Unveiling Marketing Competencies for <scp>MBA</scp> Graduates Through Text Mining and Machine Learning Applications

ABSTRACT In today's dynamic business environment, marketing professionals are expected to demonstrate a balanced mix of conceptual knowledge, technical skills, and behavioral competencies while addressing their customers. This study analyses 2000 job postings from job web portal, collected between April and June 2023, to identify the competencies most demanded from master's in business administration (MBA) graduates specializing in marketing. Using a text mining approach, including systematic preprocessing, bigram extraction, and term frequency‐inverse document frequency (TF‐IDF) based term weighting, the extracted competencies were categorized into knowledge, skill, and behavioral based competencies. Findings of the study reveal strong emphasis by employers on marketing research, marketing management, and sales management as core knowledge‐based competencies required. While selling ability, client relationship management, and digital marketing have evolved as key skill‐based competencies. Time management, teamwork, and leadership evolved as critical behavioral attributes needed for an MBA graduate specializing in the marketing domain. These insights highlight the need for management curricula to integrate conceptual learning with practical skill development and structured behavioral guidance. The results also provide accreditation bodies with evidence‐based competency trends for strengthening outcome‐based frameworks and guiding industry partners in aligning recruitment, training, and academic collaboration efforts. By offering data driven competencies grounded in real job market demand, the study supports the development of more industry ready MBA marketing graduates.