Madison College students can look forward to the Mobile Marketing Certificate this fall semester. This new, competitive certificate will teach students the product-planning end of consumer marketing on smart phones, a rapidly expanding market in technology.

Kristen Uttech, a marketing instructor at the college, said the program coincides with the Social Media Certificate and the existing App Coding class.

“We’re finding that there’s a lot of people who work for a small or mid-sized company that never had any traditional training in social media,” Uttech said. “All of a sudden, their boss says, ‘Hey, we need to be on Facebook or Twitter … and they’re looking for a way to get some kind of training.”

She said that, due to the great success of the Social Media Certificate, she and various instructors in the marketing department wanted to see what the newest trends were in the media landscape.

“Mobile is the biggest trend. Everyone said 2012 would be the big year of mobile,” she said.

She said it will help differentiate students in the job market.

According to statistics from Think Insights, one of Google’s products to help stir and spread research, 44 percent of the U.S. uses a smart phone, up 13 percent from 2011. Of those individuals, 97 percent of those individuals, 97 percent access their phone from home. Similarly, 78 percent of those access their phone from work. 83 percent do so on the go. In addition, 62 percent of those owning a smart phone will access the web every day of the week.

Uttech says that the certificate will likely give students skills that others who never had specialized training wouldn’t have, and, therefore, make them very competitive coming out of college. She says this is important due to the constantly changing landscape of how consumers interact with their smart devices.

The school offers an introductory course, called Mobile Marketing Online to give students, new and already in the fields of technology, a flexible option as an online course that meets once per week.

She also says that one of the big changes has to do with the fact that technology is evolving so fast. Students, whether new to the job market or currently employed, will fare better in the workplace by having a degree for the ever explanding sector of mobile marketing.

There is already a class on the coding and design of mobile apps, so she feels this will greatly complement that, even for students not going into marketing.