Marketing, Management and Entrepreneurship
Marketing Education is the instructional program designed to prepare individuals for the major occupational areas within marketing and management (Gordon, 2008). Marketing, simply defined, is the selling of ideas, products and services of all kinds to identified and qualified markets.
Since Business Administration is the number one declared major of college freshmen and it accounts for 39% of all US jobs, including the largest number of career positions annually , it is imperative that students in Wisconsin’s high schools have access to Marketing Education programs. These programs must evolve and create new opportunities for the success of their students, schools and communities.
Marketing includes channel management, recruiting, image building, promoting, marketing information management, market planning, product service management, selling and training, financing, and communicating. Marketing is a process that can be adapted to virtually every economic, social, or public activity and is an essential ingredient in making our free enterprise system work (DECA Inc., 1992).
Marketing Education embodies competency-based instruction, the project-based method, portfolio assessment and cooperative learning. Instruction for marketing education is a combination of hard and soft skills (Gordon, 2008) where students learn occupational skills that are transferable to many careers as well as technical college and university degrees.