in Marketing, have created a content website for marketing students and marketing professionals looking to gain in expertise and enhance their resumes. The website, http://marketingcertificationsource.weebly.com/ aggregates information on a wide variety of marketing certifications available online, in a way that is informative and easy to use. The project, part of an independent study supervised by marketing faculty member Dr. Doug Walker (dmwalker@gmail.com), included a survey of marketing experts in the field, consisting of members of the Marketing Advisory Council, the CBA Young Alumni, and the CBA Executive Mentor Program; and their insights have been incorporated into the website.
Dr. Walker has enjoyed working with this group of students. “Michelle, Shelby, and Amy are all excellent students and have been a pleasure to work with. We all developed a passion for building this website over the course of the semester, and we are all excited about the current version of the site. The site is beginning to turn up in search engine results and we look forward to working on building traffic to the site. The plans are to continue to develop the site even after the students graduate this May.”
The website is quite comprehensive. Certifications can be searched in one of two ways: by certification type (e.g. social media, email marketing) or by the sponsoring organization (e.g. Google, HubSpot). Each certification has its own dedicated page on the site, briefly describing the nature of the certification, the cost (many are free), the expected time to complete, the duration of the certification once earned, and personal accounts from those that have earned each certificate.
Walker believes the students benefited from this independent study in a number of ways. “They have learned how to produce a quality, content-based website from the ground up; producing a deliverable that they can use on the job market. As a component of the independent study, they have all gained in expertise and differentiated themselves by earning several of the certifications. And before even graduating, they are well on their way to being life-long learners, all while creating a resource that will help others along that same path. These students have bright futures in front of them – any firm would be fortunate to have any one of them as part of their team.”