It’s hard to ensure your skills remain relevant to this fast-changing industry. No matter which generation you represent, we each face an uphill battle (oops, I meant ‘opportunity’) to learn about the latest technologies and ways to influence our target audiences.
For many people, the skills we offered to prospective employers – those USPs we’ve rehearsed over and over – are now, quite simply, outdated. The challenge for us all is to keep pace.
Companies should invest in their employees, but we all have a personal responsibility to invest our own time, energy – and even money – into continuous learning and improvement. It’s our career so we must ‘own it’. No one else will do it for us.
Listen, read, talk
What can you do if you feel you’re losing touch? Start by committing regular blocks of time to listening, reading and talking to fellow marketers in order to get up to speed. For example, make the most of any commuting time by listening to podcasts and reading.
Whether it’s through membership bodies such as B2B Marketing or the Business Marketing Club, or through active participation on LinkedIn and Twitter, there’s really no excuse for anyone to be out of touch with the latest thinking.
It’s clearly important to keep your technical skills and knowledge up-to-date, but it’s also wise to go back to the basics of good old-fashioned people skills. We’re in a people business and must engage with our customers, buyers, agencies, clients and colleagues. Doing this will help determine the customer and industry pain points so that you can build the skills you need to address them.
Adopt, adapt, apply
At a time when marketing budgets are constantly scrutinised, it’s never been more important to understand those business challenges, then successfully adopt, adapt and apply the most appropriate marketing practices and technologies.
Of course, the challenge is doing all this in the context of significant pressure to deliver shareholder or stakeholder value. With many tackling short-term goals or trying to hit or exceed double-digit growth in mature markets, that can be hard. Yet you must carve out that time. To do otherwise is to neglect your own future.
