As the only university in the region offering a completely online undergraduate degree in business communication, Marquette provides you with a cutting-edge, focused degree offered in an accelerated flexible delivery format designed to meet your needs as a non-traditional student / working professional.

Be the Difference in a Growing Field

In this program you will develop your business communication skills in data-driven strategic planning, managing organizational relationships with stakeholders and creating effective messages for organizational success. Courses teach core communication principles, while addressing modern changes to the field, allowing you to apply course content directly to your career.

Featured courses of the program include:

  • Business Essentials for Strategic Communication 
  • Crisis Communication and Reputation Management 
  • Social Media Analytics and Measurement 
  • Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility 

As a Business Communication graduate, you will be able to pursue a variety of career paths in advertising, public relations, social media, employee relations and crisis communication. The undergraduate bulletin provides a full list of the degree requirements.  

Your future in Business Communication

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Be Focused.

Guide corporations, non-profit organizations, and government agencies in communicating with their internal and external stakeholders. This program features professors who combine industry experience with academic research, and work with industry professionals to deliver a curriculum that is both conceptual and applied. Courses teach communication principles, address modern changes to the public relations field and allow students to apply class content in their own professional careers.

Be Strategic.

Understand how business communication shapes corporate identity, branding, culture, mission, and vision. Learn to critically evaluate organizational needs, develop an appropriate strategy and create messages that connect with the target audience. Communication strategies and tactics can make a difference in a variety of ways. Work behind the scenes to help your organizations or clients build and maintain ethical leadership. Be a key driver in solving social issues. Be part of crisis mitigation and advance worthwhile causes to improve quality of life and society as a whole.

Be the Voice.

Develop the skills to help an organization establish a distinct identity and brand in an information-saturated world. Learn how to create and promote messages that both capture and engage your stakeholders across multiple platforms. Help organizations accurately communicate their strategic messages to customers, employees, investors and the media. Learn how to positively influence business practices of clients and corporations and maintain a strong, positive corporate reputation. Apply an integrated and creative approach to promotion of products and services by mastering communication strategies and tactics, emerging technologies and social media. Make yourself a voice for responsible corporate citizenship, building on Marquette’s Jesuit tradition of social justice.

Learning Outcomes

Work in the corporate environment will require students to accurately assess internal and external business communication needs and frame strategic responses that are appropriate to multiple contexts and audiences. Students will also need to understand the role of the corporation within our contemporary global society as well as the way in which communication helps shape, maintain and ultimately transform various aspects of corporate identity, culture, branding, reputation, and vision.

The Business Communication major is a completely online degree designed to address these needs by providing a broad-based curriculum that draws from both theory and practice. After successfully completing this major, graduates will be able to think critically about the role of the corporation, understand the intersection of advertising, public relations, and corporate communication in a corporate environment, and will practice and develop skills that can be applied across various corporate contexts.

Students who graduate from the Business Communication program at Marquette University will be able to solve business communication problems strategically using critical thinking and creativity, allowing them to plan and create strategic messages for multiple stakeholders across various platforms and in multiple organizational settings.

Students who graduate from the Advertising program at Marquette University will be able to demonstrate an advanced level of Communication Competence defined by increased levels of motivation, knowledge, and skill as defined by measured change over four years.

 

Careers, Internships and Employers

As a Business Communication graduate, you’ll have the expertise to enter corporate communication departments, public relations agencies, advertising agencies, organizational communication fields and consulting industries. You’ll be prepared to work not only in corporate settings but also non-profit and government organizations. Below, you'll find possible careers, sample internships and recent job placements in the Business Communication Department.

  • Possible Careers
  • Sample Internships
  • Recent Employers
  • Account Executive
  • Campaign Manager
  • Campaign Planner
  • Community Relations Specialist
  • Copywriter
  • Corporate Communication Coordinator
  • Corporate Manager
  • Corporate Recruiter
  • Marketing Communication Specialist
  • Marketing Coordinator
  • Media Relations Specialist
  • Product Manager
  • Product Marketing Manager
  • Production Coordinator
  • Public Affairs Director
  • Public Information Officer
  • Public Relations Specialist or Officer
  • American Diabetes Association
  • American Red Cross
  • Assurant Health
  • Brevient Technologies
  • Children's Hospital of Wisconsin
  • Direct Supply
  • Discovery World Museum
  • Harley-Davidson
  • Major league sports teams
  • MillerCoors
  • National Multiple Sclerosis Society
  • Northwestern Mutual Life
  • Pettit National Ice Center
  • Procter & Gamble
  • Rockwell Automation
  • Six Flags Great America
  • Special Olympics
  • Summerfest
  • Walt Disney World
  • Zoological Society of Milwaukee
  • Adecco
  • Bader and Rutter
  • BVK, Milwaukee
  • Charleston Orwig
  • Chicago White Sox
  • Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin
  • Cramer-Krasselt
  • Edelman Public Relations
  • Entertainment Tonight
  • Harley Davidson
  • Indiana Chamber of Commerce
  • ING
  • Kohl's
  • Laughlin Constable
  • Northwestern Mutual
  • Ogilvy PR
  • Walt Disney World

 

For more information, check out the curriculum for the Business Communication major, or please contact Dr. Scott D’Urso, Department Chair of Communication Studies.

Marquette is accredited through The Higher Learning Commission which last affirmed the university’s accreditation in 2014 and has scheduled the next comprehensive evaluation for the 2023-24 academic year. Thanks to Marquette's consistently high standards, specific academic programs also are accredited through numerous other organizations and associations.