Abstract
Marketing education literature is prolific in research dedicated to the best methodologies to provide higher education students with the knowledge as well as the soft and hard skills needed for their future careers as marketing experts. This article presents an experiment developed in a marketing degree, that took place outside the classroom over the last twelve years. The experiment consists on the organization of an annual marketing conference organized by a team of students that are supervised by a marketing teacher. It is a two-day event that brings together the best speakers from the market and academia and is targeted for both marketing students and professionals. The participation of students as part of the organizing team is voluntary and no assessment is performed by any course of the degree. These students refer the development of skills such as improving negotiation skills, networking, public speaking skills, organization, planning, team management, conflict management, leadership, time management, among others, as an added value for there careers.
Highlights
The objective of this paper is to present the event “atUAliza.te – The Marketing Conference” whose creation, evolution and organization is an initiative from marketing students of the University of Aveiro – Portugal
As can be noticed on the page of the event (AtUAliza.Te, 2021), this initiative has been growing in quality, popularity and importance over the past twelve years. It is positioned in Portugal as one of the best national marketing conferences and is a reference for marketing students and students from other related areas such as design, advertising, management, international relations, among others
Rather than presenting a narrative of what we have developed with the students in recent years, we wanted to demonstrate how it is possible to develop technical and soft skills and create an institutional culture and a huge sense of belonging on students, with the organisation and management of an event
Summary
The objective of this paper is to present the event “atUAliza.te – The Marketing Conference” whose creation, evolution and organization is an initiative from marketing students of the University of Aveiro – Portugal. The paper intends to explore how being part of the organizing team of such initiatives allows students to develop competencies and contribute to their education in the marketing field, as a whole. The paper starts by presenting some literature review about the most important skills to cope with the requirements of the market and how experience-based methodologies such as the organization and management of this type of events can contribute to complement the students' training. The third section is dedicated to describing the main phases of the organization of the event, how the team is organized and works both internally among the team members and externally with all the stakeholders involved in this endeavour, followed by testimonies from students, the role of the teacher, some important facts and numbers and conclusions related to this activity’s importance to the students are presented, in the final part of the paper
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