People usually ask this question apologetically, and that is the first thing worth changing. Digital marketing is one of the few fields where the work you can show speaks before the paperwork does, not because anyone decided that, but because the field moves faster than curricula do.
That does not make the route easy, and it does not make a degree worthless. It means the burden moves onto you: you design the syllabus, and you prove you learned it. This is the order I have seen work, and the things that genuinely get harder without a qualification.
Why the certificate matters less in this field
Some fields make the qualification a legal or technical requirement. Marketing is not one of them. What happens in an interview is that somebody opens your work and asks about decisions: why you did that, and what happened next.
And because everything here is measured, you have something a graduate may not: numbers. One small campaign you ran on a modest budget, whose result you can explain, counts for more than a module you sat.
This is not only my opinion. The platforms now train and certify for free, and that changed the market. Google runs Skillshop, its own training and certification platform built by its product teams, covering Google Ads, Analytics and the advertising products, studied at your own pace.
HubSpot states it plainly in its academy: "Creating a HubSpot Academy account is 100% free and gets you unlimited access to our complete library of education and free software tools", with lessons and certifications listed by the hour, from an hour-long lesson up to multi-hour certifications.
So material that used to sit behind a university wall is now free, from the company that builds the tool. That removes the excuse about access, and leaves exactly one real problem: sequence and discipline.
The order that works
The biggest mistake in self-teaching is not a shortage of material, it is the abundance of it. People open ten courses and finish none. This is the order that makes that less likely.
1. Learn one foundation before any tool
Before you open an ads manager, you need the difference between an audience, a message and an offer. Tools change every year and that foundation does not. I wrote about what deserves to come first, and what can wait, in what to learn first in marketing.
2. Pick one specialism and finish it
Trying to learn social, SEO, ads and email at once produces shallow knowledge of all four. Pick one, get to a level you could be paid for, then widen.
3. Do real work early, much earlier than feels reasonable
The difference between people who get hired and people who do not is usually not knowledge, it is having something to show. That is possible with no client at all, and I set out three projects for it in how to build a marketing portfolio with no experience.
4. Take the free certifications, and know what they are worth
A platform certificate proves you passed an assessment on one product at one point in time. That is real and it is not nothing, but it is not evidence you can run a campaign. Its bigger value is that it hands you an ordered syllabus for free, which matters more than the badge. The longer argument is in are marketing certificates worth it.
What a degree actually gives you, and how to replace it
This is the part enthusiastic articles skip. A university does not only sell information, and three of the things it provides are noticeable when they are missing.
The first is feedback. A quiz marks an answer, not a judgement. Having somebody more experienced tell you a decision was wrong, and why, saves months. Without it you learn only from your own results, which is slow and occasionally teaches you the wrong lesson.
The second is sequence. A syllabus puts things in an order somebody thought about. The internet gives you everything at once with no order, and building that order is real work rather than a detail.
The third is the network. Classmates are not a luxury, they are where most people find their first job. Teaching yourself leaves you alone at exactly that point, and it has to be replaced deliberately: communities, events, working with other people.
The limits, honestly
There are cases where the qualification genuinely matters, and it would be dishonest to tell you otherwise.
If you are aiming at a large or multinational employer with automated screening, there can be a first filter that removes you before a human sees your work. That is not a judgement on your ability, it is a process, and it is solved by a personal referral far more often than by persuasion.
If you are aiming at emigration, or a market that requires qualifications to be formally recognised, the paperwork is an administrative condition rather than a technical one. Neither case is fixed by good work alone.
And if structured study is the thing that makes you finish, that is a sufficient reason on its own. I went through that calculation in is a marketing masters worth it. If you are specifically comparing a diploma against a bachelor degree, the team at U Courses set the two side by side in digital marketing diploma vs bachelor degree.
How long it takes
There is no single number, and anyone telling you three months is selling something. What I can say from what I have seen: you reach an employable level in one specialism in months rather than weeks, and the difference between two people comes down to actual hours rather than talent.
I put the full timing argument in how long it takes to learn digital marketing, and the mistakes that stretch the road out in beginner mistakes in digital marketing.
One last thing. Nobody asks where you learned it if the work you show is good. Everybody asks if it is not. The route without a degree is not easier. It is just open.