Marketing

I'm Jared McGinley and I'm the department chair for the marketing program and the entrepreneurship program at Butler Community College. The way I like to think about marketing, it's where art and design meet analytics and sales. And it's all about relationship building and satisfying people's needs. Our job is to discover people's problems and to come up with a solution for those problems, whether it's the right product or service or the right place or the right time to get that to them. So something else students will ask me is what careers they could get into if they study marketing. That can be anything from sales, sales representatives or sales directors. It can be art and design, so photography and digital video. It can be social media marketing, digital marketing, website development. It can be analytical, such as supply chain management. It really truly is where art and analytics kind of converge to solve people's problems. We have classes face to face in El Dorado and Andover, but also all of the classes in the marketing program and the entrepreneurship program are available online. We have agreements, we call them two plus twos, so you can go two years at Butler, two years at another school. And we have those with private schools and also public state institutions, so it's a seamless transfer. I'll have students who will finish at Butler, go on to a four year school and get their bachelor's degree, and then off into the workplace. And we work very closely with other departments here at Butler. So for example, we have career services area, and they will help you and we work with them carefully to obtain an internship, also for a career placement. They do mock interviews and will help you out with your resume and I will as well. So we do everything we can leveraging all the strengths we have as a college to help you get on to that next opportunity that you have. At Butler, we're very blessed to have a fantastic faculty. All of the teachers in the marketing and entrepreneurship program both have master's degree in their field and they have practical experience as well. So we're really lucky that we have faculty who have been out in the real world and can practice what they preach and have that experience to share with the students. At Butler, we also are guided by advisory boards. So I meet every semester with a local group of business leaders and they help direct everything we do. They decide what classes we teach and what we're teaching in those classes and they help keep us current with industry trends. They're entrepreneurs, they're involved in marketing or advertising, have their own business or they work for car dealerships or radio stations and they help us keep current so that we know what we're doing is what they want because those are the people who are going to do the hiring. At Butler we also have FBLA which is the student organization for business which is future business leaders of America. If you're majoring in advertising or studying advertising, you might do an ad campaign or a marketing plan or social media campaign. You're competing with students from other schools and colleges in Kansas, but also across the nation. And it's a chance to travel, network, meet other people with your same interest, show off what you can do, and it's just a really fun experience. Whatever you do in life is a business, and the skills that you learn in the programs here at Butler will help you with that. What are your hobbies? Are you a gamer? Do you like photography? Are you into animals? Every organization markets. Whatever your hobbies and interests are, you can pursue that. And maybe you won't be a professional athlete, but you can still be involved in sport marketing. I think taking a business class, a marketing or entrepreneurship class is always going to be useful no matter what you end up doing.