Looking for a job in the research industry? Susan Lee has some good ideas for you. As president of The Marketing Link, a Chicago placement firm, dispensing employment advice is what she does for a living. Though the firm - which she runs with Managing Director Suzanne Walchli - specializes in placing marketing and marketing research professionals on a short-term basis, I think her insights on job hunting also apply to those going after something more long-term, whether it’s a full-time research position or starting a consulting business.

The firm places workers in all manner of researchrelated assignments, filling in for employees on extended leave or when a company needs extra help to finish a project. It’s rare for someone to get a permanent position; the jobs last an average of four weeks to two months but can range anywhere from a day to a year. Most of the employers The Marketing Link serves are in the Chicago area. While 65 to 70 percent of the assignments are research related, the company also places people in general marketing work.

Lee’s best piece of advice? Know how to market yourself. "The thing that gets me about marketing people is that they talk about doing a marketing plan when they’re on the job but they never do it for themselves. I tell them to practice what they preach," says Lee, who has worked on the client and provider sides of research, including a stint as director of marketing research at Citicorp Diners Club, before founding The Marketing Link in 1990.

"Go back and take a look at the four Ps of marketing that you were taught in school and apply them to yourself. I understand it’s hard to be objective when you’re talking about yourself but you have to step back and analyze what your skill sets are, why anyone would want to hire you, who your competition is. It’s not that different from what you do as a marketing person. You have to put together a one-year, five-year and 10-year plan, just like you go around preaching to companies to do. And then measure and see what happened."

Misconceptions

Lee says she often encounters misconceptions about the job market from both prospective employees and the companies that are looking to hire them. "Companies seem to think that it’s a buyer’s market, that they can demand anything they want to because in theory there are so many people unemployed," she says.

At the same time, some employees think they can walk into a swell job just because they have an MBA. "Companies are not paying $60,000 to $80,000 a year for an MBA with no experience," Lee says. "That went away in the ’80s but people don’t seem to understand that. Companies did that for a while and then they realized that they weren’t getting anything out of it. The return-on-investment just wasn’t there."

On-the-job training

Currently, people with two to seven years’ experience are in high demand, Lee says. Trouble is, those folks are in short supply. "The people with that level of experience tend to realize that there’s a mismatch in the supply and demand and they tend to be unreasonable in what they demand in terms of compensation."

One reason for the shortage of workers with two to seven years under their belt is that on-the-job training has been harder to come by in the past few years, Lee says. Companies have cut back training programs because they’ve been stung by employees who have worked their way up the ladder and then quit just at the time the
company expected to reap the benefits of training and educating them. "The payback isn’t always there for the companies that train, so the companies got smart and stopped training. It costs too much to keep people but it also costs an awful lot to train them.

"When I started out in marketing research, you got out of school with an MBA or B.A. and there actually was a path that you could follow. You started out in marketing research and after a year or two you went to product management. You rotated between groups in a company, working on two or three products before you ended up in a place that you stayed for a while. You learned how to introduce a new product, how to do a promotion, how to get legal approval, what claims you could and couldn’t make in advertising. Companies just aren’t doing that these days. I don’t know if they’re expecting the schools to teach it - to some extent they do but you never learn it as well as when you learn it in the school of hard knocks."

If people aren’t getting training at work, it’s their responsibility to seek it out, Lee says. There are many avenues available, whether it’s college programs, conferences offered by professional associations or courses from firms like Burke, Inc. or The Burke Institute.

On the other hand, it’s possible to have too much experience. Lee says there is an excess of people with 10 to 20 years of experience and companies don’t want to hire them because they think they’re over-qualified. "Companies don’t seem to understand that for a week or two or a month those people don’t mind doing a junior-level job. Just because someone is willing to do telephone interviewing doesn’t mean they’re not good. A lot of times if you get in there and do it you have a better understanding than if you hire someone else to do it and then analyze the results. It’s like my old theory that if you’re in research you make a much better researcher if you’ve been an interviewer. You understand what it takes to do the job."

Burned by outsourcing

The nationwide move to outsourcing hasn’t resulted in a frenzied hiring of short-term workers in the marketing research field. A lot of companies have tried outsourcing, Lee says, and many have stopped. "The idea of outsourcing was great, but I don’t think the human resources departments or whoever is in charge of training really taught managers within companies how to work with freelancers. It’s like making an employee a manager without training them. That was a problem and some people feel like they’ve gotten burned.

What makes a good freelancer? "You can’t be type of person who has to burrow into the company, who has to belong and get into everybody’s business. If they can’t get out of that mindset we can’t use them. They have to be flexible, keep their nose clean," Lee says.

The most critical attribute is expertise. "When we ask for a resume we ask for as much detail and as much variety as possible. Clients are looking for those hooks. You either have to know an industry or you have to specialize - in research, strategic planning, media planning, production or communication strategy, whatever. If you say, ’I can go in there and roll up my sleeves and get anything done,’ I don’t have a place for you. There are too many of those people out there. They don’t want a generalist. Generalists don’t make it.

"The employees need to understand that when you get to a certain age, 40-plus, you have to be willing to create your own little pyramid. The baby boom generation has come of age and there always were too many of us. The corporate structure is triangular and the higher you get on that triangle the fewer positions there are for you, so you have to create your own little triangle. If you’re looking for a place where you can belong and with stability, that just doesn’t happen these days."

It also helps to have specializations within research, more than just quantitative vs. qualitative. "Clients are not averse to paying an expert but they expect you to be an expert. They don’t expect you to learn at their expense. Our clients want a hero, they want you to get in there and rescue them and if you haven’t got a skill that can rescue them, they don’t want you. They don’t need you to duplicate what they do."

Be realistic

Finally, Lee says, researchers should be realistic about their abilities. I talk to people who have a couple years of research background and want to get into marketing. They say, ’Who’s going to give me a break?’ Probably nobody. Not these days. Twenty years ago, maybe, but not now. The only way you’re going to get that experience is to go to a really small company where they let you do anything you want. But most of them don’t want that. They want the glamour along with it. But you have to realize that things have changed."

Lee says she sees fewer prospective employees who are willing to do what is perceived as the grunt work of research. "Nobody wants to code. Nobody wants to tab anymore. Everybody wants to be a product manager. Some people just don’t have the skills to do that. They’re better at the detailed kinds of things but it’s not glamorous to do that. There’s a class distinction that if you can manage a project that you’re better than a person who can write tab specs or code - which is just as important. There’s nothing wrong with the coders and the copy writers and the production people. There’s a need for that kind of specialization."