Key requirements for a Junior Growth / Performance Marketer and how well I meet them.
I checked around 20 remote-first job advertisements across LinkedIn and We Work Remotely, spanning German, pan-European, and UK companies, and both agencies and startups. The patterns repeated across all three markets.
The top requirements in terms of skills are:
- Performance Marketing (asked in almost every posting):
Meta Ads Manager (Facebook/Instagram)
Google Ads (Search / SEA)
Secondary platforms: LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Microsoft Ads, TikTok Ads
Increasingly, the AI-driven campaign tools on top of these — Meta Advantage+ and Google Performance Max — are appearing as "nice to have," which tells me the platforms are shifting toward automation.
- Data & Analytics (just as central as the ads themselves):
Google Analytics 4 (you must be able to read website traffic and conversions)
Excel (pivot tables, reporting on campaign success)
KPIs and dashboards: reading and reporting on ROAS, CPA, CAC, CTR — several roles named tools like Looker Studio or Whatagraph
A/B testing and experimentation — named explicitly in most postings.
Conversion tracking and attribution — the Meta Pixel, Google Tag Manager and setting up conversion events came up repeatedly.
The single strongest thread across everything is a data-driven mindset: nearly every posting, in one wording or another, says "you love numbers," "you derive conclusions from the data," "you test and iterate."
- Content & Creative (secondary in these roles):
In remote growth/performance roles, content appears — landing pages, blog posts, social content and some ad creative (a few named Canva, Figma or short-form video) — but it sits below the paid-ads-and-data core. These roles want someone who can run and measure campaigns first and produce assets second, rather than a full-time content creator.
Some companies also expect marketing automation and CRM (HubSpot, Klaviyo, Mailchimp-style email tools), budget management (owning and pacing ad spend) and AI/automation tools (ChatGPT in daily workflows, and automation tools like Zapier, n8n, Make were named in a couple of roles). Project and comms tools like Slack, Notion and Jira show up as background expectations. In rarer cases: SQL or very specific industry knowledge (SaaS, fintech, e-commerce).
A degree in Marketing/Business is common, but startups care more about your attitude than a diploma — one posting literally said "we care more about who you are than exactly what you've done," another welcomed "own projects" as valid experience.
It is also worth noting the experience bar, because it splits cleanly by title. The junior tier — "Executive," "Assistant," "Specialist," "Coordinator," genuine "Junior" — asks for roughly 1–2 years of experience or demonstrable own projects — and several emphasize attitude over a CV. The "Manager" tier wants far more: 4–7 years.
Overall, the strongest pattern across all the data is the demand for a specific kind of generalist. Employers do not want a pure "Strategist" who only plans, nor a pure "Designer." They want someone who can set up the ad (Meta/Google), track and measure it (Pixel, GA4, Tag Manager), and improve it through experiments (A/B testing, funnel optimization) — and read what the numbers say. Every skill on the list is really a facet of one loop: can you run a measurable experiment and understand the result?
One thing that stood out by its absence: none of the postings asked for AI-search or LLM optimization (sometimes called GEO or AEO — getting a brand to show up in ChatGPT or Google's AI answers). It's still too new and mostly lives inside senior SEO roles for now, but I'd expect it to start appearing in junior listings before long.
Based on this information, I think I find myself somewhere in the middle. There are tools that I am definitely familiar with like Meta Ads Manager, Canva or ChatGPT, but some of them I hadn't even heard of, like n8n or Make.
I think it is a very good thing that I did the analysis. It's slightly overwhelming that there are several things to learn, but at the same time it is exciting and now I can concentrate better on the directions that actually matter the most.