Should You Invest in Marketing Skill Development?
Posted by Chris Quinn
In our experience with designing and delivering team based marketing courses, we have identified some simple but important questions which serve to set the stage for a positive outcome if they are addressed upfront.
At the initiation of any learning and development investment, these (4) basic questions should become a key part of the dialog as you ‘inspect' the alignment with your business priorities:
- What are you going to learn? (objectives)
- How are you going to learn it? (resources/strategies)
- How are you going to know that you learned it? (evidence)
- How are you going to prove you learned? (verification)
If the answer to these questions is unclear or cannot be addressed- you should be slow to provide funding until they can be. If you undertake an action learning approach it is much easier, even a necessity to answer these key questions.
Training professionals aren't particularly satisfied with their organizations' approaches to and success with training measurement, but there is little disagreement about the value of measurement. When done properly, measurement can demonstrate the trainings' impact on the company's top and bottom lines.
2010 Survey of 800 senior learning executives by Chief Learning Officers magazine
In the arena of marketing effectiveness, our work with teams to uncover and measure marketing profitability measures that link to the client companies financial profits have made answering these questions less taxing.