What you need to know:

• A little over 12 months on from launching its Competency Framework, the Australian Marketing Institute has taken the wrappers off its complementary Competency Assessment Tool to help marketing professionals rate their expertise around a raft of marketing, business and people skills.
• The tool, which can be used by individual members or teams, uses a globally aligned job title-based structure to help users and leaders build out personalised learning and development pathways against the AMI’s Competency Framework.
• Among the first brands to sign their teams on are Freedom Furniture and Wesfarmers Health.
• For Freedom’s GM of marketing and franchisees, Jason Piggott, the changing marketing landscape of the past decade made it high time the business rethought marketing skills development and learning programs. “Where those development opportunities are, and where those strengths are – that’s been a really powerful unlock for our team over the past 24 months,” he says.  
• For Wesfarmers head of marketing – retail, Corrina Brazel, having had some of her team already go through the assessment framework has opened their eyes to how skills and aptitude around things people believed they knew has progressed. Per Brazel: “It’s really fantastic to hear some of the commentary around things like ‘I thought my digital skills were up to scratch but I’ve realised that’s from five years ago when I was at university and it just doesn’t apply anymore’ – everything has moved on.”
• Meanwhile at REA Group, an inside-out university program has been evolving across three curated learnings programs across leadership, people management and individuals. “We’re now evolving the university to have more at that deep skillset level, so bringing more of the marketing pieces through into that, so that as people across the team want to start exploring other areas and facets of marketing, they can,” says GM audience and marketing, Sarah Myers. “We’ve got both B2B and B2C within the business, and we see the teams move between the various verticals and brands within our house too, which is working really well.”
• While it’s impossible to be great at it all, AMI CEO, Bronwyn Heys, says marketers need to avoid being labelled a ‘one-trick pony’ and be bench ready “for anything, for the market, the consumer. They need to be commercially savvy. They need to be strategically savvy. They need to be digitally fluent. They need to be customer obsessed, and they need to be flexible about all of those needs.”
• It’s not just the tech skills that Freedom, Wesfarmers Health, REA and AMI are noticing are lacking. Foundation marketing skills, such as strategy, commercial acumen, brand and data and insights, are also needing improvement.
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Amid all the hype, excitement and trepidation around digital, marketing automation, data utilisation and now AI coming into marketing, is the very real need to build marketing team capability and empowerment to actually use the tools effectively – and in a way that delivers business outcomes. As Infosys global CMO, Sumit Virmani, told Mi3 recently: “As AI is a very new technology, it can be a big challenge for teams at large to embrace because they don’t know how to do it. Educating them in the process of embracing AI, on the tools, and actually making investments in your team to get them the comfort to experiment, is the responsibility of a marketing leadership team.”

It’s the reason why the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) just added eight new sub-competencies to its Competency Framework: Search engine optimisation, performance marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, CX and customer journey, website and app management, marketing automation and the all-important AI. Launched 12 months ago, the Competency Framework is all about giving marketing leaders the ability to assess their own competencies – and that of their of their teams – and build out a skills and career roadmap that ensures they can cope with the shape-shifting remit and skills required to be a modern marketer today

But helping people recognise they need these skills is also why the AMI has taken the wrappers off a new skills assessment tool to help marketing professionals rate their expertise across the ever-growing marketing, business and people skills mix.

Because it’s not just tech changing the shape of marketing execution and therefore, capability. New channels and connectivity to customer – as well as higher expectations of said customer –  are demanding marketers build a diverse range of brand, performer, customer journey, people and specialist skills too. Then there’s the relentless scrutiny of marketing effectiveness and budgets, requiring ever stronger commercial nous. And don’t forget those original 4Ps, either.

All this makes it imperative that marketing teams run continuous learning and capability development loops to keep on upskilling. Two CMOs striving for this are Freedom Furniture GM marketing and franchisees, Jason Piggott and Wesfarmers Health head of marketing – retail, Corrina Brazel. Quick to jump into the AMI’s new skills assessment tool after signing up for the association’s Competency Framework as organisations, both desire more constructive, proactive learning programs that don’t just cover new specialist skills, or leadership, but can also improve core marketing knowledge across their teams.

For the two marketing chiefs, the AMI’s Competency Framework provides a much-needed foundation as well as guidance on the broader breadth of skills required for modern marketing, plus learning structures. The assessment tool is then about having proactive, pragmatic conversations with teams while holding up a mirror to your own strengths and weaknesses as a marketing leader – and importantly, doing something about them.

“With those old-school frameworks, and performance and development documents, it was very hard to have conversations with your teams and to really get into the nitty gritty of how you elevate them, develop them and unlock their potential,” says Piggott. “And we have definitely noticed the changing marketing landscape of the past decade and knew it was time to have a rethink about it.

“Where those development opportunities are, and where those strengths are – that’s been a really powerful unlock for our team over the past 24 months.”

Less far along with the AMI but no less eager to build similar learning pathways is Wesfarmers Health. In the past, the retail giant, whose brands include Priceline Pharmacy, Soul Pattinson Chemists and Australian Laser Clinics, has tried using development plans as a basis for learning, with an orientation around mid to senior levels of teams. These had more focus on leadership and people, Brazel says. Upskilling marketers more specifically largely relied on training on the job, leaning into agency relationships and ad hoc learning. What’s now become clear to Brazel is the need to tackle more of the foundational and evolving marketing skills required in a modern marketing team.

“Having had some of my team already go through the assessment framework, it’s been really fantastic to hear some of the commentary around things like ‘I thought my digital skills were up to scratch but I’ve realised that’s from five years ago when I was at university and it just doesn’t apply anymore’ – everything has moved on,” she says. “It’s a moment in time we need to much more flexible and evolve in this business.”

Skills assessment is about both understanding where skills stand in the current landscape, but also flagging to staff that Wesfarmers wants to invest in their skillsets and development, Brazel continues.

“Much of the training on-the-job was quite generalist and not very specific for marketing. So I think having a fit-for-purpose training tools has really given our marketers a boost and the opportunity to look at their marketing proficiency, but also to join a network of marketers outside the business as well, which expands their thinking and their horizons,” she says.

Alongside digital proficiency, skills that needed a new capability lens for Brazel include commerciality, as well as inclusivity and accessibility in marketing. “That third one, to my mind, doesn’t get covered that well within any of the marketing or university courses,” she says.

“Given the industry we work in, from a health and beauty perspective, trying to really keep an eye on that and how we’re communicating with our customers is incredibly important.”

Over at Freedom Furniture, it was more the generalist overview from a marketing capability point of view that stood out to Piggott as he put his team through the skills assessment tool.

“It’s probably easier to stereotype that the brand guys don’t know digital and the digital guys don’t know brand, but it’s more around those sorts of commercial insights, unpacking that, and what that means to the business. Also, some of the strategy components that I noticed generally across the whole team we need to double down own,” he says. “That’s what this [skills assessment] tool has been able to tease out, both from an individual and team level.”

REA’s deep specialism, plus going beyond marketing

Taking a similarly proactive capability build approach, albeit through an inside-out learning and development approach, is REA Group. A “very feedback hungry culture” meant there was a lot of 360-degree feedback and development plans inside the organisation. But such approaches didn’t lend themselves to extending deep specialisms out of their nook, says GM of audience and marketing, Sarah Myer.

“What we found when we explored capability frameworks in the past is that we’ve got a team of deep specialists. But when we looked more across the board at the offerings at the time, it felt as though everyone was very strong in their own areas but not represented well enough across the pool, so it didn’t really reflect where the team’s capabilities were as a whole,” she explains.

“We evolved the team based off the demand and requirements and crazy pace of change we’re all navigating to be a team of specialists for verticals – so whether it’s deep martech expertise or deep customer journey mapping, brand or performance, they’re all very unique. A one-size-fits-all [development approach] wasn’t working for the team, but what that did highlight was a real shift in making sure we were scaling the learning and capabilities that existed with the team at a much greater scale.”

Today, everyone in the business has access to REA University, which boasts of curated learning programs across three levels: Senior leadership, people management and individuals. There’s a different capability and competency framework for each, plus expectations around deeply understanding commercial success versus strategic thinking depending on the level, says Myers.

“We’re now evolving the university to have more at that deep skillset level, so bringing more of the marketing pieces through into that, so that as people across the team want to start exploring other areas and facets of marketing, they can,” she says. “We’ve got both B2B and B2C within the business, and we see the teams move between the various verticals and brands within our house too, which is working really well.”

AMI aims for bench-ready marketers

Under AMI’s Competency Framework, 25 competencies have been defined across five core marketing areas – insights, customer experience, strategy, brand and digital. There’s also a raft of other business and people competencies such as commercial acumen, planning, collaboration, resilience and sustainability. To develop the framework, the Institute spoke with 50 CMOs locally while collaborating with the Irish Marketing Association, UK Chartered Institute of Marketing, and the European Marketing Association. That also means skills are transferable internationally, says AMI CEO, Bronwyn Heys.

With the complementary Competency Assessment Tool, marketing professionals can rate their expertise around a raft of marketing, business and people skills.

“I use the term don’t be a ‘one-trick pony’: Modern marketers really need to be bench ready. They need to be ready for anything, for the market, the consumer,” says Heys. “They need to be commercially savvy. They need to be strategically savvy. They need to be digitally fluent. They need to be customer obsessed, and they need to be flexible about all of those needs. So that’s what led us to 12 months ago to launch the AMI marketing competency framework, we built it for marketers with marketers. It’s a structured future facing definition of what excellence can look like in marketing today.

“We also think the people and business competencies are extremely critical, because this is the way marketers collaborate, influence lead teams, embed strategy and make things happen in organisations. They’re skills that marketers need to drive outcomes.”

So far, demand spinning out of the Competency Framework for learning and development, plus early skills assessment tool users, has shown Heys that gaps exist around core marketing skills such as insights, brand and strategy.

“I think a lot of that’s happened through such a reliance on performance marketing – we haven’t had that strategic focus so strongly. That’s something we’ve heard from a lot of marketers,” Heys comments. “People need to learn about brand and as I always say, it’s a core and traditional skill and why we’re marketers.

“But the other thing we’re hearing is that real shift that’s happening in terms of what ‘core’ marketing is and other new competencies getting attention: Data and analytics, commercial acumen… believe it or not, some marketers don’t know how to read a P&L, which they really do need to do. They need to be able to talk the language of the business to be able to get ahead.

“Then obviously there’s AI as well… a lot of those data-led, decision-making pieces, digital… but we are seeing demand for skills also coming through that aren’t just the technical ones, such as people skills, leadership. The more senior you get, people are saying: How do I lead change? How I get things done in an organisation is through collaboration, so how do I build influence across the organisation? Softer skills are really important.”

Succession planning in the spotlight

Succession planning is indeed another key aspect of capability building for Brazel and Piggott.

“I think what the Competency Framework does throw up for us is individuals that might be in quite specialist roles, but have that desire to move eventually into a more generalist role,” comments Brazel.

“How do we help them get there? What do we need to do? That may take the form of coursework or attending webinars, but we also have lunch-and-learn sessions, where we do a lot of sharing between the team, but also have external speakers come in from other businesses and our agency partners. We have a learning and development squad, which is made up of individuals across different areas of the marketing team who look at ways in which we can better educate the entire team.

“The other piece is opportunistic learning. When we identify things like commerciality and how we can get better at it, it’s partnering with our financial partners in the business to have a deep dive on what the team needs to know and how they can upskill themselves.”

Brazel says she’s not experienced any issues getting finance teams to help marketers either. “Let’s be honest: Everyone is a closet marketer, so they’re excited to get in there – the finance team is willing to help the marketers.”

Piggott isn’t worried about training people up to leave either. “I’ve been in Freedom now for nine years. There are a lot of people sitting behind me going ‘I want his job’. I want to develop people so they can have that job, and I’m happy to do that. I’m happy for them to be able to go off into another organisation and chart their own course and be a success,” he says.

Getting buy-in

One of the concerns employees commonly have against skills assessment tools, or other forms of aptitude testing, is the fear of repercussions should they fess up to not having requisite proficiency or score lower than expected in areas. So how do marketing leaders ensure they don’t hurt confidence as they work to identify and plug capability gaps?

“I don’t think people see it as us marking their homework,” responds Brazel. “We have a very open relationship as a team; we talk a lot. If we continue to do that, then hopefully no one feels as though we’re sort of bearing down on them … I think for the majority of the team, and myself, we see it as an opportunity to really go and say, ‘these are my identified gaps, and now, what can I do to jump up to that next level?’”

Piggott agrees it’s about being authentic and genuine as a leader. “Sometimes I sit there at the end of the table with that sort of imposter syndrome coming into play myself,” he says. “I’ve absolutely picked up the [AMI Competency] Framework and the assessment tool, used it and shared it with the team to say, ‘hey, I’m not perfect here either. I have multiple gaps where the marketing world has passed me by. It’s relentless’.

“You’ve got to be able to step up and be really transparent in that sort of safe space with either your manager or the wider team, and be able to lean in as a team, win together and lose together, and understand that. We’re all going to have strengths and weaknesses, and that’s going to change over time. But let’s all stay committed to where we need to develop to get to where we want to get to, and that could be where we want to get to over the next 12 months in our job, or we could have different objectives. It could be that you want to move on at the end of the 12 months, and want to set yourself up for your next career move. I’m absolutely open to that and creating a space within our team that allows that to happen.”

As a result, Piggott see the AMI skills assessment tool as helping them to have “very human conversations around your professional development – not just about your role currently”.

“Some of these conversations have been extremely difficult to have in the past, but this gives you a foundation on which to engage in these conversations,” he adds. “And you can keep coming back to it every three, six or 12 months.”