EMCC offers business, marketing management program classes on-line

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Columbus-based Brewer Insurance Solutions owner Chimerel Brewer knew the implementation of modern marketing techniques would help her business. She was interested in tak­ing marketing courses, but the independent insurance broker said she is too busy managing her business for in-person classes.

After learning that East Mississippi Community College’s Business and Marketing Management Technology program could be completed online, she enrolled.

“The program has been a real asset to me, my busi­ness and my team,” said Brewer, who is in her fresh­man year. “I use the infor­mation I have learned to train my team. I am doing it all online, which is the only way I can do it and still have time for my business during the day.”

Classes in the Business and Marketing Manage­ment program can be taken wholly online or in-person at EMCC’s Golden Triangle or Scooba cam­puses. Shannon Miller, the program’s instructor on the Golden Triangle cam­pus, said most of her stu­dents who opt for on-campus classes range in age from 18 to 25.

“There is a wide range of ages for students who choose to take the classes online. Typically, those stu­dents will be a little older,” Miller said. “Some have been working for a while and feel like they need that degree to move up to an­other position in their com­pany. A number of students come into the program with dreams of owning their own busi­ness.”

The program prepares students for careers in areas such as marketing, professional sales, adver­tising, retail management, business ownership and human resources, to name a few.

The program includes both business and market­ing components. Business classes include Principles of Management, Merchan­dising Math, Legal Envi­ronment of Business and Human Resource Manage­ment, to name a few. On the marketing side, stu­dents take Principles of Marketing, Personal Sell­ing, Marketing Manage­ment, Internet Marketing and Advertising classes, among others.

Student housing is lo­cated on EMCC’s Scooba campus where Business and Marketing Manage­ment is taught by Dr. Joshua Carroll, who said the program’s on-campus classes there are popular with student athletes in the baseball, softball and cheerleading programs.

“For the online compo­nent, I have students who are right out of high school and adults wanting to go back to school,” Carroll said. “The online classes are really helpful to those who want to learn virtually, but also for those who want to work virtually be­cause our program trains them in that area.”

Students at both cam­puses are required to put what they have learned to practice. For the entrepre­neurship class, they create a business plan for a new business idea that includes financing, business state­ments and a feasibility study of where they would locate the business. For the marketing manage­ment class, they create a marketing plan that details the marketing strategy for a small business.

There is a social media marketing component and instruction on television advertising and direct mail marketing. A retail man­agement class includes in­formation on strategies for retail operations, retail pricing and performance measures.

Students with a job can also earn three credits for work-based learning.

“The course requires a student to work at least 135 hours during the se­mester to obtain three credit units,” Miller said. “The course can be taken twice for six credit units.”

There are three exit points to the program. Students can earn a Career Certificate after their fresh­man year, a Technical Cer­tificate after three semesters or complete the program and earn an As­sociate of Applied Science degree, which can be transferred to a four-year university.

Some students who com­plete the Business and Marketing Management program opt to take addi­tional courses to earn a de­gree in E-Commerce Technology as well, which prepares them to operate an internet-based busi­ness.

Carroll’s course includes a digital media class that teaches students how to incorporate photography and videography in a busi­ness marketing plan.

“They can learn how to build popularity through a vlog (video blog) and turn that into a revenue gener­ating instrument,” Carroll said.

In the fall, students en­rolled in the program at the Scooba campus take a field trip to learn about a business or industry. This past fall, students in the program visited Trustmark Park in Pearl, home of the Mississippi Braves, to learn about sports marketing, as well as Renaissance at Colony Park, an upscale shopping plaza in Ridge­land, to complement what they learned in retail man­agement.

“The trips are a great way for students to gain real-world experience in what they learned from their textbooks,” Carroll said.

Republic of Honduras resident Gissela Perdomo graduated with a Technical Certificate from the Busi­ness and Marketing Man­agement program in May 2018. She attended school at EMCC’s Golden Triangle campus while staying with New Horizons Christian Fellowship Church mis­sionaries in Starkville.

After graduating, she re­turned to her hometown of San Pedro Sula, the sec­ond largest city in Hon­duras, with a dream of starting a company that produces handmade-leather crafts in which she would hire women from destitute rural communi­ties to provide them with a job and the means to earn a living. The pandemic put that dream on hiatus and she is reassessing her fu­ture.

Perdomo said regardless of what the future may hold, finishing her course­work so she could earn an associate degree was a pri­ority for her.

“I would not have had the chance to continue my education if it were not for this online opportunity,” Perdomo stated in an email correspondence. “For that I am wholeheart­edly grateful. I have had great support from EMCC.”






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