What Working in Marketing Really Looks Like

Forget what the job ads say. Forget the team offsites, mood boards, Canva presentations, and filtered agency culture posts.

Here is what it actually looks like:

• Too many ideas. Not enough alignment.

  
  
  
  

• Five rounds of edits from five different people.

  
  
  
  

• Being asked to “make it pop” with no context.

  
  
  
  

• Launching something under pressure, knowing it will be changed again in two weeks.

Working in marketing looks clean from the outside. Internally, it is usually unclear, reactive, and tied up in a thousand priorities no one can quite agree on.

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Marketing Without a Degree is Possible (But You Will Have to Prove Yourself Constantly)

I did not study marketing. My major is in accounting. I left because I wanted to do something that made more sense to me. I taught myself everything I know through Google, through testing and through failing in real time.

It worked. But it was not easy.

If you do not have a formal degree, you will be expected to prove yourself more than others. You will have to show you know your stuff. You will have to deliver without being handheld. You will also probably be asked to fix broken things that were not your idea to begin with.

Learning marketing by doing is possible. You just need to be prepared to learn in public, get it wrong in front of people, and still show up again the next day with a better version.

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What No One Tells You About Office Culture in Marketing

The toxic side of marketing is not the deadlines. It is the culture.

Where ideas get credited to someone else.

Where race, politics and quiet power plays decide who grows.

Where someone with less skill gets promoted because they know how to present better(or know someone in the company)

This is the part no one wants to post about.

The reality is, some workplaces reward noise more than they reward impact. If you do not fit into the image, if you work quietly, if you get things done without needing applause - you might be overlooked.

That does not mean you are in the wrong career. It just means you are in the wrong room.

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Why Marketers Burn Out

It is not always the workload.

It is the constant shifting of expectations.

It is the feeling of never having full context.

It is trying to own results when decisions are made without you.

It is being invited in too late, but expected to fix everything anyway.

If you are feeling that, you are not alone. It is not because you cannot handle pressure. It is because you were never given the right structure to begin with.

Burnout in marketing is not about weakness. It is about a system that confuses volume with value.

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You Can Leave and Still Be Proud

I have left jobs that looked good on paper. I have stayed in jobs longer than I should have. I have taken roles where I knew I was undervalued, just to keep proving myself (and sometimes you have to do it).

You can walk away.

You can build something else.

You can decide what makes sense for you.

There is no one right way to build a career in marketing.

But there is a wrong one: staying where you are constantly being questioned, underestimated or underpaid for the sake of stability.

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If You Found This By Searching...

You are probably not looking for advice. You are looking for honesty.

So here it is:

You do not need a marketing degree to be good at what you do.

Marketing careers are not always what they look like.

Burnout is real and it is not your fault.

You are allowed to leave, start over, or stay and try again.

Whatever you choose, make sure it makes sense for you - not for your resume, not for your LinkedIn post and definitely not for someone else’s idea of success.

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If this made sense to you, we probably think the same.

-Ami