Organizing Events as a Tool to Develop Marketing Skills – the atUAliza.te Event Case Study

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.