ePolitix.com speaks to David Thorp, director of research and information at the Chartered Institute of Marketing, about how technology is changing the way marketers learn and perform.

Question: Can you tell us a bit about the role of The Chartered Institute of Marketing and how you support your members?

David Thorp: The Chartered Institute of Marketing offers support to marketers to help them stay ahead in their profession, act responsibly, and excel in a fast-changing, competitive environment. The Institute wants to raise the profile of marketing as a value-creating part of an organisation that leads to profitable and sustainable growth.

At the same time, we help marketers meet their ethical, social and environmental responsibilities to ensure both a commercially viable business future and healthy marketplace and society.

Question: The latest ‘Shape the Agenda’ research paper from The Institute is entitled ‘Learning 2.0’ and looks at some of the new ways people learn. What has changed and why?

David Thorp: The way we view our careers has changed, and that impacts on what, how and why we learn. There's no longer a 'job for life' or even a career for life – many of us move into different sectors or roles more frequently now, and that means learning at work is more important than it used to be. And the impact of technology means that we now need to learn in different ways to the classroom models we were familiar with at school.

Before the internet, you would learn in a 'narrow and deep' way – exploring a subject in detail and reading a great deal about it. Nowadays, with so much more knowledge instantly at our fingertips and our social networks multiplying, we inevitably learn in a shallower but broader way. That's not necessarily a good thing, but it's a reality created simply by how much knowledge and information there is out there.

To give you a simple example, a decade ago you could 'read the newspapers'. These days, the sheer quantity of blogs, columnists and feedback from readers means you have to be a lot more selective; you physically can't read everything if you have a day job to squeeze in as well.

So the big change for individuals is we now need to choose what we want to learn, we have more responsibility for guiding our own learning, and it's up to us as individuals to pursue our learning goals – guided and helped by the people we look to learn from.

Question: Are other sectors affected by these changes or are they unique to the marketing industry?

David Thorp: I think most sectors are affected, but it's acute for marketing as it's such a continually changing profession, and touches on so many different parts of business.

Consider how social networking has become such a phenomenon in the last year or so. Marketers need to learn very quickly how to get the best use from social networking; what the ethics are; how to avoid devaluing the brand by inappropriate use of it; the data protection and legislation issues; and on a practical level, whether people should be using sites like Facebook when they're at work. These are all issues for the marketer to grapple with and think carefully about.

Question: How will organisations operating in the marketing environment need to adapt in order to accommodate these new learning practices?

David Thorp: When a company sends an employee on a training course or helps them study for business-related qualifications, there needs to be more focus on how the learning is going to directly relate back to the work the employee does for the company. Just because someone has a qualification or has attended a course, it doesn't necessarily translate back into business success.

Companies need to think more strategically about what they want employees to learn, and what the real changes for the company are going to be as a result of the individual learning. At the moment, there's too much reliance on 'happy sheets' – the forms people fill in at the end of a course. We'd like companies to set more focused objectives for people before they send them on training courses, and agree more effectively with them how they're going to input their new skills into the role when they get back.

That complements, rather than contradicts, the personal learning goals that the employee is seeking from the course or the qualification. The logical framework for this is a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme, where the individual and the organisation work together to decide what you want to learn, how you can accommodate that alongside your existing job, and what the mutual benefits are going to be.

Question: How important are new learning opportunities and should the emphasis be on the individual or the organisation to create these opportunities? 

David Thorp: New learning opportunities are key to future business success because up-to-date knowledge means you have competitive advantage. We've moved, very broadly speaking, from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy. To maintain that thriving economy, we need a rich balance of talent and skills, and that only comes about by seeing 'learning' – which I'd define as the outcome of education, training and on-the-job or social development – as vital for companies and individuals.

The focus has to be largely on the individual, for a combination of reasons. Firstly, organisations know that employees move on quickly – the average tenure in a marketing job is less than four years. So there's an increasing reluctance to invest significantly in individuals' careers, only to see them move on and take the benefits to another company.

Whilst there's lots of opportunity for organisations to invest more in training, it's a reality that individuals have got to take responsibility for their own learning. Also, in a lot of organisations, individuals will find that if they push their employer for particular training and they're focused in what they want to achieve from it, the organisation will respond positively. But it doesn't happen without some impetus from the individual.

Question: Why have society and social interactions become so important to the way we learn?

David Thorp: We're moving on from the old modes of teacher-centric learning, to more active forms of learning where the learner themselves is at the centre of the process. That's essentially a social process – we learn from our colleagues, our friends, what we see on TV, social networking, as well as books and from teachers. This doesn’t replace the classroom model, but it expands it and advances it. We don't learn in a vacuum any more and your learning is going to be far more dynamic and effective if it's placed in a social context.

In fact, some of the academics who've thought about this process have concluded that all learning is 'social' – it's the relationship between the individual and the environment that leads to the learning.

Question: Political parties talk regularly about the skills gap affecting employers and economic productivity in the UK. Is the skills gap affecting your member organisations?

David Thorp: The skills gap is always there to a lesser or greater degree, and that's inevitable because it's not a static situation. The gap always opens up – the important thing is how we respond and what we fill it with. Look at the IT industry – experts estimate that workers have to entirely re-train something like every eight years. That's a massive responsibility, a potentially huge drain on resources and hard work for all involved. But it’s what’s needed to fill the skills gap and advance our economy and society.

Question: Do you think government is doing enough to tackle this problem?

David Thorp: We welcome the recent initiatives where the UK government and Welsh Assembly Government have called for consultation on how businesses and government can work more closely on skills development.

But we're concerned about the idea of diverting budget from second degrees to basic skills, and expecting employers to pick up the tab for more advanced training. Whilst basic skills are of course important, it's more advanced skills that create a competitive economy.

Also, we'd like to see the government increase its grants to small companies in particular for training purposes, and make it simpler for the entrepreneur or very small business to find out about them.

However, the government shouldn't be expected to fill in gaps where they exist just so businesses can avoid investing in learning. We want companies to recognise that skills training isn't just a cost driver or something that takes employees away from the day job; it's about creating value for their company, giving them more talented and enthusiastic individuals, and making profitable growth and a successful business more likely in the future.

Question: What do you hope to achieve following the publication of this latest research paper?

David Thorp: We'd like to see both organisations and individuals recognising learning as a way to unlock potential and create real value for business, and appreciate it as a commodity that should be cherished and looked at with enthusiasm.

At the moment, it's further down the priorities list than it should be – understandably, because all of us are spending so much time and energy getting on with the job in hand, that learning starts to be seen as a luxury. But it's not something to put off – it's the boost you need to get on in your career and make a real success of your life. 

Question: Do you have any final comments for ePolitix.com readers?

David Thorp: We'd like to know what ePolitix.com readers think about the relationship between marketing and government. Is the Olympics Act, for example, unnecessarily restrictive on marketers? Also, how do readers think marketers can address the gap between the value they bring to companies and how they are perceived by the rest of business?