The Australian Marketing Institute’s CEO Bronwyn Heys has said that marketers of all levels in Australia are lacking some key skills and that upskilling staff is one of the few ways to ensure long-term brand growth.
“Commercial acumen is a growing expectation of marketers to have and to understand business, strategy, finance revenue drivers and to understand the levers for growth in organisation. They need to be able to speak the finance language of an organisation, buddy up to the CFO and the finance guys, because they should be great partners for you,” she told B&T.
Last year, the AMI released its Competency Framework with 25 core competencies to give business the chance to assess skills and proficiencies in marketing teams. Last week, it released the Competency Assessment Tool, giving businesses the resources to develop staff further using the Competency Framework.
The new online Competency Assessment Tool enables businesses to evaluate and develop their teams’ marketing skills, identify marketing skills gaps, while empowering individuals to take charge of their professional growth. It is globally benchmarked and and built on the expertise of marketing leaders, academic institutions and industry professionals for all stages of a marketing career.
Bridging The Skills Gap(s)
“It was gaps that we’d identified through our global network. We have global relationships with others like the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK, the European Marketing Institute and in the US. We’d recognised it was a global piece that people need,” said Heys.
“We know that people are always asking in marketing, ‘What are the skills that I need at my career stage?’ They’re not just technical skills, they’re business and people skills,” she said.
Aside from the gap around commercial acumen, Heys said that AMI had also found that marketers are “overwhelmed” with data and they lack the skills to use it in a constructive way.
“There are huge opportunities with AI to assist and support [the use of data] to make better decisions abut the opportunities for growth,” she explained.
“Also, I’ve said it before, brand remains important. We’re marketers, we should understand brand, we should understand and know about the competency of brand. We shouldn’t just be all performance… Every marketer should try to understand that. You may not need to be an expert but, I’d hope that you understand brands as well because it is a really important part of the marketing mix.”
From Heys’ perspective, rather than leading marketers into a deeper quagmire of data and analytics, upskilling in the areas of data, analytics and AI will liberate marketers from the “mundane” and put them back on course to grow organisations.
“We can go back and engage our brains to be problem solvers, brand marketers, strategists and the growers of organisations. That’s what we train for,” Heys said.
“AI is going to take all the mundane pieces of our roles and make it more exciting. It means we can probably go back to the Four Ps. AI can do the mundane and, to be honest with you, we can become the thinkers again.”
Upskilling To Up Retention
Upskilling staff can seem challenging at a time of reduced budgets and perceived increasing business. However, for Heys, upskilling staff in the short-term will lead to improved employee retention—reducing the rate that institutional knowledge is lost—and will lead to employees being able to work more efficiently.
“Organisations that actually value growth and development retain employees in the long-term. Short-term people are worried about material offerings and things like that but over the long-term, employee value proposition, people want growth and development,” she said.
“Companies that believe in people and invest in people, they want to stay in and thrive. So if you invest in learning and development in your team, not only does your brand grow, your organisation grows because they’re proficient and relevant marketers.”
“It’s quite narrow-minded to not see that growing individuals is important in terms of ensuring that you’ve got a workforce that’s continually growing and acting,” said Heys.
“It’s critically important to organisations and has never been more critical. 2025 is the year that marketing will completely change because of AI. So if they’re not starting to think about how they upskill their teams, they will be left behind.”
It’s a stark warning for marketers and teams. But one that might be more easily remedied that you might think.
