400,000 people are employed in marketing roles in the UK. CPD’s voluntary for some of these people. However, Chartered Marketers must complete and document at least 35 CPD hours every year.
Marketing is one of the many professions that’s constantly evolving. Likewise, CPD must constantly adapt to suit new marketing techniques and ways of working, for hundreds of thousands of marketers.
Do you organise and/or provide CPD for marketers? If so, read on to consolidate your knowledge about how this form of CPD will need to change in 2022 and beyond.
Focus on Digital Marketing
It won’t be news to professionals in the marketing world, but marketing has almost entirely shifted to be digital. This is shown in the professional bodies that currently exist to provide CPD for marketers: the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the Data and Marketing Association, the Institute of Data and Marketing, the Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the Marketing Society, etc.
As can already be seen in the titles of the above organisations, marketing today has a large emphasis on data and digital. For instance, the Data and Marketing Association used to be called the Direct Marketing Association. This reflects the emphasis on data collection and analytics that’s prevalent in marketing today.
Therefore, there’s more of an emphasis on providing technically competent marketers. Marketers who won’t just create marketing campaigns that resonate with certain demographics and psychographics, but who can also analyse how successful these campaigns were. They will need to know how to measure this in terms of concrete figures and quantitative data.
Types of CPD in Marketing
There are 3 different forms of CPD that can be used to train marketers. The CPD Certification Service defines these as follows:
1. Structured CPD/Active Learning – e.g. training courses, conferences, online courses. Anything that involves active participation from the learners.
2. Reflective CPD/Passive Learning – e.g. reading relevant articles, listening to podcasts, about such things as industry updates. In this, learners don’t have to interact with anything. They can instead passively consume information one-way.
3. Self-Directed CPD/Unstructured Learning – e.g. reading relevant publications, documents, etc., in an unstructured manner and while not being accompanied.
Discussing what structured CPD activities like conferences will look like from now on, and attempting to predict whether they’ll take place mostly in person, hybrid, or online, is its own big question – we’ve written entire blog posts just about this subject already and you can read one of them here.
Furthermore, today the 9-5 is adhered to less, especially with working from home. People like to take control over their own working schedule, and work and learn at a time that’s most suitable for them. Therefore, self-directed CPD might be a more dominant form of CPD in the future.
Furthermore, large-scale structured CPD might become les possible. This is due to the value of marketing being questioned, and marketing budgets being cut, as we’ll discuss in the next section.
Soft Skills in CPD For Marketers
The CIM once shared that the Deloitte Report found that only 20% of senior marketers believe marketing’s truly effective. Furthermore, at London Business School, Professor Tim Ambler found that only 10% of meeting time in the boardroom’s devoted to marketing issues, and this percentage could be falling.
Therefore, we believe that CPD for marketers should focus on soft skills like time management and assertiveness in meetings, so that marketing departments can work more effectively with an increased influence. Marketers could also be trained to recognise valuable statistics about their work, such as that 62% of CMOs and ACFOs say that business’s biggest purpose is to serve customers, and 65% particularly respect how marketers can serve customers.
Non-Marketing Aspects of CPD for Marketers
The CIM states that CFOs tend to have more positive views of marketing than CMOs, potentially because marketers have a more accurate understanding of their limitations and therefore know more about their firm’s marketing activity. And partly because marketers are quite successful at “talking up their game” to other senior managers. Therefore, it’s important that marketers can be trained via CPD to understand finances. This will help them justify the marketing activities of their company and stress the importance and necessity of their department and role.
Conclusion
CPD for marketers needs to display an understanding of the bigger picture. Marketing is often undervalued; it needs to be carried out in such a way that marketers can carry out and justify their role.
Do you carry out CPD for marketers? Do you need to get your CPD activities recorded and/or livestreamed so that your learners can view them remotely or on-demand? Tell us about your next CPD event in the form here, and we can give you a free quote.