Landing a job in marketing has gotten more competitive and complex. For young people navigating AI, hybrid work, and an industry in constant transition, the barriers to entry are only increasing.
The Effie Lions Foundation is addressing these challenges with Voices of the Future, a new fellowship program designed to prepare the next generation of marketing leaders.
The fully funded, eight-month program launched in April and will provide 12 high school and college students with training in marketing, leadership, and AI fluency, as well as a trip to Cannes Lions and concluding with paid apprenticeship at global agencies and leading brands.
The cohort was selected from more than 200 applicants across 10 countries, led by global leadership professor Frederique Covington Corbett as dean of the program.
“A degree isn’t enough to get you into the industry anymore,” Allison Knapp Womack, CEO of the Effie Lions Foundation, told ADWEEK. “The entry level roles require two years of experience. You have to have networks, and you have to have AI fluency. And that’s before you’re even in your first job.”
Knapp Womack described Voices of the Future as a “structural answer to a structural problem,” built around what she called a “three-pronged” skills approach.
Alongside marketing fundamentals like strategy, creativity, media, and effectiveness, fellows will be trained in leadership, communication, and the art of selling ideas. “In this new AI world, soft skills are the new hard skills,” she said. They’re also the skills Knapp Womack wishes someone had stressed the importance of when she was starting her own career.
The third focus area of the program is AI skills. Presenting sponsor Adobe helped shape the curriculum through Adobe Digital Academy. Lara Balazs, executive vice president and CMO at Adobe, said the program is “designed to equip fellows with the marketing skills that are in highest demand right now and the opportunity to immediately apply them.”
She noted that younger talent do have one advantage, as they are “digital natives, fluent in technology, and ready to adapt.”
Throughout her career, Balazs has watched the industry constantly reinvent itself. “Those who thrive are the ones who stay curious, challenge their own assumptions, and lean into change even when it’s uncomfortable,” she said.
For Magda Pawelec, senior director and head of brand marketing at Whirlpool and one of the fellowship’s mentors, strong mentorship played a major role in her own development, which motivated her to become involved in Voices of the Future. She’s encouraging fellows to stay proactive, ask questions, and most of all, “be bold.”
It’s a vital time for a program like this, as she acknowledged the challenges facing young marketers today are significantly greater than when she began her own career.
