Networking and having a certificate on your résumé is a powerful combination. This holds true for Sandra Titre:

1. During her tenure working in various marketing roles at TCI Lead Gen, one of her main clients was Workday, where she now works as manager of global campaign operations.
2. In October 2022, Sandra completed our Professional Sequence in Digital Marketing.

And to add a fun spin to this, it was almost to the day one year after receiving her Award of Completion that I had the pleasure of chatting with Sandra via Zoom.

Even through a Zoom square, it’s quite evident that Sandra is committed to being a lifelong learner. Whether it’s earning an AA degree at City College that she parlayed into a B.S. in Business Administration and Management from San Francisco State University and then upskilling with us, Sandra is honest when she says, “I get bored if I’m not learning something new.”

And that commitment to learning extends beyond deep-dives into the various aspects of marketing. Sandra’s interest in clean energy brought her to a 4-month internship at solar company Sunrun, which is where her marketing career took off.

What draws her to digital marketing? “Marketing is something that any business needs, and connecting with people is something that I thoroughly enjoy,” she responds. “Being able to connect people with products or services that will help improve their life in any way, or make their job easier, is something that gets me enthusiastic about marketing.”

So it was during that time in her internship when Sandra was approached by TCI Lead Gen to jump-start her marketing career.

“I worked there for eight years,” she adds. “Our clients included HP, Dell, Workday, IBM, Oracle and many others. I started working at TCI as a sales development representative. After a year, I got promoted to marketing campaign manager, where I took on the Workday account along with several other different lead-generation marketing campaigns for various types of tech companies.

“A year later,” this rising star tells me, “the company continued to grow and I got promoted to senior program manager of marketing and operations as a team lead. I trained about five other program managers as the company was scaling. Most of the people that I trained and worked with were in the U.S., but we also had assistant program managers in the Philippines.”

Then COVID hit, and like so many others, Sandra found ample time to self-reflect and work toward her next career chapter. “I asked myself, ‘What am I doing with my career?’ So I talked to a friend who had a friend who went to UC Berkeley Extension,” Sandra says. “I mentioned that I was feeling stuck in this role. I wanted to further my education, but I didn’t want to get an M.B.A. because of the cost.”

Being able to connect people with products or services that will help improve their life in any way, or make their job easier, is something that gets me enthusiastic about marketing.

And this is when you found our digital marketing program?

Yes! Everything that was listed on the website and the class descriptions sparked my interest and made me want to pursue it. I jumped right in, starting in December 2020 and finished in October 2022—almost to the day we are talking!

It was a really good way for me to develop my skills and further my education, and I'm happy I did it.

What was your experience taking online courses?

What I liked about UC Berkeley Extension was being in the class virtually with people in real time. I was still able to have conversations and live chats with my classmates. That makes a huge difference.

I appreciated the flexibility to be able to have the option of doing it on demand if I couldn't make the class on time, which was also great. I also really liked that the books weren’t completely digital; I like to have the tangible book at hand.

The course material was something that I was interested in learning—different types of analytics, different types of marketing strategies. The instructors were very involved, as well. They really cared about what they're teaching and wanted their students to learn. They were all quality instructors.

Any standouts?

All four of the classes were impactful, challenging and helpful, especially for me to carry my skills on over to this role.

Digital Marketing with Thiago Medeiros. He covered Search Engine Optimization (SEO) through Search Console and Google Analytics, Adwords and pay-per-click models, market segmentation and how to target potential customers who are in different stages of the sales cycle.

Strategic Marketing Analytics and Marketing Analytics Tools and Technologies with instructor Stephan Sorger: He covered several aspects of marketing analysis that ranged from calculating Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) by using math equations and taught us different techniques to determine market share and sizing, forecasting and positioning; to developing and interpreting surveys; to understanding predictive analytics, sales analytics and metrics, and measuring the effectiveness of dollars spent; and to assessing the lifetime value of the customer.

All four of the classes were impactful, challenging and helpful, especially for me to carry my skills on over to this role.

So just about as you’re ready to complete the program, you get laid off.

In this economy, it’s very competitive and hard to find work. So I started driving for rideshare companies, doing whatever I could do. And then I was contacted by an employment agency called The Mom Project, which is a really great organization. They try to help mothers get back into work—after having kids or if they were out of the workforce for a really long time.

Related: The Future of Work Podcast—Are We Moving Toward a Gig Economy?

In March 2023, one of their recruiters reached out to me, and said, “There's this role at Workday that I think you'd be a really good fit for based on your education and your experience.” Turns out that they had somebody who was going on maternity leave and they were looking for somebody to move into the manager of global campaign operations role and lead a team that supports all of the campaigns for 70 different marketers across the globe.

Given my experience with working with teams across the globe, I was very familiar with a lot of the systems that they use, and they saw that I had just obtained my digital marketing award of completion, which gave me an edge in addition to what I had done in my previous role. Turns out that the hiring manager knows my former boss—the stars aligned and here I am!

How were you putting class subject material to this new role?

One of the things that is important for me is being able to track marketing effectiveness. The Strategic Marketing Analytics and Marketing Data Visualization courses really help me to follow and track campaigns, and decipher the data about marketing campaigns.

I can track what assets perform the best and in what country and find out what assets performed the least, so that from quarter to quarter, our campaign managers can determine which assets to continue using and when to use something else.

That's where Tableau comes into play: I can look up campaigns, see which regions we are getting most of our leads from, and what type of marketing assets are performing well and which ones aren't. It can create the visual aspect of that data: Creating graphs and charts and extrapolating it into visual data so we can measure the effectiveness of a campaign.

Learning about marketing automation was also very helpful. We use Marketo,  which allows you to automate marketing emails, tracking where your leads are in the marketing funnel, who opened the email, who clicked on a link, what they read, what they are interested in, what company they work for.

Also, the Social Media Marketing Strategies class—it's not something that I do in my role, but learning different tricks and methods to use when you are posting on social media to catch people's eye was interesting. That class helped me understand the dynamics of social media marketing and how you can use it as a tool to promote your company.

What I was exposed to at UC Berkeley Extension helped me exponentially move into this role at a larger company with a lot more tools in my tool kit.

What does it mean to you to have completed this program?

Personally, it just helped me continue my learning path. I had wanted to go back to school to enhance my skills and build upon that business management degree for a solid three years, and I just kept putting it off. But once I started with the courses, it felt really good to be able to accomplish this and learn new things that are not only helpful to my role, but also mentally stimulating in general.

Professionally, the Award of Completion has been very helpful to brush up on my skills, especially working in the Bay Area where everything is so technology-based. Every year, there's a new software program that you can use to automate or enhance your business. Being able to update my skills in the technology world was huge. What I was exposed to at UC Berkeley Extension helped me exponentially move into this role at a larger company with a lot more tools in my tool kit.

I'm grateful for everything that I've learned. UC Berkeley Extension was a good place for me to develop my skills without having to pay for an M.B.A. degree.

If you really want to improve your skills but the amount of money to do so is a barrier, UC Berkeley Extension is more affordable with excellent instructors and great course material. I learned a lot and I am considering going back and getting the Business Analytics for Marketing Professionals program.

Don't let the amount of money to continue your education hold you back from what you want to do—there are other ways to accomplish your goals and UC Berkeley Extension is a great way to achieve that.