I, like many, struggled to get into a career in marketing.

It’s not easy and the recession makes an attractive career in PR or marketing even harder to come by.

If you are not a marketing / PR / business graduate it becomes even harder, and no experience, well….

So what can you do if you feel that you could grow into this type of career?  How can you invest your time to build a platform to build a career?

Here are a few tips that I hope will be of some help.  They derive from my experience and as you know experience can be described as a collection of mistakes – peppered by a few successes – that helps you learn how to do something proficiently.

Resilience – you are going to get knocked back unless you are very lucky, well-connected or brilliant.  It is not easy to get a letter like this if you feel that you are perfect for a job: “Even though you are an excellent candidate we felt your skills were not quite right for our organisation on this occasion….”

You need to have a thick skin and move on, and don’t look back.  It’s not easy.

Give yourself a range of options – You might want to work in fashion PR, it is your ambition since you were 17.  But be flexible, so if a job in consumer PR comes up consider it carefully.  You can always move to other sectors at a later stage (although HR can have a habit of pigeon holing people).

Make a start and do not wait for the perfect job – You have to start somewhere.  The first job might be far from perfect but does it get you to the place you want to go?

A note of caution:  Sometimes an opportunity comes up but it is not right because it will not develop your skills, you don’t have the right attributes to build on in the first place or the boss or environment is not for you.  It takes real courage to turn something down when you are desperate to get a career started.  However, it is often the best option, so think carefully before accepting a position that you have a bad feeling about.

Desperation – the enemy of job seekers.

If you are desperate it will come though at interview and you will not get the job or as above it will cloud your judgement.  When you are starting out you often don’t have much perspective and little experience – you need to get on NOW!  Try and relax, if you are determined you will get there.

Qualifications – These can be more important in securing your first position rather than what you learn.  (I cannot remember 90% of my Chartered Institute of Marketing Diploma).

Apprenticeships – take them.  It shows employers your intent and gives you insight into your profession.  It might convince you that it wasn’t for you all along.  But remember a bad experience doesn’t mean you won’t thrive elsewhere.

Networking – If you develop good contacts it can help flag opportunities.  The least it might do is give you a real insight into the profession.  So start to attend CIPR events, ask friends who they know, can your lecturers help make introductions for you?  Be proactive, it will also deveolop your business skills and you as a person.

Social networking – It is hard to go to a business event as a wannabe PR and feel confident that you will be taken seriously.  You might think, “What can I offer the other attendees?”

These thoughts are understandable, but that doesn’t stop you using Twitter, monitoring blogs or indeed blogging yourself to start to establish a greater insight into your new profession and to initiate contacts.  If you are engaged in these pursuits at this moment in time you will probably be admired by the best professionals.  In a couple of years perhaps it will be nothing special at all.

Take control of things yourself – I have one client that could not get the summer job he wanted so he found projects for himself and by the time he graduated he had enough work to form his own business.

Not everyone is confident or able enough to do this, most people need to learn the ropes before they can work for themselves.  Saying that, if you feel you can offer something, why not do PR for a small charity or organisation?  (Caution: you might look back on the mistakes you made here and cringe, but it could be useful for your CV).

Find a mentor – someone who can help and guide you is invaluable.  Even getting snippets of advice from professionals can help, so be open and receptive.

Someone, family or friend, that can give you support can be just as crucial when you are feeling down thinking about the ridiculous odds you might encounter going for an entry level position.

If you want it you can get into marketing or PR – be proactive, focused and determined.

In this era of Ping, Ning, Twitter and Flickr you might be forgiven for thinking that we have a new paradigm.

Social media, the Internet and mobile communications are making the transfer of information so fluent, so easy that it somehow relegates some of the basics of marketing.

I remember one of my lecturers Peter Betts (Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester Business School), a really gifted lecturer, ask, “where does you marketing start?”

His answer was with the first person you come into contact with at an organisation, probably the receptionist.

That was the mid 90s and yes for many people a first experience of an organisation might well be online now.  It might be an unguarded comment on a blog or someone else’s comment about your organisation on a Google search.

What I am saying is that in any organisation the guardian of the company’s reputation is not just the PR professional, it is everyones.

Reputation is a central component of a business and without a decent reputation it is hard to trade.  So before thinking it is just media relations it is worth looking at all points of contact.

mad.co.uk ran a story on the current IPA Bellwether Report on the state of the UK marketing industry, the results give a mixed picture.

While direct marketing is suffering cuts across all sectors and PR is not fairing well, marketing spend is actually on the rise: reading between the lines things are slowing up but are still quite reasonably healthy.  This seems to be reflected on the ground from my observations as agencies continue to be busy.

How to interpret things?  Are we going over the edge into a recession, business is just being a little cautious or in the light of recent year’s healthy demand this news isn’t so bad?  I don’t know, but we will be all watching.  The fear is that we might talk ourselves into something worse than it needs to be – such are economies and that all important confidence.

It is not a new story. Unfortunately it is a common one. You go to pitch and you discover the prospect has been burnt by an unscrupulous agency before.

Even the best ideas and pitches can fall on this fact. Budgets that have been exhausted with little result and any imagination or adventure or even the fact of establishing trust cannot be planted.This must rebound on some PR agencies that are less than scrupulous. Yes, sometimes clients make it hard for the agency to work. Yet, there are simply too many cases of unsatisfied customers owing to little effort being applied on the part of the offending agency.

I can say that this can rebound greatly if the hurt party is well connected, and not all agencies realise how well connected someone can be.

PR and marketing are professions that still struggle to establish their credentials. Less than a professional effort undermines everyone.

I think you get good and bad in every profession, so it might be that I have nothing to really complain about. Even lawyers can be straight forward. I think?