Case studies: Airline marketing executive: Julie

Julie studied French at Edinburgh University, which included a year teaching English in France. She now works as a marketing executive for a low fares airline.

I really enjoyed my degree as it was a good mix of studying literature and the actual language and culture of France. I went through quite a few assessment centres during my final year and was delighted to be offered a job at an airline when I graduated.

The feedback I had from my employer during the assessment centre was that my extracurricular activities at university had really impressed them (I was a member of the University Officers’ Training Corps (UOTC)), but they felt I did lack some business knowledge so I was keen to pick up on that side of things early on.

The graduate programme started with a month’s induction where all graduates coming in to the company worked together on some minor cross-functional projects and we also got to travel to several countries to see how the airline operated as a whole.

My typical working day involves working on my project, which is a customer satisfaction survey for a specific customer segment. I have had to learn a lot very quickly as I am completely responsible for designing the survey (with help from a market research agency). I will be expected to make sense of the data when it comes back from customers and come up with key recommendations.

The role hasn’t really developed yet as I have more than enough responsibility on this project. I would expect that in the next few years I will make a sideways move into the branding side of our marketing activities, and after a few years there I should be able to apply for a managerial role.

My favourite element of the job is talking to clients and I travel quite extensively to do this. The down side is trying to learn a lot about the company and my role whilst actually achieving what I am expected to achieve on my project.

My advice to anyone wanting to work in corporate marketing, but without a business qualification, is to try and do some really interesting things while at university that you can talk about on application forms and in interviews. This will enable you to show that you have the necessary skills (planning, analysis, giving presentations) and are able to learn quickly and deliver.